"She was so Dutch, she was harsh and unsentimental -- and deeply compassionate, all at the same time," said her friend, writer David Marr.
"She was deeply, deeply concerned about social justice but she came at it without any cant. I think really her best book was her book (Dirt Cheap) about going around doing all those rough jobs -- it's compassion without ideology. It was about facts, it was about how people actually lived."
Wynhausen, who turned out painstaking journalism for papers including The Australian, The National Times and The Bulletin, grew up in Manly, where her mother, Marianne (Nan), had a shop, Paris Frocks.
Her poignant and hilarious memoir Manly Girls captured that era, as well as Elisabeth's adventures as a student bohemian, improbable schoolmarm and expatriate in New York. Like her mother's, Elisabeth's humour was earthy, uproarious and mischievous. They also shared a remarkable openness and curiosity.
"And she was a very pure person -- you were never in doubt with Elisabeth about anything," said her friend Kim Williams, former chief executive of News Corp Australia. "She was the most truthful person I've ever known. It upset people at times but I always found it to be the greatest tonic imaginable. She was awesomely direct, passionate, she was loyal, independent, she was a wholly original person."
Colleagues and friends were drawn into a kind of serial publishing venture as she shouted, or sometimes conspiratorially whispered, the latest sample of a work in a progress, whether it was her essay On Resilience, an overdue feature for the newspaper or her book-length foray into gloomy economics, The Short Goodbye.
Her friend Kathy Bail, chief executive of the University of NSW Press, said: "She'd get on the phone when she was working on a book and she'd read the first paragraph to you, or she would try a quote out on you -- 'Check this out!' She's probably recited half of her works to me at various times."
If her prose appeared effortless -- with a telling anecdote perfectly placed, a narrative rhythm, and a sly joke -- the process was full of doubts. "She was honest about every single sentence," Marr said. "She couldn't bear any taint of exaggeration, of pomposity, of falseness. She worked ruthlessly at her prose, to make sure that it was true."
Both parents and her only brother, Jules, having died, Elisabeth is survived by niece Gabi and her partner Aaron, as well as nephew Jessie and his wife Joanna. Her funeral is expected to be next week.
