Flora worked for five months as manageress of the Cosmopolitan Hotel in Samarai island in Papua in order to gain experience of the business.

When World War I broke out the couple returned to Australia and her husband enlisted in the First Australian Imperial Force.

[1][2] Stewart and her husband then moved to Salamaua on the north coast of New Guinea, a staging post for the goldfields area of Wau and Bulolo in the mountains of what is now Morobe Province.

Not forgetting her love of horses, she raced them with considerable success and she and her husband organized races by shipping horses from Australia to Lae and then flying them up to the goldfields in Junkers airplanes, which were being used at the time to ferry large gold dredgers piece by piece.

Among the many important visitors to pass through the hotel was the American pilot, Amelia Earhart, who stayed at the Cecil on the night before her departure on 2 July 1937, on her final flight.

At the end of World War II, she returned to Lae as soon as possible, reputedly being the first civilian white woman allowed back into the territory.

She took over some barracks and turned them into a temporary hotel, with rooms created by building flimsy partitions that did not reach to the floor or ceiling.

Reports from the Lae correspondent of Pacific Islands Monthly indicated that she took a six-week "world tour" by plane in 1951 and also visited London for the coronation of Elizabeth II in 1953, a trip that also included Spain.

She was a founding member of the Morobe Agricultural Society and led the grand parade at its annual show until the end of her life.