Lavender Bay

This guide to Lavender Bay in Sydney follows Wendy Whiteley, who in 1992 looked down at a patch of derelict, mattress-strewn railway land behind her late husband Brett's old house and began clearing it by hand. It traces her years of unpaid, unauthorized work on state-owned land, and how the garden absorbed a second grief in 2001, when her daughter Arkie died young, drawing stone tablets and small sculptures from fellow artists into the ferns. Listen for the harbour view that once filled Brett Whiteley's own paintings.