After her father's overdose in 1992, she negotiated with the New South Wales government to purchase his studio and run it as a studio museum managed by the Art Gallery of New South Wales.
Whiteley married her first husband Christopher Kuhn in 1995; they divorced in 1999. She married her second husband Jim Elliott in December 2001, shortly before she died from adrenal cancer on 19 December, at age 37.
