It was the turn of the 1970s when Brett and Wendy Whiteley moved into what was then a “very old, run-down house” overlooking Sydney Harbour. The couple had spent most of the previous decade living between the bright lights of London’s Ladbroke Grove and New York’s Chelsea hotel, together with their young daughter, Arkie.
Returning to comparatively sleepy Sydney might have felt like a step down – but Wendy Whiteley loved their Lavender Bay home so much that it didn’t matter. Many of Brett’s most famous paintings were produced from its balcony, which offers a prime view of the harbour. The family lived there until the late 1980s, when the couple divorced. They had both battled heroin addiction but, while Wendy managed to get clean, Brett died from an overdose in 1992. Arkie died from cancer in 2001. In her grief, Whiteley spent years and millions of dollars converting the derelict RailCorp-owned land adjacent to their home into a charming secret garden – one now protected by a long-term council lease.
In our conversation, Whiteley reported feeling amazed to still be here at 83. She is matter of fact when discussing bereavement and addiction, as she’s now very used to talking about the hard things. She considers the 1960s the best time of her life, largely due to the front-row seat she had to the decade’s cultural revolution. And she still lives in that Lavender Bay home, which, like the garden, she has lovingly transformed over the years into something beautiful. You can hear the roar of children screaming at Luna Park from her living room but it’s noise she doesn’t mind, because it’s a happy sound.
Here Whiteley tells us about the most cherished and most useful items in a home rich with history – both the personal and the culturally significant.
What I’d save from my house in a fire
There’s a lot of things but what I would really hate to lose is a mouse hand puppet that Arkie and I made together when she was in kindergarten, just after we first got back to live in Sydney.
We had to make something for the school, so we made this and it just turned out so well. We made the face out of papier-mache. I made a lovely little corduroy frock with some red buttons for it to wear. I think Brett did a little bit of pinching on the mouse’s face. And we mounted it on a metal stand, so it’s like a sculpture. It now sits on my sculpture shelf next to a Balinese puppet.
I’ve come to realise that I’m incredibly attached to it, particularly because it was made for Arkie and we all made it together. My daughter died, and Brett died too. So it’s a real emotional connection [to] her being very much alive and young and the beginning of a life, rather than the end of her life. It’s a memory of a very happy time – she was so excited to take it to school.
My most useful object
A well-seasoned cast iron fry-pan – the old-fashioned kind, when they used to come from Spain.
I’ve bought plenty of new non-stick fry-pans but this one, which must be 50 years old at least, is still my favourite. This thing’s so beautifully seasoned, and so nice to look at. Add a little bit of oil and you can fry the best egg in there. Fried eggs are the best thing to have in the morning. Scrambled is second.
And it holds a lot of memories, that fry-pan. Arkie used it, we all used it, it was everybody’s favourite cooking thing. I got it when we first moved into Lavender Bay and it’s still here – like me.
The item I most regret losing
There are two pieces of jewellery, both made for me or given for a special occasion, that I lost. The first was a necklace that Tony White made for me, which I lost somewhere in a nightclub in London. That one was really all my fault. It was a rasta nightclub in the back of Portobello Road and it was very wild – everybody was drinking and smoking a lot of hashish.
I also had a Georgian gold brooch that [Brett’s mother] Beryl Whiteley gave me as something to wear for when Brett and I got married in New York. It just fell off somewhere a few weeks later, which Brett was furious about and I was upset about too. Beryl was very upset that I’d lost it, because she thought that meant I didn’t care enough about the brooch.
I hate the wedding photographs of Brett and me but the brooch looks very nice. We were trying to keep everybody happy about the way we looked. Brett had his hair cut and he bought a suit, which he wore that day and never again. A good friend of mine made the wedding frock and I just hated it. It doesn’t look like us at all. But Beryl Whiteley loved them and everywhere she went she put these fucking photographs up.
Wendy Whiteley’s Secret Garden will host a pair of open-air music performances in January as part of Sydney festival
