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. 

Rings of Saturn, Heidi 

The farmhouse where they were all welcomed 

In the sculpture garden 

One of the Ned Kelly pieces by Sydney Nolan 

Garden art

One of our favourite outdoor pieces

The house that Thomas built

Such a beautiful house, Werribee Park Mansion, with such tragic tales as part of its very fabric. Built by Thomas Chirnside and his brother Andrew as they were both approaching their sixties, Werribee Park was seen as a reflection of the success of their pastoral ventures to that time, and was one of the most extensive and exceptional homes ever built in Australia. But it was much more than that. At the age of twenty-four Thomas could hardly have known when he set out from his home in Scotland with just a couple of hundred pounds in his pocket to begin a new life in the colonies that he would become one of the greatest landowners in the history of Australia, or that he would build a house like no other for the only woman he had ever loved.

Thomas was driven. Within months of landing he bought sheep on the Murrumbidgee but left them to graze as a drought set in. A dicey step. Soon after, he collected Andrew from his ship and together they bought cattle. They drove them overland to the markets in Adelaide selling them there successfully when many others had failed. The gods were still smiling.  Rains fell, and on his return Thomas’s sheep made good. He took over a run he found being abandoned, then he bought a station, then other stations so he and Andrew reared cattle and steadily grew their wealth.  Andrew was the quiet one. Thomas was the gruff one. 

Frequently Thomas would visit Scotland. He imported red deer for his hunt from the deer stock owned by Prince Albert, Queen Victoria’s husband. He also imported the foxes. To be healthy, Thomas believed, one had to ride to hounds. He loved thoroughbreds and became an expert at horse flesh, importing mares and stallions to improve his racing stock. His racing achievements were legendary, including winning the 1874 Melbourne cup with Haricot. He would not work on Sundays, nor would he allow work on any of his properties on the Sabbath. His feelings ran deep. 

On one of his trips back to Scotland he fell deeply in love with his first cousin, Mary Begbie.  But he arrived back in Australia, months later, without her. She had not accepted him, though he must have felt there was hope, for when Andrew made his first visit back to Scotland some time later, Thomas begged him to bring Mary back with him,  any way he could. 

And Andrew did.  Andrew married Mary whilst in Scotland, and brought her out to Australia once their first child, Mary Matilda, was born. 

Thomas was never to marry. But he soon set about building Mary a home. It was to be a place of serenity and peace, a fitting tribute to Mary. Thus Werribee Park Mansion was conceived, adding to the extensive portfolio of properties that the Chirnside brothers already owned throughout Victoria and the other states. It took three years to build, drew on the best architectural skill and craftsmanship available at the time, and when finished held sixty grand rooms of lavish proportion and style.

Andrew and Mary and their three children moved in, then beseeched Thomas to join them there. Eventually, he did.  But his health was deteriorating. Given to spells of melancholia Thomas was often acutely depressed. He sought treatment for this. But to no avail. During this time he transferred funds out of his name into the name of family members. Then, imagined himself bankrupt. He threatened suicide. Reality was fast fading for Thomas. 

One Saturday late in June, just after lunch with the family, it became all too much. Thomas took himself and a gun out into the grounds of the mansion. He set the butt into the dirt, took off his boot, and firmly set his toe over the trigger. His forehead bent to the muzzle, and very deliberately, Thomas blew his brains out. His life ended at 72.

Just three years later, when Andrew was 73, he died of a heart condition. Mary lived on at Werribee until 1908 when the flame of a candle in her bedroom torched her beautiful hair. She died as a result, a terrible and traumatic death. 

One son, George, inherited Werribee. The other, John, inherited stony land above the railway. John set about building himself a home. George took him to court to ensure he did not use the name “Werribee” in the title.  It had come to this. Werribee was put on the market in 1922, and sold. Which marked the end of any Chirnside ownership in the house that Thomas had specially built for Mary. 

Mary's house

Beautiful chandelier 

Lovely symmetry

Garlands for Mary 

Art on the edge

The modernists, we are discovering, are not the only artists who have come under great scrutiny, discussion and dissension on the Melbourne art scene. 

