‘I still feel detached from others—that there is a distance between me and other people … I attract people into my scenarios but I’m not a person who easily lives with others.’
—Gretel Pinniger, 1993
Visitors to Florida House entered a fortified gate and walked along a stone-stepped path and up a flight of wooden stairs. At the top, they found a casual sunroom looking over Florida Road. Beyond it stretched a large lounge room with an enormous stone fireplace, an informal dining area and a large country-style kitchen with a huge island benchtop. Gretel soon had these living areas choc-a-bloc with her collection of kitsch—Balinese puppets, Neptune figures, fish-shaped plates, lighthouse lamps, toy foxes dressed as hunters and mannequins and dolls in faux-fetish clothing.
Gretel’s earlier attempts to cast off her Madam Lash image had failed. Sydney simply refused to see her as anything else. Nonetheless, the persona did give her a power and a presence she was reluctant to lose. ‘In Madam Lash’s clothes I can be Ms Bossy Boots, even if not naturally gifted that way. Stomping around in thigh high boots and corset … I feel the Power. I can go “Off With His Head!” like the Queen of Hearts and be more convincing, it would seem, than I ever could have believed.’ So she instructed her architect Brian Zulaikha to convert the ground-floor dormitory rooms into a set of cells. Zulaikha recalls, ‘We built it [with] concrete floors that you could hose out … Beds and chains.’ In one room—the ‘anything can happen’ room—Tim Marks used his metal-working skills to make a set of rotating steel doors. Gretel’s rack, her leg irons and other useful accessories were installed. A trap door was added later.
High above the kitchen, her builders would install a twenty-eight stair wrought-iron spiral staircase leading up to an octagonal turret-style bedroom. On the main upper floor, ten tiny bedrooms had been knocked out to form a vast studio where Gretel could paint and gaze through the pine trees to the beach and Barrenjoey Lighthouse in the distance. Here, along with her easels, paints and works in progress, Gretel housed more of her fantasy clothing and accessories, on mannequins and in glass cases. Near the picture windows at the studio’s northern end, Gretel erected a gilt theatre proscenium around a low stage on which rested a chaise longue. At parties and when the media visited, Gretel would dress in her Cleopatra outfit and recline on the chaise as she consorted with her devoted disciples and made love to the camera—the home maker as performance art. Gretel’s gold fabric pyramid floated cloud-like from the studio’s high ceiling.
Gretel’s finishing touches to her Florida House makeover were not quite what architect Zulaikha had in mind. Gretel recalls, ‘The house was so white inside [that] you could hardly see out the windows. I thought of the white as being a blank canvas needing colour.’ Zulaikha says he and Gretel ‘were never on the same wavelength in terms of aesthetics’. What came to perplex him was Gretel’s lack of awareness of their differences until she moved in and changed it all.
Zulaikha was horrified when Gretel ‘painted the driveway hideous colours and painted a whole lot of stuff inside. I was so appalled I didn’t want to go there again.’ Still, he says, she was entitled to repaint, and ‘I don’t think she could have left it alone … It’s not in her blood … to leave anything alone.’ After completing the renovation Zulaikha visited Gretel at Florida House a few times, but ‘… there was a moment when I decided … I just didn’t want to go up there and smoke all the time’.
Yet Gretel loved the place. ‘I’m sure this house is magic,’ she told journalist Elisabeth Wynhausen. ‘I mean people get younger here.’ Her next installation, Gretel confessed, was to be a lifeboat, suspended on davits above the mansion’s sandstone façade as a statement against the threat of global warming. Visitors would clamber in down in the driveway and be hauled up level with the top floor studio, using pulleys. ‘They’ll walk through a door in the middle of the window,’ Gretel explained. ‘It’ll be hilarious.’
Dressed for the interview in black jeans and a T shirt, her long golden hair uncombed, she added: ‘I would, uh, like the misapprehension of me that I have endured for twenty years to be turned around. I would like to end my life as an acknowledged national treasure.’
By 1992 it was clear that Laurie Pinniger had dementia. Gretel’s brother George recalls that his mother ‘was convinced someone kept coming into the house to steal things’. Scared, and convinced her daughter-in-law was to blame, Laurie would hide things then forget where she’d hidden them. ‘She would cry because she was sure someone had stolen [them].
‘Once I heard her voice on the answer machine … she had thought [it] was … me and wept when I didn’t answer her,’ George recalls. He finally persuaded his mother to move into a care hostel. Laurie was sure her children simply wanted her gone so they could rent out her house.
