Down the rabbit hole
Researching artist Brett Whiteley for a biography gave Ashleigh Wilson an excuse to use his journalistic skills to dig, and keep digging, burrowing through rumour, records and remnants.
The story went like this: For a few years, some decades ago, England couldn’t get enough of Australian art. In 1961, a major exhibition opened at London’s Whitechapel Gallery featuring the best contemporary artists from Australia. One of them was Brett Whiteley, a 22-year-old described by the Whitechapel director as “the Shirley Temple disguised as Holden Caulfield of modern painting.”
Whiteley, recently arrived in London from Sydney via Italy, was painting abstract art with an international accent. And even though this show was full of names like Sidney Nolan, Fred Williams and Russell Drysdale, young Whiteley was impossible to ignore. The Tate certainly noticed him, so much so that it bought one of his pictures. This in turn made Whiteley the youngest ever artist to have work acquired by the venerable British gallery.
But hang on — was that last part even true? People had been saying it for years, and it had been repeated numerous times in books and catalogues by no less than the Whiteley estate and the Art Gallery of NSW. But was it true? As his biographer, one of my challenges was to test everything we thought we knew about one of the nation’s best known artists. And something about this story didn’t feel right: it’s not mentioned in any records, public or private, until the early 70s, a decade after the event.
No one seemed to know the answer, and that included the Tate. There was only one course left open if I wanted to find out for sure. I got my hands on a two-volume publication, a compilation of every work in the gallery’s collection by artists born since 1850, and set to work. I went through every acquisition, A-Z, checking each one against the age of the artist at the time.
The story, as it happened, was true. Brett Whiteley was indeed the youngest artist to have work purchased by the Tate. (For what it’s worth, another artist, Margaret Barker, was younger when her picture was acquired in 1929, but the gallery considers that a gift, not a purchase, so the record stands.)
This meant that I had just spent the best part of three days proving a story that no one, as far as I could tell, was doubting. But this is part of what makes writing a biography so rewarding. Unlike the hustle of newspapers — where I have spent most of my adult life — researching a book presents an opportunity to dig and keep digging for as long as it takes. To burrow down that rabbit hole and follow the trail, wherever it leads.
And if you want the biography to be the definitive account, which was my ambition, the job involves accumulating new material while double-checking all the stories passed down through the years. This is where training as a journalist helps. I spent more than four years working on this project — a generous span of time, it’s true, but it would have been twice as long without the skills learned while working in various roles for The Australian.
That story about the Tate was an unusual case. There were many more occasions when research resulted in new insights into Brett’s life and work. I interviewed dozens of people around the world, from his high school art teacher to his Dire Straits mates to fellow artists to fellow drug users to the people who spent time with him in his final years. New stories and perspectives abound.
Then there were the small details, and the memories distorted over time. Wendy Whiteley, Brett’s former wife, had been saying for years that her family had taken the final voyage of the Queen Mary when travelling from England to New York in 1967. The Queen Mary? It was actually the Queen Elizabeth.
Not a big deal, perhaps, but details matter. I found myself chasing this one after the novelist Piers Paul Read gave me a letter he had written to his father in September 1967. In the letter, Read was telling his father how he had just met a “conventionally unconventional” couple from Australia. He meant the Whiteleys, and the logo at the top of that letter, written on board the boat, belonged to the Queen Elizabeth — so down the rabbit hole I went.
Another challenge was working out how to manage all this information as it came in. David Marr, almost 25 years on from his masterly biography of Patrick White, gave me a few tips early on. One of them involved setting up a timeline. His was hard-copy, the kind you’d see in an old library, while mine was electronic, but the idea was the same: everything that had a date (passport entries, letters, newspaper stories, artworks) went on the timeline. It was a useful resource, and constantly illuminated the story. To pick one example: on June 10, 1992, Beryl Whiteley, Brett’s mother, was in London having dinner with Bryan Robertson, the director of that career-changing Whitechapel exhibition. The next afternoon, on the other side of the world, Brett checked into a small hotel in Thirroul on the NSW south coast. He died there less than a week later.
As well as speeding everything up, I like to think journalism training helped me gather information that may have otherwise remained out of reach. It meant I knew where to look to track down Brett’s original application for a Harkness Fellowship that had sent him on that trip to New York. Brett had stuck a small photo of himself and his two-year-old daughter, Arkie, to the application. Even Wendy hadn’t seen it for half a century. “As I’m interested in Living Art,” Brett wrote, using a typewriter instead of that handwritten scrawl that became so famous later in his life, “and not merely the historical evolution of painting, there is in America at the moment an enormous diverse current of creative thinking — 22 months there would be of immense benefit clarifying and innovating ideas and feelings, at present insoluble amid the gum trees of Australia.”
Memories fail, and stories evolve over time. But just as newspaper articles tend to present the first draft of history, documents like these are hard to beat. Letters are the same. There’s a good reasons they’re usually the most sought-after document for biographers. Brett’s letters to Wendy were fascinating, but only a handful exist, since they spent so much of their time together. Fortunately Brett also wrote letters to friends, art dealers, fans, rock stars and others, so there were plenty of other accounts available in his own hand.
Of all the correspondence, Brett’s letters to his mother are particularly raw. None more so than one he wrote in January 1979, shortly after winning the Archibald prize. He had just come from treatment, where he was fighting his drug addiction, and the business of art seemed a long way from his mind: “I can tell you it’s been the most miserable difficult confusing deeply depressing gaoled 12 days my mind has ever had to spend. Not so much craving the drug, but feeling the desolate panic that there doesn’t exist any sort of future, so intertwined had I become with this false lover, so powerful had its control over our lives become.”
Letters written by Brett’s sister, Frannie Hopkirk, read as real-time narratives of her remarkable family. In the late 1980s, as Brett and Wendy began divorce proceedings, she explained the atmosphere to their mother: “I intend to keep well clear of the impending collision.” Another letter, written a lifetime earlier, documented the beginning of that same romance: “Mummy,” she wrote, “if you saw Brett and Wendy together you wouldn’t worry about him being seriously involved. They are two kids with more in common and more understanding for each other than any two adults could have.”
Of course, the time comes when the biographer must stop gathering material and start writing. But a life can’t be entirely contained within these pages, so the research never really stops. My book was published last July, and many readers have since come forward with stories of their own. These stories are often wonderful, even if it’s frustrating that they hadn’t come to me sooner.
Just a few weeks ago, I came across a letter on Instagram, of all places, while idly following a Brett Whiteley hashtag. I don’t know the context, nor the recipient, but it finds Brett in 1988, writing in a most reflective mood. Here’s hoping there’s space in the revised paperback version due to come out later this year. “For a long while,” he writes, “I put art before my life and although art gained I nearly lost my life; since I have been in recovery (15 months) I have put life before art and put trust in whatever causes art, it will follow … as it has for the majority of artists who aren’t damned.”
Ashleigh Wilson, the arts editor of The Australian, is the author of Brett Whiteley: Art, Life and the Other Thing (Text Publishing, RRP$49.99). The revised paperback will be released at the end of October.
Rocco Fazzari is an independent multimedia artist and video producer. Follow his work on Instagram: @roccofazzari.
This article appeared in Issue 89 (August 2017) of the print Walkley Magazine.