Another is the grunge artist, Adam Cullen. One day we were taken to lunch at the HuTong Duck and Dumpling bar in Prahran where the food was divine, delicious morsels of split eggplant and prawns in hoisin, and all sorts of dumplings filled with anything from crab to crispy duck. But, even more interesting, the food bar is situated on the ground floor of The Cullen, a boutique hotel named for Adam Cullen’s edgy art pieces, which the hotel group bought and displays on every wall, in every suite. Somewhat like a patron.

Adam Cullen grew up in an apparently stable home and studied art, formally, and at length. From early on he stood out, turning up at art school with a rotting head of a dead pig chained to his ankle. Clearly wanting to stand out. 

His life and his art became even more lurid, more exposed. Diagnosed bipolar, his behaviour became as extreme as his drinking and drug taking. Guns were his passion, shooting at things, anything. He even shot the leg of the man he’d invited to write his biography. He incorporated gun violence into many of his works and many of his creations drip paint-blood.

To start the day Cullen needed a bottle of vodka to fuel the violent apparitions he plastered over his canvas: mongrel dogs, the hair on their backs set brutally afire; human faces, their eyes slashed out, dripping from the eye cavities. Rabid animals, fangs exposed, drooling blood. Or decapitated. All against brightly splashed backgrounds of acid yellow, neon orange, lurid pink and shard green exaggerating the violence of his subject matter. Standing out.

The most peaceful work we have seen is his yellow tinged head of the actor, David Wenham, which calls to mind one of Van Gogh’s self portraits in its mood, its brush strokes, its style. For this, Cullen won the Archibald Prize.

A driven man. His subject matter so often violent and difficult to comprehend, is stark and visually stunning in its simplicity, for with just a few simple almost caricature-like lines, he can portray a canvas overflowing with a violent warped rage.

Watching his paint splatter over his canvas is like watching Van Gogh in the agony of his dark days, painting swirling skies that are starry no more: the subject matter growing grimmer, darker, more dangerous and edgy the closer the end came. 

And the end came for Adam Cullen quite young. He was just forty seven when he was found dead. And, like Van Gogh, his work will likely sell stratospherically. 

At the bottom of the garden

One of the more eccentric things we viewed this trip was a photographic recreation of a Victorian Pleasure Garden spectacle inspired by the famed garden parties held at one of Melbourne’s historic mansions, Rippon Lea.

Rippon Lea was home to the Sargood family. Sir Frederick Thomas Sargood grew his wealth selling drapery during the gold rush days. He later became a politician in Melbourne, frequently entertaining his guests to fabulous parties in the grounds of the exotic pleasure gardens he and his wife had created on their property at Rippon Lea, with its expansive lake, waterfall, archery hut and arched bridges over meandering walkways; all of which covered more than fourteen acres of land. 

Inspired by the tales of such magical themed parties, professional photographers and stylists, makeup artists and actors playing dressup together with the National Trust for support, set up a three day photo shoot to capture the essence of such a lush and exotic party. 

Mythical characters were researched. Museums scoured for costumes and jewellery. Tables laid with the extravagant feasts typical of the times. Characters were dressed and posed including arrogant butlers, insouciant hostesses, and peeking at them from the green boughs were woodland nymphs, fanciful unicorns, foxes, peacocks and faerie queens. The exhibition showed it all to be quite magical, slightly wicked, and delightfully fanciful.

In keeping with the garden theme, we followed the exhibition with a wander through the Fitzroy Gardens which were close. And what a boon to have this lovely open space such a short walk from the city centre. So commendable of our forefathers to ensure such green spaces were set aside for us to enjoy, even today.

Here, too, we found faeries at the bottom of the garden. The gnarled trunk of a three hundred year old tree, long dead, was carved by a lady sculptress and storyteller, Ola Cohn, who, in the 1930s, on returning from London where she’d trained under Henry Moore, was spilling over with new ideas and technologies and wanting to start something new.

Taking up her mallet and chisel she set about chipping away to release the little creatures she imagined hidden in the cracked whorls and knots of the dead redwood in the park. She uncovered faeries and spiders, imps, wizards and elves. Here, a kangaroo, there a lyrebird, even a sorcerer spider’s web was exposed. The trunk became a veritable cornucopia of dozens of delightful fairytale characters that Ola spent three years imagining and carving. 