In September 1993, Gretel was in Bali with the Patron when George phoned to say Laurie had had a mild heart attack. In hospital she had fallen out of bed and broken her hip. It was doubtful she would survive. Gretel flew straight home, rushing to her mother’s bedside. She was shocked to see a ‘tiny little bird woman’ lying there. Apparently she had not eaten in days. Gretel sat with her, taking over George’s vigil. Her mother slept, and Gretel had the uncanny feeling that Laurie ‘was not located in her body’. She ‘was everywhere’. Gretel suddenly recognised her mother’s ‘absolute saintliness’.
As she sat there, Gretel contemplated her adolescent inclinations to Catholicism and her devotion to the Virgin Mary. She saw a path forward—an escape from her Madam Lash persona. She would redefine her alter ego as the Immaculate Lash—a ‘born-again Scarlet Woman now redeemed and without stain’.
But now was for her mother. Laurie seemed to have surrendered and Gretel was concerned she was not eating. She wondered what she might do to keep her mother stimulated. She smiled to herself. ‘I wonder what she’d do if I dribbled liqueur chocolate …? So off I went and got some.’ Returning to Laurie’s bedside Gretel bit the top off one chocolate so its runny centre was visible, bent over her mother’s bed and dribbled the rich fluid onto her lips. Laurie’s body shuddered and her tongue darted out as she gripped Gretel’s wrist. ‘I felt rather than heard her words—Trust you, Gret!’
As her mother wasted away, Gretel captured her final days in over 200 photographs at her bedside. To her friend Fiona Wrobel, this macabre epic of documentation was ‘a form of closure’. On 10 October 1993, Laurie Pinniger died. Gretel scheduled the funeral for her own birthday, five days later. Overwrought by her loss, Gretel arranged her deathbed photographs into intricate montages in a huge album—her mother’s death as art. For Gretel, it was the only language she understood.
Scrap-booking had been a habit of Gretel’s for years now. She would create carefully collaged albums of events such as exhibition openings and Wagner festivals. Sometimes a whole album would contain just twenty-four hours of her life. This was an extension of the cards Gretel sent her friends—at Christmas she might collage angels around an image of her own face, dressed up in Santa emblems.
It was not only her mother’s death, but Madonna’s imminent tour to Australia that sparked Gretel’s latest dictum, ‘I really feel like a virgin. I’m born again without stain,’ she proclaimed.
Two weeks after the funeral, Gretel flew to the Melbourne Cup and launched her new persona. Before dozens of reporters and photographers, she stood in the race track’s members’ enclosure as the Immaculate Lash, her arms outstretched in a pastiche of a renaissance painting. A garland encircled Gretel’s luxuriant blonde hair, a powder-blue cape was draped over a white satin wedding dress and a scarlet heart was pinned to her breast. Gretel confessed to the media that her Madam Lash persona had become overpowering—so much so, that it concealed the ‘real girl’. Her brother George believed the Immaculate Lash much better reflected the real Gretel—‘a spiritual girl with a big heart.’
In 1994 Mary MacKillop, a teacher and Catholic nun who had established the Sisters of St Joseph in nineteenth-century Australia, was beatified. This made her Blessed Mary MacKillop, and was the first step to sainthood. To celebrate, the Australian government and the Catholic church jointly sponsored a $25,000 prize for the best portrait of her.
Inspired by the coincidence with her own vision of sainthood, Gretel submitted as her entry a gold-fringed canvas on which she had depicted MacKillop with almost photographic accuracy. The problem was, the Immaculate Lash—an open-mouthed Gretel in blue cape, white satin bodice and crown of thorns—found its way into the picture, taking up a third of the canvas. ‘We don’t look too terribly different,’ Gretel assured her friends.
The judges rejected Gretel’s entry. If she painted herself out of the picture, they might reconsider. Gretel refused. Instead, she entered the portrait for the $20,000 Sir John Sulman Prize, awarded for the best subject or genre painting. Its judges too rejected the work.
‘It was sad,’ reflects George Pinniger. ‘Gretel had portrayed herself as a repentant sinner along with a new saint, hoping for forgiveness—a very Christian message overlooked by the Christians assessing the portrait.’ Undeterred, Gretel instead used the work as the centrepiece of her float for an upcoming Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras parade. In Gretel’s eyes it meant ‘fifty million people worldwide [had] seen a glimpse of it’ during the television coverage.
While Gretel had long seen herself as a benefactor of the arts, she had never been in a position to donate money. Now she decided her contribution would be in kind. Florida House would be a creative haven for fellow artists and musicians. ‘I want people to come and go, to be entertained and create,’ she explained. ‘Just think of it as if the Addams Family have moved into the street.’
To Gretel’s friend John Ogden her giving nature is extraordinary. ‘She has regularly given home to people that … society has discarded for not conforming.’ In his eyes, Palm Beach has not one but two lighthouses—the convict-built one atop Barrenjoey headland and Gretel’s Florida House—a ‘beacon of acceptance’ to the south.
