12 minute read
Hanging with Brett Whiteley
Hanging with Brett Whiteley – a boyhood idyll
This edited extract forms part of a memoir written by John Wilson. John grew up in Longueville and later raised his family there. John eloquently recounts growing up in the area alongside his childhood friend Brett Whiteley.
In the Longueville of my childhood – a Sydney harbourside village in those days – Brett Whiteley, my closest friend, was a tiny legend. For years, people told stories of his mischief ... like the time he kidnapped a neighbour’s cat and sent a ransom note demanding money for its return. The Longueville of the 1940s and 1950s was placid, quiet, secret. Nothing much ever changed. But then, one day, another scandal erupted. Down on Mary Street, Mrs Aspinal went to collect her daily loaf from the kitchen servery to find that most of it had gone. Someone had scooped out the warm centre to leave behind a hollowed crust. The next day it happened again. Same theft, same MO. Mrs Aspinal was determined to catch the thief so next morning, concealed by a kitchen curtain, she lay in wait as the baker arrived. Slam! went the servery door as he left the new-baked bread.
In minutes, as his van purred away, a child with a topping of Pre-Raphaelite golden curls crept from hiding, lifted the loaf and quickly disappeared into the bushes.
Five minutes later, the cherub reappeared and replaced the nowhollowed shell. Mrs Aspinal had her thief. That night she wrote a note in large letters and left it in the servery: “Dear Brett, Please do not steal my bread. If you would like some, knock on the door and I will give you a piece. Mrs. Aspinal.” The next day the note was gone and another left in its place. In childish hand, it read: “It wasn’t me Mrs Aspinal.” Funny, outrageous and, for someone so clever, spectacularly naive. That was Brett, the same child who thought the goldfish in neighbours’ ponds were made of real gold and if you caught them, you’d be rich. He was the child who would set alight the letterboxes of people he didn’t like and who had the district in a panic when he disappeared and was found riding the ferry wash under the wharf in a stolen canoe. “God, he was a handful,” said my mother.
Brett in the billycart made by his father Clem, which was ‘just like a real racing car’. Photo: Ian MacTavish
He was demanding and jealous, exciting and dangerous, captivating and enchanting, thrilling to be with and to be his friend was a badge of honour that I proudly wore. In our conservative, almost Victorian, world of Johns and Ians and Alans and Kenneths, even the name ‘Brett’ was theatre and, somehow, thrillingly American. Brett was the wild child over whom the district’s mothers tut-tutted, worried – and fed. A lot of the time he was fed at our place and my mother regarded him as a difficult, but tolerated second son. She would pretend to be cross. “Doesn’t Brett have a home to go to?” she’d ask sternly. The truth is he did have a home to go to, a beautiful home; far, far more impressive than ours, but there was often no one at home – apart from a granny who was pressed into babysitting and whom he despised. So much has been written about the boy genius but, in those early years, I saw little of that genius; what I did see was a small friend with astonishing charisma, someone you just ached to be with.
Longueville’s Gatsbys
In Longueville, the Whiteleys were different to everyone else. They were showbusiness, glamorous, fast-living; they were our Gatsbys. Nothing about them was typical – even their house. Most of our houses dated from the first 30 years of the century – deep red brick and red tiled roofs – but Clem’s and Beryl’s walls were painted white and the roof was blue, like houses you saw in art books, or magazine articles about California. The difference between us was cruelly clear. Longueville and its bays slept a million miles from anywhere, a magical place where our lives were measured by the tides that lapped the shores of the perfect childhood. The peninsula had been home to bushrangers and fierce Aborigines. A century later, it was just 10 minutes from the centre of Sydney and had become the first suburb in Australia for the average price of houses to reach $1 million. But when we were kids, in the 1940s and 1950s, it was home to ordinary families; bank managers, shop owners, suburban solicitors, the man who founded a refrigerator company, a bookmaker at the greyhounds – and Billy Salvatori, who drove Mr Newman’s black and white buses at breakneck speed while his brother, Ron, drove them like an ambling tortoise. Families didn’t move. Our parents were plain folk, lives fulfilled by family bungalows and neat gardens; people who had endured Depression and war and asked nothing more. The street that divided Longueville into two classes was Kenneth Street, the cool riverside people to the east, where the Whiteleys lived, and those on the west side of the peninsula who, as my father used to say, had to cope with the hot westerly winds blowing up from the gully and lifting the lounge room carpets. We lived in the west.
My dad couldn’t afford to buy a home, so we rented one half of a little 1920s cottage. My baby sister shared the only bedroom with my parents and I slept on the open back veranda where the rains splattered off a spreading loquat tree and right up to my bed. It was really only a single step from camping. Inside, the house was dark and dour. My mother’s tiny kitchen had thin wooden cupboards, no fridge but an icebox and blue-and-white gingham curtains to hide the gap beneath the sink. Beryl Whiteley’s kitchen was a world away: bright, snow white and light, an electric fridge and, wonder of wonders, a milkshake machine and an electric can opener.
