into the 1970s. She was working as director of the Adelaide Theatre Company when she was asked to audition for a role in Number 96. The producers of the show were having trouble filling the role of Flo, a friend and comic foil of gossip Dorrie Evans (Pat McDonald), and Brooke fit the part. Initially seen as a frequent visitor to the flat of Dorrie and her husband Herb, the writers soon burnt down Flo's off-screen apartment in a neighboring suburb and moved Flo permanently into Dorrie and Herb's flat, where she became a key character in many of the serial's comedy stories. Brooke continued with Number 96 until the series ended in 1977, also appearing in the film adaptation in 1974. After this she remained a frequent face on Australian television, with roles in television programs like the soap operas The Young Doctors and The Restless Years in the late 1970s. Brooke was specially written into the Young Doctors episode as a clown, she so impressed Grundy Organization executive Reg Watson with her knowledge of clownsmanship. Ten years prior, she wrote a play about a clown in a bid to entice the very young into theatrical appreciation about a clown who had a skip acting parlance from a clothes basket. So successful was the play she did another naming her clown Trumbo and had him looking for his red nose. Finding such enthusiastic responses from audiences in small theater venues around Melbourne, Brooke then wrote a third clown play. She also played various roles in films, miniseries, and TV movies. She acted in the feature film Dawn!, about Olympic Swimmer Dawn Fraser, playing the role of Fraser's mother. Later career (1980s–1990s) By the early 1980s, in senior years, Brooke was living in Melbourne and again working for Crawford Productions, this time as a casting agent. She also had acting roles in the Crawford shows Skyways and Carson's Law. In the 1980s, she cast a relatively unknown Kylie Minogue for The Henderson Kids. In November 1980, Brooke won the Penguin Award of "BEST SINGLE PERFORMANCE BY AN ACTRESS" – Rock Pool, ABC Next Brooke was known to a new generation of viewers with an ongoing role in the children's series Round the Twist (1989) as Nell Rickards, and, in 1990, acted at the same time as the ongoing role of Auntie Violet "Vi" Patchett in the soap opera E Street.