Wendy Whiteley's Secret Garden

This garden exists because of grief. In nineteen ninety-two, the Australian painter Brett Whiteley died of a heroin overdose in a motel room in Thirroul. He was one of the most celebrated artists in the country's history. His wife Wendy was devastated. She looked out the window of their home above Lavender Bay and saw the overgrown, rubbish-filled railway land on the slope below. And she started clearing it.

For over twenty-five years, Wendy Whiteley came down here and transformed abandoned government land into a lush subtropical garden. She planted trees, dug paths, hauled rocks, created hidden corners with benches and sculptures. She did not own any of it. Not one square metre. The land belonged to the state government, and technically she was trespassing every single day.

Lavender Bay was known to the Gadigal people as Quiberee and was once a large V-shaped harbour beach before it was filled in by Sydney Railways to extend a train line. So the garden sits on top of filled-in harbour, on top of railway land, tended by a woman who had no legal right to be there.

The secret could not hold forever. In two thousand and fifteen, the New South Wales Premier granted a thirty-year lease with a thirty-year option to North Sydney Council specifically to protect the garden. In two thousand and eighteen, it received New South Wales State Heritage protection. A woman's private grief project on stolen government land became a heritage-listed public garden.

Wendy, now in her eighties, still visits regularly. If you are lucky, you might see her. The garden is free, open every day, and has one of the most spectacular harbour views in Sydney -- framed by trees that a grieving widow planted because she did not know what else to do.