It was a work of love that she gifted to the children of Melbourne whose families were in the midst of a depression at the time, so had very little. But the children then, and now, have treated Ola’s gift gently. With help from the city fathers who contributed to its preservation by installing metal rods to keep the trunk standing, and fluids to prevent rot setting in around the wee characters. 

And, once a year, in the summer, children gather at the base of the trunk and Ola’s characters spring, as if to life. The folk of the fairies tree dance, sing, and cavort as villains are vanquished and heroes rise up and rejoice. A touch of Enid Blyton enmeshed with Beatrix Potter. These are indelible memories for impressionable young minds. Deeply imprinted. Stirring their imaginings. 

And close by the fairies tree is a tiny model village,  not at all exceptional, until you read its intent. It came from the folk of the City of Lambeth in England to the folk of Victoria, as a thank you, for food packages sent and desperately needed, given the food shortage caused by the second world war. 

This little village of the Tudor period, with its thatches and half timbers, churches, barns and stocks, was lovingly carved by the wizened hands of a seventy-seven year old pensioner with such a passion for his hobby that he scoured the rubble of bombed out London war sites hunting down suitable material for his task. These tiny homes, and no doubt visiting children think they are for faerie folk, grew out of the rubble of war. 

And the tales from Fitzroy Gardens keep on keeping on. A grainy old noticeboard near one of the footpaths we trod told us of the early days of Melbourne’s hospital care. Prior to 1900, hospitals in Victoria were essentially charitable institutions. If you were well off, but poorly, you paid for any treatment needed at home. You did not go to hospital.

Hospitals were set up for the poor. Workhouses, as in England, were not a feature that the early fathers encouraged in Australia. They considered hospitals the better option for the poor. Typically, they were run by nuns, volunteers, and funded by private donors in the main. But public donations were welcome, too. 

And that is where Fitzroy Gardens played its part. Once a year, from as early as 1873 and right though until the1920s, Fitzroy Gardens was a venue for fund raising activities for a special event that came to be called, Hospital Sunday. 

Hospital Sunday would often involve the Bishop delivering a special service in the town hall. Different churches, throughout town, would offer different choral services. Donation plates were passed around. Sacred music would be laid on in the afternoon in the gardens. Crowds would come to listen. Collections would be made at the entrance gate, or on board excursion steamers, if listeners came by boat.

Collection points came together in the early evening, and the total of the funds donated was published in the newpaper in the following days. And folk were amazingly generous. In 1888 one Hospital Sunday raised over £14,000. Mind you, they were the good times still. The banks had not yet toppled. And finally, as we headed back to the city to find some lunch we passed Captain Cook’s parents house, dismantled stone by stone in Great Ayton, in Yorkshire, in the 1930s, and shipped to Australia in hundreds of cases and dozens of barrels, along with a cutting of ivy from the front garden, to be re-erected in Fitzroy Gardens where today you can stop and chat to the volunteers playing the part of Cook’s folk. 

We take a shortcut through the Conservatory and are enchanted by the display. Today, the arrangements are exceptionally romantic with a pink and purple vibe, separated by little puffs of white.

The Conservatory garden, like much of what we have seen today has stood here since the 1930's, changes form and flowers every two to three months. This involves moving dozens of hanging baskets, laying out hundreds of pots of background plants and greenery, and arranging nearly two thousand pots of coloured flowers. Quite an expensive operation it would seem, to change these so regularly, but most of the plants, we are told, are recycled, so that’s a relief. Tho’ still, the work involved is a huge expense.

But, it is all so very beautiful. And every little seating rock (and sadly, there are not nearly enough. People want to sit and gape) is occupied by a pair of city workers taking a romantic respite as they slowly munch on their lunch time sandwiches in one of the most beautiful settings to be found. 

Lunch is not a sandwich for us. We find a place called Lucy Liu, in one of the city lanes, and dive into platters of Michael Lambie’s delicious soft shelled crab, and blackened ham hock served as if it were Beijing duck with delicate pancakes, pickled greens and a tart, spicy sauce. Superb. We will return.

