Wendy Whiteley OAM (b. 1941) is recognised as cultural icon, gardener and activist, who first came to prominence as the wife of renowned Australian artist Brett Whiteley. Born Wendy Susan Julius, she met Brett Whiteley in the late 1950s when they were students at the National Art School in Sydney. They married in March 1962 at the registry office in Chelsea, London, having settled there in 1961, and their daughter Arkie was born in 1964. Wendy was model and muse to her husband as he worked and exhibited across the United Kingdom, Europe and Australia. Having spent much of the 1960s and 1970s living in England and then New York, the family returned to Sydney in 1969. Initially, they rented a floor of a harbourside Federation house at Lavender Bay. In 1974, they purchased the entire premises, the views from and interiors of which subsequently featured heavily in Brett's work. In the 1980s, he bought a former t-shirt factory in Surry Hills which became his studio. By this time, both had developed addictions to drugs, particularly heroin. Though Wendy was able to overcome her addiction, Brett was not, leading to the breakdown of their marriage and eventual divorce in 1989. With Arkie's assistance, Wendy began to cultivate a garden on an unused parcel of railway land near her home, as a means of dealing with her grief following Brett's death from a heroin overdose in 1992. Her devotion to the healing and restorative capacities of the 'guerrilla garden' project intensified following Arkie's cancer diagnosis and death in 2001. Having managed Brett's Surry Hills studio as an art museum for a number of years, Whiteley ultimately initiated its transfer to the Art Gallery of New South Wales. She was the co-curator of a retrospective of Brett Whiteley's work at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in 1995. Whiteley was awarded a Medal of the Order of Australia in 2009; in 2015, the NSW Government granted North Sydney Council a thirty-year, renewable lease on the land on which she created her garden.
Gift of the artist 2021
© Anne Zahalka/Copyright Agency, 2024
Anne Zahalka (3 portraits)
On one level The Companion talks about the most famous and frontline Australians, but on another it tells us about ourselves.
Naomi Cass, Director of the Centre of Contemporary Photography, in conversation with Anne Zahalka.
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