Ashleigh Wilson - A Year with Wendy Whiteley: Conversations About Art, Life and Gardening

We sit at the table, opposite each other, a tape recorder and a microphone between us, and I begin by saying that I dont want to start with Brett.

Thats a good idea. Wendy looks at me and smiles. I didnt 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 eightiesreflective yet outspoken, with a dry witshe 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 Wendys life.

For Zoe and Raphael

The robin flew down from his tree-top and hopped about or flew after her from one bush to another. He chirped a good deal and had a very busy air, as if he were showing her things. Everything was strange and silent, and she seemed to be hundreds of miles away from anyone, but somehow she did not feel lonely at all.

Frances Hodgson Burnett, The Secret Garden

Whenever the active life is presented to me in the form of teas, concerts, dinners, I enter into it with the wholeheartedness of a novice, thinking to myself: Perhaps I have not seen enough of it yet to lie back in my chair and recreate it. So let me liveI will write later.

Anas Nin, 29 May 1925

Dappled light on white floorboards. Everything illuminated and still. Flowers stand on tables stacked with books. Objects positioned with gentle precision around the edges of the room: birds nests, Buddhas, a wooden lion. On one shelf, a marble bust. A bronze on another, cast from a brush that belonged to Rothko. And paintings on every wall.

From this space, a window to the world, trees open out from the living room like curtains to the harbour, the streaks on the water like white paint on canvas. On the balcony, rainbow lorikeets pause on the railing, then soar high resplendent, aflame. Three floors below, at ground level, a photographer frames a young couple walking hand-in-hand through the garden and a kelpie skips down the stairs in front of its owner as two women in running gear look up, searching perhaps for a glimpse of the homeowner inside, and a phone rings and the sound surges through every wall in every room on every level until its stopped at last by a voice close to the window. The voice is coming from the large table beside the kitchen, near the painted vases and the fruit bowl, near the tins of tea and the lolly jars and the glass vases stacked like museum antiquities above the cupboard. There, at the table, sits Wendy Whiteley, the great survivor, phone to her ear, two bare feet, one crimson headscarf, surrounded by papers and a half-finished glass of juice.

The table: heavy and oval and grey. Its edges are curved. Its surface is busy.

A friend she has known for the best part of fifty years is on the line. Wendy promises to call back after lunch. Ive got a microphone in front of me, she says with a sigh and an eye roll. She returns the phone to its holder. It rings again, this time a gallery owner in Paddington, and they arrange to talk later. Wendy is accustomed to people calling to ask favours of one kind or another, even though she wishes the phone would stop ringing, just for a little while. Her mobile pings with a message and she scrambles to find it among her papers.

The table was a chance discovery. Wendy spotted it a few years ago, discarded by the side of the road. The base was intact but the top was wrecked. She hired a craftsman to apply zinc to the surface, a reanimation that cost a small fortune, but the result was a sturdy, elegant finish. She put it next to the kitchen, where it suited the space so well that it seemed to have been custom-made. Its a bloody good find, she says. Worked out perfectly.

Wendy leans forward and rests two elbows on the table. Setting her distractions aside for the moment, she returns her attention to the matter at hand, a conversation about romance, addiction, independence, creativity, solitude and loss, as well as the family members who are no longer around to tell stories of their own.

~

The business of being Wendy Whiteley takes place at this table. This is where she sits to have conversations with collectors and gallery executives, dealers and admirers, artists, reporters, businessmen, auctioneers, filmmakers, lawyers, friends and all the others who come for a moment of her time. This is the table where Wendy takes most of her meetings and sits to eat most of her meals. This is the table where visitors join her for a cup of tea. If its just her at home, there will be papers spread across its surface, roughly categorised: emails printed out alongside catalogues, brochures, magazines, newspaper clippings, documents to sign. Her address book can usually be found in there somewhere, small and black, hundreds of names and numbers and cryptic inscriptions written by hand inside. There are also invitations to eventsexhibition openings, dinners, cocktail parties, fundraisersbut their volume has slowed recently, one consequence of the coronavirus pandemic, though Wendy isnt complaining about that.

These have been indoor days. There was a time, not so long ago, when she could be spotted out in the garden every day, tending to her creation, forever finding a piece of nature that needed refinement or care. But those pieces of nature require less of her than they once did. Theres also a practical reason for her absence, in addition to the pandemic that forces all of us to shelter inside. She hasnt been out in the garden much lately because her body is no longer as forgiving of her spending long hours crouched in the dirt. If works of art are never finished but abandoned, then Wendys garden, no longer a secret, is entering a new stage of existence, one that belongs as much to the people who step through its paths as to the gardeners who tend to its leaves and to the woman whose creativity, obsessiveness and indifference to authority brought it to life.

~

This is the table where Wendy and I sat, hours upon hours, for the best part of a year, talking about her life. The moment was timed to coincide with her eightieth birthday, even though the date, to her eyes, was something of an artificial marker. If Wendy had her way, the milestone would pass without notice, certainly without any real fuss, but those closest to her had been insisting otherwise for a long time, so she was resigned to a celebration of sorts being held somewhere. Probably there would be a lunch or a dinner, maybe at Lavender Bay, the suburb on the edge of Sydney Harbour where she lives, and a select group of friends from around the country would come, some of them staying the night in the guest room downstairs.

There was another milestone she could have marked, were she were sentimental enough to do so. I realised, as we first sat down to talk, that it had been fifty years, give or take a month or two, since Wendy moved to this house with her husband, Brett, and their daughter, Arkie. At the time, almost a decade had passed since they left Australia in search of a greater sense of occasion and experience. Then they were propelled back home, reluctant repatriates, not yet ready to stop moving. But they found shelter on the lower north shore of Australias biggest city, and to look out at the promise of Lavender Bay was to believe that there could be a future in this country after all.