Wendy Whiteley
Although they divorced three years before he died, she has control of Brett Whiteley's estate including the copyright to his works.
[6] She won art awards and a David Jones Drawing Prize, which defrayed the costs of her formal studies at East Sydney Technical College.
[6] It is sometimes claimed that this meeting occurred at Jerichos, a Sydney coffee shop known for its bohemian clientele, but the reality was more prosaic.
At that time, Brett was attending the life drawing classes at the Julian Ashton Art School, while working for Lintas Advertising.
She saw Brett off on the boat, and then started working 18 hours a day to earn the money to pay her own way to Europe.
After their return to London, Brett started on the Bathroom paintings, a major series of nudes celebrating Wendy's form and his domestic happiness.
Brett Whiteley was working feverishly on his paintings, particularly The American Dream, becoming very stressed, and turning to alcohol for relief.
Brett was very unhappy about this, and threatened to divorce her; he explained that it reminded him too much of his own mother leaving his father as soon as she was financially independent.
[9] In July 1969 Brett's physical and mental fatigue caused him to abandon work on The American Dream and to quickly leave New York for Fiji, with his family.
They decided to stay permanently, living a life of utter simplicity in a tranquil tropical paradise, in the manner of Paul Gauguin in Tahiti.
They returned to Australia, and moved into a Federation house originally known as Lochgyle, built in 1905, in the Sydney suburb of Lavender Bay.
The interior of the home was frequently the subject of Brett's paintings, often with Wendy's naked form reclining on a sofa or in the bathtub.
Their tandem heroin addiction continued, and in 1987 they were advised to seek separate treatment; Brett would stay to work in Australia, while Wendy and Arkie went to England.
At considerable personal expense—reportedly some millions of dollars[11]—Wendy started to clean up and landscape a large patch of derelict land adjacent to her home in Lavender Bay, owned by the New South Wales Rail Corporation.
It was choked by weeds and lantanas, and strewn with old train carriages, abandoned refrigerators, rotting mattresses and broken bottles.
Wendy treated the garden like a giant painting, structuring, planting, pruning, moving things around, and letting nature do its work.
As well as helping her mother with the project, Arkie planned to hold her second wedding ceremony, to Jim Elliott, in the garden.
However, her adrenal gland cancer intervened, and they married in the house overlooking the garden, only a few weeks before Arkie's death in 2001.
[14] In 2009, Wendy Whiteley was awarded the Medal of the Order of Australia (OAM) for "service to the community through the establishment and maintenance of a public garden at Lavender Bay, and as a supporter of the visual arts".
[15] In October 2015, the New South Wales Government, which owns the land, agreed to give the North Sydney Council a thirty-year renewable lease on it.
Arkie Whiteley claimed that her father had hand-written a revised will after his divorce, leaving everything to her, but that the piece of paper was lost.
[19] On 8 December 2008, Wendy Whiteley was Andrew Denton's final guest on ABC TV Enough Rope.
