A Year With Wendy Whiteley

We sit at the table, opposite each other, a tape recorder and a microphone between us, and I begin by saying that I don’t want to start with Brett. ‘That’s a good idea.’ Wendy looks at me and smiles. ‘I didn’t start with Brett.’ These days Wendy Whiteley is a legendary figure in the art world, the keeper of the Brett Whiteley legacy, best known for creating the Secret Garden on the land below her house on Sydney Harbour. But before she met Brett, Wendy was herself a budding artist; her creative work ever since has been under-recognised. Wendy is a survivor: of drug dependence, bitter divorce, the deaths of Brett and their beloved daughter, Arkie. More than that, she is a remarkable figure whose life has had its own contours and priorities. Now in her early eighties—reflective yet outspoken, with a dry wit—she has much to tell about it. The product of many hours of candid conversations at the kitchen table in Lavender Bay with acclaimed Brett Whiteley biographer Ashleigh Wilson, and supplemented by extensive research and interviews with others, this is the unforgettable story of Wendy’s life. Ashleigh Wilson is the author of Brett Whiteley: Art, Life and the Other Thing (2016) and On Artists (2019). He was a journalist and editor for more than two decades, based in Sydney, Brisbane and Darwin, and won a Walkley Award for a series on unethical behaviour in the Aboriginal art industry. Wilson lives with his partner, a designer, and their son, and works at the Sydney Opera House. ‘This astonishing, glorious book reveals Wendy Whiteley as she really is—an artist in her own right, a unique personality. Wendy tells the truth: she made a garden for Australia. And found the right person to tell her amazing story.’ Miriam Margolyes

For more than twenty years Wendy Whiteley has worked to create a public garden at the foot of her harbourside home in Sydney's Lavender Bay. This is the extraordinary story of how a determined, passionate and deeply creative woman has slowly transformed an overgrown wasteland into a beautiful sanctuary for everyone to enjoy - and in the process, transformed herself. Wendy Whiteley was Brett Whiteley's wife, muse and model. An artist herself, with a finely honed aesthetic sense, she also created the interiors at the heart of Brett's iconic paintings of their Lavender Bay home. When Brett died, followed by the death nine years later of their daughter Arkie, Wendy threw her grief and creativity into making an enchanting hidden oasis out of derelict land owned by the New South Wales Government. This glorious guerrilla garden is Wendy's living artwork, designed with daubs of colour, sinuous shapes and shafts of light. This is Wendy's story but it's also the story of the countless people who cherish the Secret Garden. 'I've loved making this garden. It's been a great gift to my life. It let me find myself again, and it's my gift to share with the public.' Wendy Whiteley

When he died in 1992 Brett Whiteley left behind decades of ceaseless activity—some works bound to a particular place or time, others that are masterpieces of light and line. Whiteley had arrived in Europe in 1960 determined to make an impression. Before long he was the youngest artist to have work acquired by the Tate. With his wife, Wendy, and daughter, Arkie, Whiteley then immersed himself in bohemian New York. But within two years he fled, having failed to break through. Back in Sydney, he soon became Australia’s most celebrated artist. He won the Archibald, Wynne and Sulman prizes in the same year—his prices soared, as did his fame. Among his friends were Francis Bacon and Patrick White, Billy Connolly and Dire Straits. Yet addiction was taking its toll: Whiteley struggled in vain to separate his talent from his disease, and an inglorious end approached. Written with unprecedented behind-the-scenes access, and handsomely illustrated with classic Whiteley artworks, rare notebook sketches and candid family photos, this dazzling biography reveals for the first time the full portrait of a mercurial artist. Ashleigh Wilson has been a journalist for almost two decades. He began his career at the Australian in Sydney before spending several years in Brisbane, covering everything from state politics to the Hollingworth crisis to indigenous affairs. He then moved north to become the paper's Darwin correspondent, a posting bookended by the Falconio murder trial and the Howard government’s intervention in remote Aboriginal communities. During that time he won a Walkley Award for reports on unethical behaviour in the Aboriginal art industry, a series that led to a Senate inquiry. He returned to Sydney in 2008 and has been the paper’s Arts Editor since 2011. He lives in Sydney. ‘Ashleigh Wilson has produced an intriguing, absorbing and assured account of Brett Whiteley’s life and work’. Mark Knopfler ‘With relentless precision, Ashleigh Wilson has provided a peerless grasp of the life and genius of Brett Whiteley. This storied journey of one of Australia’s most mercurial twentieth-century artists will be impossible for the reader to put aside until it is finished. It is the dispassionate biography Whiteley has long needed: a career clarified from the brilliant clouds of myth.’ Barry Pearce, Emeritus Curator of Australian Art at the Art Gallery of NSW ‘A full-dress life of Whiteley that speeds and soars and never ceases to do homage to the colossal confrontation and contradiction the artist represents...Wilson has written that rarest of things, a 400-page biography that is hard to put down...[It] will make you weep for this exasperation of a man and hunger for his art.’ Australian ‘An essential and invaluable resource for any Whiteley scholar...Wilson’s achievement is considerable...Ashleigh Wilson’s Brett Whiteley: Art, Life and the Other Thing is a benchmark publication in Whiteley studies.’ Sydney Review of Books ‘The best biography I read [this year] was Ashleigh Wilson’s Brett Whiteley: Art, Life and the Other Thing...Combines journalistic rigour and personal compassion his landmark account of one of our greatest artists.’ Australian ‘Ashleigh Wilson’s biography of Brett Whiteley is hard to put down. The narrative hums along beautifully, allowing readers a rare insight into Whiteley’s complex genius. A colossal undertaking, helped by extraordinary access. Wilson has delivered readers—and history—an absorbing, detailed and fascinating read.’ Walkley Magazine ‘Ashleigh Wilson methodically tracks this mercurial artist from early family days to his final years—a motley of sex, drugs and rock’n’roll, and importantly, art.’ Art Almanac