Brett and I instantly bonded like magnets – although the reality is that Brett was probably the magnet and, like the rest of the gang, I may well have been the bonded. Over those fractured years of our schooldays, I was as close to Brett as I’ve been to anyone in my life. Tucked away in the roof of the white house, he had the bedroom of my dreams, with shelves for treasures, a second bed for a mate, a goatskin rug on its polished floor and a vintage muzzle-loading rifle hanging like a trophy on the wall. But best of all was the huge, built-in desk for painting and drawing and, in front of the desk, was a panoramic window, where below spread the luminous waters of the Lane Cove River. We were obsessed by art and that river was our Seine, the waters of Renoir and Matisse; we had no doubt that one day we would go to Europe and paint like them. When we weren’t painting or lusting or listening, the river was our playground, the blue and green river with its dancing lavender lights. All summer we swam, stole dinghies and canoes from the boat sheds, raided the rowing and sailing clubs for beer and supplies, and smoked stolen tobacco aboard invaded yachts. One day, Brett and I invented a new kind of bomb and placed it by the river baths before lighting the wick, then hiding behind a boat shed to shelter from the blast that we were sure would come. Minutes passed. Nothing happened. We peered around. The bomb was sizzling with potential and standing by it was the Presbyterian minister. “Why, hello,” he said, as he spotted us. “It’s Brett Whiteley and Johnny Wilson!” I prayed harder than I ever had in choir that they wouldn’t be the last words he ever uttered. God answered; the wick fizzled to silence. The experiment had failed. Our prayers had been heard; Brett and I had escaped the noose.
The white house came alive
The only thing consistent about the Whiteley’s was their difference. Even when we were very young, we realised that Beryl Whiteley was not only exquisitely beautiful but lived in a different world to our mums, all cheery women who bustled around each other’s kitchens swapping recipes, or trading gossip at my Uncle Bunny Warren’s little grocery shop. Continued on page 10
Beryl was like an untouchable movie star and my memories are glimpses ... fragments of black and white film ... she was enigmatic and exciting, a cool strawberrry blonde vision of perfect bones and fashion, who seemed to be barely at home. I wondered what her life was like, where she went, what she did. We worshipped Clem, Brett’s father. When Clem was around, the white house came alive with riotous rugby matches on the back lawn, where Brett was a surprisingly talented and slippery half-back. And the billycart Clem made him was just like a real racing car. Clem was fun, like a bigger version of us. Nothing like our own fathers. According to Brett, he had done and been everything: a military hero, a Queen’s Scout, a great sportsman – even a racing driver in the little Wolseley Hornet that sat in the garage, the car in which Brett said Clem had proposed to Beryl. In 1950, Clem and Beryl – the aristocrats of the White House – crowned their superiority, their difference, by actually sailing to America on a great ship. When they returned, they crowned Brett’s princely eminence by adding to his already unimaginable treasures. There was the cap gun that worked like a real Colt .45 and the Mercedes-Benz racing car with steering and proper quick-change wheels with winged hub caps. But most of all, most fantastic of all, was the carton of bubble gum – the defining symbol of young America. To us, bubble gum was a dream, something we’d only seen in comics. And typically, the chosen one refused to share a single piece. But then, he could be a mean little prick. He may have been the most mesmerising person I had ever met and yet, while I loved him, it was hard to escape a sad meanness and a cruelty inside that small body. A special trick reserved for infirm old Longueville ladies was to walk past with head down and then suddenly leap and scream in their face. As for his despised grandmother, one day I watched as he pasted a photograph of a gorilla on a sheet of paper, carefully printing “NANNA” underneath in a childish hand, then tucking the insult into an envelope addressed to “Nanna, Lucretia Avenue, Longueville”, with a used stamp added to the envelope. “What are you doing?” I asked. “I’m leaving it in the mailbox, she’ll think it came in the post.” “She’ll kill you.” “No she won’t, she won’t know who it’s come from.”
Different paths
Life was changing fast. In 1956 I won entrance to art school, while Brett met his muse, the exquisite Wendy Julius. After all these years, I have never met Wendy and I don’t think anyone else in our gang did either as, typically, Brett kept her in a secret compartment of his life, but goaded us with stories of their passion for each other. Envy was one thing, but it was also obvious that this was more than just a minor intrusion into our relationship. It was clear that our childhood bonds had been traded for something far stronger and from that moment, we would walk different paths….
© 2014 JOHN WILSON.
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Lane Cove welcomes a new Red Cross shop
New and pre-loved clothes, accessories and homewares at affordable prices are all available at the new Red Cross op-shop which has opened on Longueville Road. The store raises funds to support Red Cross’ vital work in Australia and overseas, helping people in times of emergency, personal hardship and disadvantage. “The local Red Cross shop is a great place to pick up a unique variety of products that appeal to the fashionconscious and budget-conscious shopper alike,” says Australian Red Cross Retail Area Manager Kate Messervy. “We warmly invite locals to drop by to find a unique treasure, from pre-loved designer garments and new clothing to unusual finds you just can’t buy elsewhere. And the great thing is you’re helping raise funds for our services around the country.” The Lane Cove store located at 99 Longueville Road is open Monday to Saturday from 9am to 5pm and Sunday from 10am to 4pm. It also provides volunteer opportunities for those looking to pitch in. Volunteers can assist in everything from customer service and sales through to visual merchandising and sorting donations. To sign up, call into the store or register your interest online at www.redcross.org.au/shopvolunteer.
