Elizabeth Laverty, collector who set 266 artworks free, dies at 88

Elizabeth Laverty, the Melbourne art collector and philanthropist, was remembered at a service in Melbourne on Tuesday, months after her death in September at 88. Wesley Enoch, chair of the Australia Council, told the room that Laverty 'did not merely collect art or attend the world of art. She made a world around it.'

Enoch, who met Laverty when he was newly appointed director of the Sydney Festival, said the pair spoke twice a day for about five years. 'Friendship is often made not in the big declarations but in the ordinary repetition of care,' he said, calling the calls 'a kind of shared geography between us.'

With her husband Dr Colin Laverty OAM, a pathologist who died in 2013 and whose HPV research helped lead to cervical cancer vaccines, she amassed one of Australia's largest and most diverse collections of contemporary Australian art. Sydney's Museum of Contemporary Art showed it in 1998. The couple bought their first painting together in 1984 — a Tony Tuckson, for about $7000 — and from the late 1980s travelled to Indigenous art centres around the country.

Part of the collection went under the hammer in 2013: 266 works valued at $4 million to $6 million, including pieces by Peter Booth, Emily Kngwarreye, Ken Whisson, William Robinson, Rosalie Gascoigne, Richard Larter, Louise Hearman, Robert Klippel and Boxer Milner Tjampitjin. 'We collected from the heart, but there's just so much work and so much of it in storage,' she told the Australian Financial Review in 2012. 'It's time to set them free.'

The Lavertys also put money behind kidney dialysis for Kintore, in the Western Desert, and a swimming pool appeal that funded pools at Kintore and Maningrida in Arnhem Land, according to Candice Bruce. They backed the Australian pavilion at the Venice Biennale early and pushed other collectors to do the same. Portraits of Laverty by Richard Lewer were Archibald Prize finalists four times.

She is survived by her daughter, Jane Kleimeyer, and stepchildren Georgina Laverty-Bill and Sam Laverty.