Wandering about Whiteley

I have recently been spending a bit of time with a medical professional who has a reproduction of this painting in her rooms.

Brett Whiteley needs no introduction to most Australians, being one of the most successful, award winning and prolific artists of the 20th century.

This Archibald Prize winning 'Self Portrait' was painted in 1974.  That is the artist in the mirror.  Through the window to the left is his beloved Sydney Harbour and in the foreground a distorted odalisque in the manner of Matisse.   I could look at this painting for hours and hours.   Brett Whitely died, alone, of a heroin overdose in a motel near Woolongong in 1992 at the age of 53.  He flies in the fact of my visual artists live long lives theory.   

He said 'art is an argument between what a thing looks like and what it means'.

Here he is in the 1960s with his wife Wendy and their only daughter Arkie:

Arkie was a beautiful woman, creative and gentle.  She is famous for appearing as an actress in Mad Max, and for zealously guarding her father's legacy.  She died of adrenal cancer in 2001 at the age of 37. I remember seeing a story about her in one of my mother's Australian Vogues in the early 80's with a feature on her completely white and pastel apartment in London.  White and shabby chic long before everyone else started doing it.

The only one left in this little family was Wendy Whiteley.  She said this:

“you can go two ways with grief. I could have given up and slid into an abyss of depression, or become suicidal…..I just felt an overwhelming desire to do something positive…doing something creative, right here, would be the most freeing thing I could do”.

So Wendy created a garden at Lavender Bay in Sydney.  She planned and designed it and has cared for it for years now.   The garden is not hers, it is on public land.  But it is known to locals as Wendy's Secret Garden. 

The garden was overgrown and unkempt and filled with old railway parts and carriages.   This tree is a Moreton Bay fig, a wonderful climbing tree which is prolific in Sydney.  Willy wagtails, kookaburras and parrots chirp and chatter away whilst magical bendy paths go hither and thither.  This is secret Sydney at its best.  Surrounded by high rise buildings, a little place of peace.

How wonderful is her positive and creative approach to the vicissitudes and tragedies which life has thrown her way?

(Images: (1) Gallery of NSW (2) John Tranter.com (3) The Age (4)(5) Galeriaaniela.com.au)

 

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Friday Pretty

I bought the August \ September copy of Vogue Living yesterday.

Of course whilst I am not buying any magazines for a year, I make an exception for this one because I post it to Raina in Colorado.   So it is not really for me.    Incidentally, I had a real magazine buying urge on the weekend and I sated it by looking at the Vanity Fair website.   Easy.    

I don't know what has happened to Vogue Living but it is much improved.  Well I do know actually, they have relaunched it and have a relatively new editor.   It is thicker (over 1 centimetre - wow!) and mercifully not nearly as Sydneycentric as it has been in the past.

(Did you know my husband invented the term 'Sydneycentric'? Every time we hear it in the media or in conversation he says to me 'I invented that term 20 years ago.  And I get no credit for it at all'.  But I digress).

This Vogue Living has a feature on John Derian's two homes, and a special on Istanbul, including the home of a Turkish designer called Zeynep Fadillioglu.  This is a  bedroom in her house:

And then the south of France 'bolthole' of Jaqueline Morabito:

This bathroom..... I love the way the bath and basin are part of the walls and floor.

If I could have my way in my house all our walls would be rough plastered.  (Apologies for bluish pics, having tech problems today).

Even the entrance stairwell has the patina of age.

Happy weekend to you all.  Spring is coming to Melbourne and the sun is out and I have lots of little projects to do around the house this weekend.


And thanks for your thoughts and nice comments about my son's night terrors.  I have turned the heating off in his bedroom and it is making a huge difference.  He is cold, but happy.

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Restaurant Inspiration - Guillaume at Bennelong and Peach Sorbet

Summer is over and soon the leaves will start turning orange and dropping into my garden en masse.  To use up very ripe end of summer stonefruits, there is nothing better than a fruit sorbet. 

I started an intermittent series last year where I cook something I have eaten in a restaurant.  This was our dessert at Guillaume of Bennelong, where we ate in January.  It is described as strawberries and blackberries with lemon verbena cream, meringue and a trio of raspberries.   This strawberry sorbet was smooth and rich and delicious.

Guillaume is a rather fine dining restaurant located in this anonymous little structure on Sydney Harbour. 

