Gold and Graffiti: Tales of Melbourne: Sissinghurst revisited

It took us almost a complete day to visit the Heidi Museum of Modern Art. There are so many exhibitions, so much art, and so many installations in the garden, but, it was the story of the Reeds themselves that ended up occupying most of our time.

Sunday and John Reed. An extraordinary couple who occupied such an influential space in time in Australia’s art history. He a lawyer, she a gardener with a discerning mind, found a home together, in a farmhouse they named Heidi on 15 acres of land, in Heidelberg, where they nurtured a circle of like minded friends, interested in analysing and debating all forms of modernist art and literature.

The talent amassed throughout their lives at Heidi is like a Who’s Who of Australian Art including Sydney Nolan, Arthur Boyd, John Perceval, Joy Hester and Albert Tucker. They were young, full of ideas and passion, keen to come together to clarify their ideas and share their work with Sunday and John who housed and fed many of them throughout the 1930s and beyond, and nurtured their work.

What probably was not wise, in hindsight, they also shared their beds and their bodies with many others of the group. He slept with her, slept with him, slept with them, watched a sexual menage, or begat him. It all became terribly convoluted and eventually far too complicated to sustain.

Which put some noses seriously out of joint. Sydney Nolan fell in love with Sunday while painting the Ned Kelly series at Heidi. This affair went on over many years, with John, the voyeur on the sidelines. Nolan gifted the Kelly works to Sunday, but regularly beseeched her to leave John and run away with him. Sunday couldn’t. Nolan finally realised this was not going to happen, so left Heidi permanently. Enroute he met up with John’s sister, Cynthia, and married her, much to John and Sunday’s horror. Then adding fuel to a volatile flame, he asked for his Kelly works back. All of which permanently severed all ties with John and Sunday forever. Never to be reconciled.

Joy Hester and Albert Tucker of the Heidi Circle had a similar complication. Hester, who already had several abortions, was pregnant when she and Tucker married. With someone else’s child, as it happens. This time she had an infection and could not abort. Their alliance, like many of the others, did not last, and Hester’s son, Sweeney, was left for Sunday and John to rear when the two went their separate ways.

Sweeney’s life was short and skewed. He committed suicide when he was thirty four. John died of bowel cancer two years later. Cynthia, his sister, and Sidney Nolan's wife, committed suicide five years before that. Sunday committed suicide ten days after John died. Strange goings-on. It all reminded me very much of Virginia Wolf and the Sackville-West's Sissinghurst gatherings. Revisited, in many ways.