Romantic garden in the Fitzroy Conservatory

Rippon Lea from the gardens

Victoriana pleasure garden tableaux

Just that hint of danger 

The Fairies tree

A thank you from the ruins of war

Cook's parents house transplanted

Blackened ham hock 

Fragment of the past

We can thank Sir Redmond Barry for the State Library of Victoria. His statue stands at the front steps of the library welcoming everyone, just as he did in 1856 on the day the library first opened. And, this, after staying up all the previous night helping to shelve some of the 3,800 books that he had ordered for the library that had just arrived by ship the previous day. A librarian had yet to be hired, but someone had to do the work. Which tells you a lot about Sir Redmond Barry.

He was the judge who acquitted thirteen of the Eureka Stockade miners in 1855, but who in 1880, when he sentenced Ned Kelly to death by hanging said, “May God have mercy on your soul”. Only to have Ned Kelly respond that he would see the judge anon in the afterlife. And, as if following a script, just twelve days after Ned’s execution, Sir Redmond Barry died.

Even today, there are many interesting links between the State Library of Victoria and the tale of Ned Kelly. We were lucky enough to arrive at the library in time for a guided walk offered by a volunteer, one of the friends of the library. This went, astonishingly, far longer than 2 hours, though we skipped out after two as we desperately needed a cool drink, but we could easily have gone back and done more the next day as the collections were so interesting. This, we were informed, is a reading library, not a borrowing library, and is heavily used by RMIT students whose lecture rooms are just across the street, and by the general public who throng the building and its various galleries in their hoards.

The building itself has some magnificent parts, particularly the great Domed Reading Room which is vast. Its floor space is spiked with long rows of study desks and tables, filled with patrons while the entire space is canopied by a huge lantern-like glass dome spilling light down from some thirty five feet above ground level. The dome room is encircled by arcaded pavilions, lined with shelved books, and eccentric and interesting exhibitions, some you would not expect to find in a reading library.

One of these being Ned Kelly’s actual suit of armour which Ned made in preparation for his final showdown at Glenrowan. It is pitted with bullet holes and hugely heavy given its plough metal construction which kept Ned the only gang member alive after that last bloody dawn battle. Until, of course, Sir Redmond Barry sentenced him.

Amazing pieces of Australian history are on display. Batman’s ‘agreement’ with the natives for him to occupy land along Port Phillip Bay. Early records of explorers. First editions of some of the rarest books, along with fine botanical drawings. Too much to really absorb in one visit. So, we’re determined to visit gain, and move slowly through the collections of interest to us.

Our passion to do this somewhat soothing, that such a library as the State Library of Victoria is not yet seen as the defunct species suggested in another work of sculpture outside the library, on the corner of Swanston and La Trobe streets, where Petrus Spronk of Holland, created a work slamming carved bluestone deep into the sidewalk like an ominous foreboding. As if what is left of the library is but a fragment of the past that you almost trip over.

Thank you for the library, Sir Redmond Barry

Spokes of study desks below the dome 

Bullets pitting the armour Ned Kelly made

Fragment of a library 

Old'n'gold

Into the hills, north and west, we drove next day, on the recommendation of a friend who visits there regularly, and who once had relatives digging for gold in the region. After a quick coffee at Mr in Macedon we discovered an idyllic garden to visit enroute: Forest Glade. Another treasure. The day was glorious and sunny, but not hot, and the bees buzzed all around us, so heavily laden with pollen that you could almost smell honey in the air. So many, that we were not surprised to learn there were hives for it to be collected at the bottom of the garden.

The garden was on twelve hectares and had magical little walkways winding through all of it. We likely wandered it in its entirety, it was so spectacular, and we could not bear to leave. The daffodils and bluebell glades were just finishing; the elegant poppies stood tall and magnificent; the azaleas, rhododendrons and peonies were opening up fresh and new. Garden ornaments were a feature, too. There were tasteful pieces of sculpture in perfect little spots all over the place. We particularly loved the exquisite Japanese moongate, opening onto a singing streamlet topped with stepping stones, and delicately arched bridges hidden around secret corners.

