Today, at home in Lavender Bay, we can add a bothersome cut finger to the mix, which is stopping Whiteley (who really needs no introduction as the former wife of late artist and Australian cultural icon Brett Whiteley), from getting into the garden: “It’s terrible timing when you want to be doing stuff,” she said. “My right hand too.”

The garden in question is Wendy’s Secret Garden, a picturesque, peaceful haven she created on unused railway land in the grief-stricken weeks following Brett’s overdose death in 1992.

Nine years later, she threw herself into gardening with more ferocity after losing her only child, daughter Arkie, to cancer. Whiteley’s passion for, and dedication to, cultivating the garden led the NSW Government to grant it heritage status with her house last year.

That Whiteley is resilient is a given. But there is an overwhelming joie de vivre that radiates from her voice despite the knocks she has endured. “It has been an amazing life, but there has been some tragic stuff as well — Brett’s death and then my daughter’s death, much more to the point.”

In their heyday, the Whiteleys embraced the very best of the 1960s, mingling in artistic circles with the likes of Janis Joplin (who once babysat for Arkie) in New York, London and other European cities. “I look back on those days with a great deal of affection — enormous affection,” she said. “We met a lot of incredibly interesting and creative people.

“We were lucky in a sense that Brett won his scholarship to go to Italy in 1959. I joined him in Paris and then we went back to Italy for scholarship time, and then to London,” Whiteley said. “London was just bursting into this famous era, with everything happening. It was a very lucky time. It was lucky for Brett, he’d already found an image of his own to work with, and people in London loved it — his career took off like a rocket.

“We were gypsies, in a way: there was a great deal of freedom. Arkie was born in 1964 in London, and because she was just one child, she travelled with us everywhere. So we came here and literally fell in love with Lavender Bay.”

And here we are to chat about Kim Carpenter’s new play, Brett and Wendy … A Love Story Bound By Art, which tells the story of the artist and his long-time muse, from first meeting as teens, through the swinging ’60s and rocking ’70s and ’80s, and ending with the artist’s death in 1992.

“Because it goes through the decades, we don’t really linger on anything in particular,” said writer and director Carpenter, who has long been enthralled by the ‘Brett and Wendy’ love story. “It is a fast moving piece, because their lives were peaks and valleys. It gives it a rhythm and a pace and an energy, and that was the thing I noticed most about Brett when I met him — his frenetic energy.”

Throughout the production, Carpenter has used music and dance (three dancers choreographed by Lucas Jervies will join actors Paul Gleeson and Leanna Walsman as Brett and Wendy) and projected images of Whiteley’s paintings, to represent particular times.

Topic-wise, nothing is off-limits. “When you say, ‘Have we ignored anything?’ I guess you’re referring to his addiction to alcohol initially and then to drugs,” said Carpenter. “The thing is, it was embedded in his life, and as a result, there were paintings that were produced that reflect those periods where he was up to his spine in his demons. And I think fame was a demon.

“What Brett did as an artist was he lived life to the absolute full, and that’s what comes across in his work. And he was incredibly prolific and an incredibly hard worker. That energy that drove him …. I spoke to many people when I researched the script, and most of them seemed to feel that they were surprised he lasted as long as he did.”

Carpenter himself met the artist on two unforgettable occasions. “The first time, Brett and Wendy came to a production I did — it was a very visual production and it involved puppets and actors, and he was very keen to talk to me afterwards … I found him incomprehensible to start with, because he had such inventive language — everything was abbreviated and it was art.

“I was a great admirer of his work, he was one of my heroes and it stood with me, that meeting.”

The next time, about a year before Brett’s passing, was a different experience. “I knew he was living at the studio on his own and I knew things weren’t really great at that point in his life. He was completely different. The joy wasn’t there and the enthusiasm wasn’t there.”

With sensitive topics on the table, Carpenter involved Wendy, partly as a matter of respect, in the production from conception; early on, on an official level, to give approval for the paintings to be projected on set, “and then it progressed into me actually interviewing Wendy on many occasions, and we’ve become friends,” said Carpenter. “We did a workshop — meaning we tried a couple of things — last year, and Wendy came and saw that. So she’s got some inkling as to what we’re doing with the piece and how the dancers, actors and music all integrate to tell the story.”

Whiteley also met Gleeson and Walsman, the actors tasked with ‘becoming’ Brett and Wendy. “I liked them, actually. They came here for a cup of tea and had a look at Lavender Bay and I felt very comfortable with her (Walsman),” she said. “The actor who plays Brett (Gleeson) as well, he had a look or an air about him which reminded me of Brett. They seemed to me to be very good choices.”

Whiteley downplays being one half of such an iconic pairing that the public, it seems, cannot be satiated. In July, Whiteley, the opera, will begin a run at Sydney Opera House. Then there is the Art Gallery of NSW’s Brett Whiteley drawing exhibition (“It’s the first exhibition I haven’t curated myself, I left it entirely to the gallery and I was really happy with the result,” Whiteley said) as well as the Brett Whiteley Studio in Surry Hills. And of course, the Secret Garden.

“It’s been an amazing couple of years. There has been a lot of focus on Brett, and therefore on me as well, and a lot of incredible things have happened. I just deal with it as it comes because I’ve no idea how long it will go on for,” she said.

“In Australia, we culturally have a notion that people like to knock you off your pedestal … but everyone has been amazingly good with me, and Brett’s work has really been looked after incredibly well.”

Whiteley has yet to see the finished production of Brett and Wendy … A Love Story Bound By Art, but will be at Riverside Theatres on the opening night and is looking forward to seeing how Carpenter treats the very precious ups and downs of her own 30-year relationship.

“(Watching the opera) I got very emotional and I’m sure this will be too — particularly, you know, the scenes at the end of Brett’s life. I don’t know what Kim is incorporating into his vignette, but I trust him. I just hope people will go along and enjoy it — that’s the main thing.”

Brett and Wendy … A Love Story Bound By Art will run from January 18-27 at Riverside Theatres, Parramatta, as part of the Sydney Festival. For tickets, visit riversideparramatta.com.au