Australian Story: Sept 7

Eleven years ago Australian Story featured Wendy Whiteley, wife of the late artist Brett Whiteley and mother to the late actress Arkie Whiteley.

Now it revisits her for a story on her “guerilla garden” and what it means to her and the community.

For more than twenty years, Wendy Whiteley has been creating a unique public garden in front of her home at Lavender Bay, on the northern shore of Sydney Harbour.

“Where the garden is, used to be just a big green lump of lantana and morning glory,” she says. “You had no idea of the depth of the place. The actual thing of it being a walled garden wasn’t revealed until we started clearing out all the junk and the rubbish.”

Covering almost a hectare, this harbourside land had been neglected for almost a century, becoming an unofficial dump, until Wendy Whiteley began to clear it.

“I think people don’t realise that it’s actually a huge philanthropic gift from Wendy, this garden,” says friend and writer Janet Hawley. “For over twenty years she’s paid for the entire thing herself. Her own labour, full-time gardeners, all the plants, the soil, everything.”

What makes this achievement all the more astonishing is that this is a “guerrilla garden” – the land on which the garden stands is public land owned by the NSW State railways and Wendy Whiteley has never sought anyone’s permission for her venture. She worried that if she asked, she’d be told “no”.
Nor did she engage landscape gardeners or other professionals.

Instead, she approached the garden as if it were a giant painting, and applied the same artistic sensibility as seen in her late husband Brett Whiteley’s famous Lavender Bay series of paintings.

“Brett always knew he’d struck gold when he found Wendy,” says Janet Hawley. “All those interiors that Brett painted in those much-loved Lavender Bay paintings, that’s Wendy’s aesthetic. The way she framed a view, looking through a window, and it’s continued in the garden.”

For three decades, Brett and Wendy Whiteley were icons of Australian art – he the internationally acclaimed “rockstar” artist, and she his wife and muse.

Adding to the allure was a talented daughter, the actress Arkie Whiteley.

But then tragedy struck. Brett died in 1992, followed by Arkie nine years later, leaving Wendy alone.
Determined not to let her grief and heartbreak overwhelm her, Wendy Whiteley has instead thrown all her energies and creativity into turning this huge wasteland into a beautiful sanctuary, and in the process has transformed her own life.

“Life is all we’ve got, really for me,” she says, “life and our imaginations and our creativity and how we deal with it. And if you’re lucky, it gets important to other people and you can share it.”

Today, the work on the garden continues under a temporary beautification lease. But supporters of the garden are campaigning for Wendy Whiteley’s “living canvas” to be declared a permanent public garden.

“Life is all we’ve got, really for me,” she says, “life and our imaginations and our creativity and how we deal with it. And if you’re lucky, it gets important to other people and you can share it.”

Today, the work on the garden continues under a temporary beautification lease. But supporters of the garden are campaigning for Wendy Whiteley’s “living canvas” to be declared a permanent public garden.

“It’s very important to keep the garden as a kind of breathing space for people’s spirits and for the city itself,” says Wendy Whiteley, who at 74 is increasingly anxious to see it protected. “And this is true of any public space or garden, if it’s been made and people love it, then it’s nice to feel that it would just go on.

8pm Monday on ABC.