An Unauthorised Life
At 4.00 pm on Thursday 11 June 1992, Brett Whiteley, enfant terrible of the Australian art scene and creator of some of the country's most valuable paintings, checked, alone, into the Beach Motel, Thirroul. He had come for one of his habitual lonely drug-purging bouts: a bottle of whisky, a final dose of heroin, a chaser of methadone. Then cold turkey. Four days later he was dead. The country went into shock.
Brett Whiteley's life and death is in some ways a sad and seedy saga, but his five decades spanned rapidly changing times from wartime austerity via the hedonistic 1960s to the greedy 1980s, when art prices hit the roof and kept rising. In many ways, Brett is a victim and emblem of those times, but he is also an artistic genius and, despite the varying critical opinions of his work, much of it will last and remain a permanent symbol of the fertile brilliance of one man's mind.
This is the story of Brett Whiteley's life pieced together from newspaper and media accounts and from a series of in-depth interviews with major figures in Brett's life, from his boyhood friends to his adult influences. The engrossing biography reveals a deeply tormented man with a great appetite for life.
