Elizabeth Fortescue

Elizabeth Fortescue entered the wondrous world of journalism in 1978, running errands for subs and editors at News Corp's Sydney headquarters in Surry Hills. Gaining a cadetship in 1979, Fortescue visited jails, fashion houses, courtrooms, parliaments and countless numbers of homes and business places while on assignment to cover the daily life of Sydney in all its various textures.

Fortescue initiated stories about art and exhibitions as often as she could, gradually creating a new role as visual arts writer for the Daily Telegraph and the Sunday Telegraph. She went on to become arts editor of those newspapers between 2015 and 2021.

Today Fortescue's art writing is published in many leading journals. These include the Australian Financial Review, the Sydney Morning Herald, LOOK magazine (Art Gallery of New South Wales) and Openbook magazine (State Library of New South Wales). She is a long-term Australian correspondent for the prestigious London-based monthly, the Art Newspaper.

In 1995, Fortescue tracked down and interviewed a young artist called Wendy Sharpe whose star was inexorably on the rise. Sensing a hint of mutual familiarity, journalist and artist worked out that they had been friends and playmates in the early 1960s, when they were little girls and their families lived almost next door to one another at Avalon Beach, Sydney.

This special friendship - and its unexpected rediscovery and continuation after so many years - underpins the delight Fortescue has taken in working with Sharpe to bring this book to fruition.