See the little sails on the right - that is where the restaurant is located.   It shrieks Special Occasion (shudder).

However, I had a marvellous meal here, and it was a restaurant which disproved the oft quoted rule that the quality of the food in a restaurant is in inverse proportion to the view. 

The peaches this year have been nothing short of superb.  The orchards got rain and sun at just the right time and we have been feasting on peaches for months now. 

In honour of Guillaume Brahimi, here is a peach sorbet.

First step is to double check the recipe.  In my case this involves reassembling the cookbook from whence it came.  It really is time to bite the bullet and buy a new copy of this book.

Pile the peaches up attractively for a last shot:

Peel and remove pips.  It all looks a bit like a massacre at this stage. Avert your eyes if you need to.  But not whilst holding knife.

Put in food processor with about 100g of caster sugar (the actual recipe calls for 680g peaches and 100g sugar. I find about 6 peaches makes 680g.  You can adjust the proportion of suger down if you do not have enough peaches).

Add a little lemon juice after liquidising. 

Put into ice cream maker.  As an aside, can I just say how much I love this appliance. I am not an appliance person.  We do not have a microwave (yes I am the only person I have ever heard of with children and no microwave), we have no toasted sandwich maker, milkshake maker or popcorn maker (all of which incidentally populated my childhood kitchen in the 1970s so there is obviously something going on there).  

And if you look at the photo above you can see that I have a set of scales which date from 1947.    

But I do have a Girmi GranGelato maker and it is heavenly.   Simple to operate (it has an on/off switch and that is it) and easy to clean, it makes icecream and gelati in about 15 minutes. In my case I had to set it up in the hallway because Certain People were complaining about the churning noise.  But don't let that put you off buying one.  

Here it is once churned suitably.   My camera cannot really capture the pinky blush colour of this sorbet, with little flecks of red (where my peeling skills failed me). 

Divine.
Next up (when I find them), fig sorbet.

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Book of the month - The Lieutenant by Kate Grenville

Daniel Rooke, astronomer, mathematician and marine,  a boy who showed promise growing up in Portsmouth in the 1760s, grew into a man who believed that 'God was just a way for a man to interrogate his own heart'.

Sickened by the violent death of fellow soldiers witnessed in the West Indies, he seeks an escape to gentler climes.  And what better than accompanying the First Fleet to settle the great land discovered by Captain Cook?  There was even an astronomical excuse, as Halley's Comet was due to pass over Australia in 1789.

The Lieutenant, by Kate Grenville (2008) has been sitting on my bedside table for a long time. I started reading it and was upset by its intensity and stopped.  I could almost sense the tragedy to unfold over hundreds of years, triggered by the settlement of Sydney by the English.  

It is a wonderful book, sparsely written but so evocative of its environment and the two peoples who found themselves living together, suddenly, in an unforgiving land.   I wish I had read it sooner, and now will have to go and read everything Kate Grenville has ever written.

Daniel Rooke sensibly decamps across an inlet, to set up a little home for viewing the night skies. 

He quickly befriends the local aboriginals, in particular a girl of 13 or 14, wise perhaps beyond her years, named Tagaran.  He learns her language, and develops feelings for her which are a combination of paternal love and perhaps something more.

Acutely aware of his pale and soft shortcomings, he thinks:

What was it like to be Tagaran?  To walk about the wood barefoot and naked, as easy as he had been on Church Street? ....

The urge was irresistible, like hunger or thirst, to unbuckle his shoes, peel off the worn stockings and stand barefoot on Tagaran's eath.  His feet were as white as those fat caterpillars that were found among the rotting wood: vulnerable, weak looking.  He took a few wary steps along the track, then he was jabbed in the heel by something sharp enough to make him gasp. When he looked he saw it was only a piece of twig half the size of a toothpick.  Was that how little it took to prevent him from walking in Tagaran's feet?'.

(Richard Browne 1813) (courtesy State Library of New South Wales)

Eventually and inevitably, tragedy triggers a violent response from the settlers and he must choose between Tagaran's tribe and his own troops. 

I have not read a better distillation of the fascinating aboriginal culture and in particular language.  

(sketches by William Govett 1830)

A wonderful moment includes Daniel's discovery that the Aboriginals have a word for 'heating one's hands in front of the fire and then rubbing one's warmed fingers slowly over someone else's hands to warm those hands in turn' (putuwa).

A book to treasure and read over and over.

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