Gretel and her disciples would party and create together, fuelled by large quantities of illegal drugs. But while her new friends guaranteed an ever eager audience, her new open-door policy soon exposed her to parasites.
Some of the creative refugees drifting into Florida House were simply unemployed junkies who wanted nothing more than a share of Gretel’s drugs, a free bed and, if they could wangle it, a share of her monthly allowance. Gretel’s friend Rachelle King saw ‘a great many parasites … who feed off her and when they’ve had their fill, drop off ’. A few were ‘low-life and very manipulative’, proficient at using divide-and-rule strategies to set Gretel against her old friends. For those who loved Gretel, it was painful to watch. They soon found themselves undermined by these younger, sycophantic spongers.
Objects were always going missing—beautiful baubles, trinkets and valuable jewellery. Once Gretel left an $800 camera on her kitchen table. A day later it was gone. Tim Marks recalls that at times ‘she would lose stuff which was totally irreplaceable’.
Gretel never asked for rent—she had always operated on a barter system. In exchange for accommodation and food, she would invent a household task for each disciple: gardener, butler, personal trainer, chef, chauffeur, housekeeper or personal secretary. Unfortunately many simply ignored their tasks. Some turned out to be toxic influences. Gretel would turn against others, locking them out.
One woman, Liz Mania, would become her live-in housekeeper. With a flair for interior design, Liz would arrange Gretel’s kitsch objet d’art. She was obsessive, rising at six a.m. to commence her duties. Like Gretel, appearances were important to Liz. She would apply nail polish and make-up each morning before starting on the bathrooms. She was ‘painful’ and even by Gretel’s open-minded standards ultimately ‘a nutter—just too weird’. Gretel recalls Liz ‘would smile this weird made-up smile’ before lowering her voice an octave to growl, ‘Someone left a turd for me to see in the toilet.’
Creative blow-ins became such a regular occurrence at Florida House that Gretel had to draw up a set of ‘House Rules’ to try to keep costs down. They were posted on the wall of the ground-floor living area.
1. Under my roof, all persons and property will be treated with the utmost respect … Offenders will be summarily expelled or subjected to torture if attractive, by order of Madam Lash.
2. No noise after midnight.
3. Three hours’ work on the house each day.
4. Breakfast is provided. You must clean if you use the kitchen for other meals.
5. The upper level is private. No access. No use of phones.
Some of Gretel’s houseguests were profoundly influenced by their time at Florida House. When Gretel came across Rachel St James and her boyfriend Nick via an artist called Droogie, they were squatting in an ‘arts space’ at the bottom of Sydney’s Glebe Point Road and about to be evicted. Gretel took an instant liking to the couple, who definitely fitted her criteria for artists in need. She commanded that they move in. Within a week Rachel and Nick were installed while Droogie floated in and out as he pleased, often staying over.
As well as being a talented graffiti artist, Droogie was into myth, mysticism and ceremonial magic. Gretel was particularly taken with him, commissioning him to spray-paint some arresting murals within the Florida House garage, converting it into ‘a post-apocalyptic temple to Isis’. She ensured he included the inscription ‘I Isis, am all that is, has been or will be. No mortal man hath ever me unveiled’ in the work. ‘With his beautiful dark looks, karate physique, leather, studs, piercings and delightful company, he was my all-time favourite STIFF chauffer,’ says Gretel.
Rachel, in her early twenties, aspired to acting. Gretel suggested she play at being her maid. If Gretel was throwing a party or had media coming Rachel would don a short, short skirt and very high heels—part fifties cigarette girl, part French maid—and serve visitors afternoon tea. She would accompany Gretel to opening nights at the Opera House in the same garb, ensuring that Gretel provoked maximum attention. Rachel believes she and Gretel ‘had some kind of special connection … because I have a high vibration of light. I’m an angelic person. I saw the beauty in Gretel and … I loved that.’
Gretel would always urge her, ‘Come with me and take a headlong leap into the unknown.’ Rachel started to blossom as a performer, with appearances in nightclub shows. ‘In a way,’ she says, ‘Gretel launched me, inspired me.’ The pair would choreograph extraordinary performances—sophisticated, twisted strip-tease acts that they performed at Florida House parties. Rachel went on to become one of Australia’s top models, including Penthouse Pet of the Year.
Her boyfriend Nick would often play the role of chauffeur, as well as inspiring Gretel creatively. Nick also loved his time at Florida House, though Rachel says he and Gretel were often at loggerheads. Because Gretel is ‘such an open energy field’, Rachel explains, ‘she can attract a darker energy, and that can be bad for her’.