On talking to a gardener we learned that Forest Glade was owned by Cyril Stokes. Cyril, now a philanthropist, once trained to be a minister but was chucked out of the church for his gay leanings we learned. He married, had children and divorced; then found a gay partner, some three decades younger than him, with whom he built a relationship. He also built a hugely successful bathhouse in Melbourne, bought and sold retirement homes, and became seriously wealthy, sufficient to indulge his passion for collecting 18th and 19th century porcelain pieces. In fact his collection is one of the largest of its kind in the world and is occasionally on display here at the bottom of the garden. The garden was Trevor's refuge, one he built from scratch after a bushfire raged through here in the 80s. Sadly it was not enough to assuage his demons. He was found dead here one morning not so long ago by Cyril and a gardener. Cyril had a sculptured piece made of the two of them that was scheduled to be unveiled the weekend after our visit. In remembrance. 

After lunch, looking out over the magnificent views from the Top of the Range tea rooms, we headed across country to Taradale, a tiny town settled well before the gold rush days, but one that became a busy working hub once gold was discovered in the region. At one stage some 5,000 folk lived in Taradale, and that’s not counting some 3,000 Chinese who were digging up the dirt along the Back Creek tributary. In those days there were hotels, churches, banks, and civic offices vying for business, and houses aplenty. 

Today, instead of mullock heaps pocking the goldfields, horses graze in peaceful paddocks amiably dodging rusted relics of ancient farm machinery. A quartz battery, fully outfitted yet, still stands to one side of a dipping roadway, which would once have been a sea of moving wheelbarrows and drays loaded with rich stone heading for the crusher.

Other little oddities have survived. The streets were named after scientists and the old busy Faraday street, once the heart of the town, is still lined with buildings that grew from the town’s gold: the old police station, the historic courthouse, and the solicitor’s house, once used as the Mining Register’s Office, are now all private homes. As is the old Catholic Church built out of the ballast bricks that were carried aboard one of the sailing ships coming out from England in the 18th century. The picturesque old Methodist church, too, was built using bricks recycled from an earlier church in town. 

Today Taradale is a mere shadow of its former self in terms of size, but, is a peaceful, rural and picturesque hamlet of fewer than two hundred folk, many of whom are living in the solid stone dwellings of their town’s past, that are still standing strong. 

All the little towns on the drive back to Melbourne offer up a history that links them to the discovery of gold. And, of course, bushrangers. We were charmed by Kyneton which before the gold rush days was all slab huts and tents, but now proudly boasts some lovely historic stone buildings as part of its gold history. 

One of these, the Old Court House, was home for a time to Ned Kelly accused of ‘robbery in company’ but from where he was soon acquitted due to lack of evidence. A letter he wrote to Sergeant James Babington of the Kyneton police is the only written document of Ned’s that survives. We happened upon this letter just a couple of days after this, when we visited the Melbourne library exhibition. And, though it had a few spelling and grammatical errors, it certainly showed that Ned could put his hand to a well constructed plea for help and consideration without too many difficulties, after sadly realising that “everyone looks on me like A black snake”. 

We stopped for afternoon tea at a charmingly named delicatessen and coffee house in Kyneton: Duck, Duck, Goose & Larder. We chatted with the busy and productive owner who told us that the name for the business came via his family. His daughter, who worked in the shop was nicknamed Duck. His wife, too, was lovingly called Duck. He was the Goose, he said, and the provisions they stored, of course, were the Larder. Delightful. 

Just as interesting as their name for the shop is its history. The building, still, in amazing condition today, was constructed in 1878 by the Shire. And is a rare example of that sort of commercial venture. Well, it was half built, actually. Huge as it is today, the Shire intended it to be double its size. Thinking they might boost business in the community, they installed five butchers as well as a pie and coffee stand in their Market building.Sadly, it did not do well for the Shire, and has spent over a hundred more years finding its successful self, as Duck, Duck, Goose & Larder. We just loved it! 

Exquisite garden, exquisite day 

Stepping stones, enticing you deeper into the garden

Moongate is a perfect frame 

A special memory 

Delicious coffee, lunch and gift gallery all in one

Quartz battery as it ever was

Old Methodist Church in Taradale

Old Court House - where Ned was acquitted

A page from Ned's letter 

Delicious deli 

Amazing historic structure 

Lovely old signage