Anne Newstead
Anne Newstead
Anne is a force of nature. She will tell it as she sees it without hesitation. It’s good to know where you stand with people and you certainly do with the incomparable Anne Newstead.
Bondi wasn't even on Anne’s radar until she met her husband Adrian in 1980. She'd grown up on a farm before her parents moved their six children to Sydney's northern suburbs.
She graduated from Sydney Uni and sailed for Europe at 20 and didn't return for 15 years.
Anne was in her mid 30s when she finally discovered Bondi. Today, it would take a bulldozer to move her out. She even joins husband Adrian Newstead, a compulsive year-round swimmer, down at the Icebergs each morning at sunrise.
Anne has worked alongside Adrian for many years. They worked together at their store of Australiana design, the “Cooee Emporium,” which opened its doors in 1981 and was the precursor to the “Cooee Aboriginal Art Gallery” which they have only recently sold. A number of former Emporium clients in New York and London still have the cushion covers and furnishings Anne designed and had made from those early days.
Anne lived and travelled in Europe, Buenos Aires and New York (where she worked as a biochemist!) with many of South America’s finest writers and intellectuals. Carlos Fuentes, Gabriel Marques were good friends. She set up a bakery in Woodstock, NY with her second husband, the father of her now 49 year old daughter Mandala, before they returned to Australia.
Anne has always married interestingly. Her first husband was a professor of philosophy. The second, who she met in the Mandala commune in 1972 in New York’s East Village, was a “professor of the streets” and finally Adrian, who is an Aboriginal art consultant, dealer, and commentator with an OAM.
She now has two Tiwi Aboriginal grandchildren and is a mad greenie, obsessed with growing trees on her country property in the hinterland behind Mullumbimby in northern NSW.
We are great admirers.
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Thank you Adrian for your help putting Anne’s story together