An exciting and refreshing call to arms, The Planthunter is a new generation of gardening book for a new generation of gardener that encourages readers to fall in love with the natural world by falling in love with plants.

If we denounce the artist, then what becomes of the work that remains? The #MeToo movement is overturning a cliché that has forgiven bad behaviour for years: to be creative is to be prone to eccentricity, madness, addiction and excess. No longer can artists be excused from the standards of conduct that apply to us all

Brett Whiteley died in 1992 at the age of fifty-three, ending one of the most prodigious careers in the history of Australian art. He attended Julian Ashton's school in Sydney during the late 1950s while working at the advertising agency Lintas, and then made an impact on the Australian art world just as it was receiving unprecedented international attention. Whiteley achieved wide recognition, spending a long period abroad, exhibiting paintings, drawings and sculpture in Britain, Europe and the United States, before returning to Sydney permanently at the end of 1969. His years in London were particularly formative, when he came into contact with many of the art world's most influential figures, including members of the Abstract Expressionist and Pop Art movements. Whiteley's early paintings startled critics and fellow artists with their sensuality of color and erotic under-drawing. At the root of all Whiteley's work was a draftsmanship of stunning virtuosity, capable of capturing all the poetic arabesque of a river in a single sweeping line of brush and ink, or the erotic curves of the human body in a few searching strokes of charcoal. This book, published to coincide with an exhibition at The Art Gallery of New South Wales - the first major retrospective of the artist's work - presents an illuminating evaluation of Whiteley's achievement. Works dating from the 1950s until the last years of his life, illustrated in 180 color plates, allow Whiteley's fascinating career to be surveyed in its entirety.

"It was a cause celebre: the biggest case of alleged art fraud to come before the Australian criminal justice system, a $4.5 million sting drawing in one of the country's most gifted and ultimately tragic artists, Brett Whiteley, a heroin addict who died alone in 1992.It started with suspicions raised about artworks being produced in the style of Whiteley in a Melbourne art restorer's studio. Secret photographs were taken as the paintings took form.A jury finds two men guilty of faking Whiteleys, but a year later the appeal bench sensationally acquits them. The paintings are returned to their owners, leaving the legitimacy of the artworks in limbo. Whiteley on Trial investigates this remarkable case and exposes the avarice of the art world, the disdain for connoisseurship and the fragility of authenticity."

Currawongs appearing at the Manor in vast numbers had come to portend one thing... Death was on its way. When photographer Elizabeth Thorrington is invited to document the history of Currawong Manor for a book, she is keen to investigate a mystery from years before: the disappearance of her grandfather, the notorious artist Rupert Partridge, and the deaths of his wife, Doris, and daughter, Shalimar. For years, locals have speculated whether it was terrible tragedy or a double murder, but until now, the shocking truth of what happened at the Manor that day has remained a secret. Relocating to the manor, Elizabeth interviews Ginger Flower, one of Rupert's life models from the seventies, and Dolly Shaw, the daughter of the enigmatic 'dollmaker' who seems to have been protected over the years by the Partridge family. Elizabeth is sure the two women know what happened all those years ago, but neither will share their truths unconditionally. And in the surrounding Owlbone Woods, a haunting presence still lurks, waiting for the currawongs to gather... An evocative tale set in the spectacular Blue Mountains, Currawong Manor is a mystery of art, truth and the ripple effects of death and deception.