Fallible Podcast Fallible Podcast

The average pedestrian would never know that behind the dusty street corners, nostalgic terraces and anti-Westconnex signs of one quiet street in St Peters, Sydney, lies award-winning artist Wendy Sharpe’s studio.

A simple note pinned to the door of her warehouse says, "Wendy Sharpe? Please ring lower bell."

Those brave enough to ring enter a fantastic realm filled with gilt chandeliers, paintings, piles of clothes, scribbles, swatches, and an enormous table where Sharpe herself sits painting.

Over a 35 year career, Sharpe has quietly developed a reputation for paintings and drawings filled with bold brushstrokes, vibrant colours and strong female characters.

In 1986, she won the Sulman Prize: an eclectic award for subject and genre paintings. Ten years later, she took out its more famous sister prize, the Archibald, with Self Portrait as Diana of Erskineville, 1996.

She’s been a war artist, a teacher and a humanitarian portrait-maker, creating works from a vast array of materials, hundreds of thousands of marks telling her unique stories.

And beneath those marks, 2 layers or 10 layers deep: countless mistakes.

It’s been six years since Michael Kirby retired from the High Court of Australia.

An ordinary workday will still find him high above the Sydney law courts, padding through a cream-carpeted, book-lined office, mind furiously at work.

Six stories below, workers escape their offices for appointments at the dentist, while across the road NSW politicians debate infrastructure and live tweet The Bachelor.

Fiercely intelligent, formidably voiced but surprisingly open, Kirby moved through Australia’s late 20th century legal system with devastating ease. He was appointed to a series of senior judicial roles while still a young man, becoming the first chairman of the Australian Law Reform Commission and presiding over the NSW Court of Appeal.

In 1996, he arrived at the High Court of Australia. Here, his genius was let loose and earned a reputation for high rates of dissent and a steadfast refusal to see Australian law as isolated from international precedent.

Even after retiring, Kirby’s mind was deployed by the United Nations Human Rights Council to head the inquiry into human rights abuses in North Korea (2013-14).

But when the robe and wig had been laid aside at the end of each day, he’d go home to his partner of forty years, Johan van Vloten. Their relationship became open public knowledge in 1999, and with it, Kirby the first openly gay high court judge.

Fallible sat down with him to chat about secrets, mistakes, love and loss, and the “medieval hobgoblins” behind his illustrious career.