Our Chanel, our Armani, with better made clothes

Lifelong friends: Barry Humphries and Carla Zampatti. Pictured: Supplied

My wife, Lizzie, and I were deeply shocked by the desolate news of Carla’s death. She was a lifelong friend of mine and she introduced something to Australia which we had never previously possessed — Style.

Carla Zampatti taught the women of Sydney’s eastern suburbs to resemble ladies, a miraculous achievement!

She was our Chanel and our Armani but her clothes were better made.

She was a brilliant business woman, as brilliant at business as she was a brilliant artist, and her daughter Bianca seems to have inherited her gifts.

Bianca Spender, Barry Humphries and Carla Zampatti.

She had a highly sophisticated taste in art, and it was wonderful to visit her and her elegant home near Edgecliff — in my view the most beautiful house in Sydney — and laugh with her, surrounded by the enormous sculptures by Elizabeth Frink … far too heavy and monumental for any art thief to get away with, supposing an Australian art thief had ever heard of Elizabeth Frink.

Carla Zampatti and Barry Humphries in 2010.

Whenever I was in Sydney, Carla was the first person I would telephone. And we have been together in Italy, her native Italy, as well. She was always a great supporter of what the distinguished diplomat Sir Les Paterson called the Yartz.

The Art Gallery of NSW, the Australian Ballet and many other cultural institutions have benefited from her largesse.

And it is gruesomely appropriate that she met her tragic end at the first night of La Traviata.

My address book is full of black lines, but when this morning I took my pencil to the name Carla Zampatti, it was with a sense of irreparable loss. Instead of marrying me, she was married for 35 years to John Spender QC, during which her gifted daughters were born. I too married a Spender.