Modern Love: The Lives of John and Sunday Reed

By Kendrah Morgan and Lesley Harding

Much has been written about the lives and art of Heide, but finally the remaining members of the inner circle have entrusted the full story to be told through this intimate biography of John and Sunday Reed.

Part romance, part tragedy, Modern Love explores the complex lives of these champions of successive generations of Australian artists and writers, detailing their artistic endeavours and passionate personal entanglements.

It is a story of rebellion against their privileged backgrounds and of a bohemian existence marked by extraordinary achievements, intense heartbreak and enduring love. John and Sunday’s was a remarkable partnership that affected all those who crossed the threshold into Heide and which altered the course of art in Australia.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Melbourne University Publishing Ltd
• Release date: Sep 23, 2015
• ISBN: 9780522862829

Book preview

This is number one hundred and sixty-five in the

second numbered series of the

Miegunyah Volumes

made possible by the

Miegunyah Fund

established by bequests

under the wills of

Sir Russell and Lady Grimwade.

‘Miegunyah’ was the home of

Mab and Russell Grimwade

from 1911 to 1955.

‘This book is like a dream, a dream to enrich us. It is an incredible book, incroyable. One can’t find one like this anywhere in the world. All the personalities in the book are honoured to be recorded like this. Sunday and John were very courageous, they are the soul of Heide, they demanded honesty, they were the best teachers we could have had. It is a tour de force, they have come alive again.’

MIRKA MORA

‘Modern Love is a rich and satisfyingly detailed account of the remarkable lives of John and Sunday Reed, the champions of Australian radical modernism, and of the extraordinary array of artists and writers who came to stay and work at Heide—most notably Sidney Nolan, Albert Tucker, Joy Hester, John Perceval, Max Harris. Here is one of Australia’s great stories: one of immense achievement and loss in equal measure.’

RICHARD HAESE

Modern Love

The Lives of John & Sunday Reed

LESLEY HARDING

& KENDRAH MORGAN

THE MIEGUNYAH PRESS

An imprint of Melbourne University Publishing Limited

11–15 Argyle Place South, Carlton, Victoria 3053, Australia

[e-mail]

www.mup.com.au

Published in association with

Heide Museum of Modern Art

7 Templestowe Road, Bulleen, Victoria 3105, Australia

www.heide.com.au

State Library Victoria

328 Swanston Street, Melbourne, Victoria 3000, Australia

www.slv.vic.gov.au

First published 2015

Text © Lesley Harding, Kendrah Morgan and Heide Museum of Modern Art, 2015

Design and typography © Melbourne University Publishing Limited, 2015

This book is copyright. Apart from any use permitted under the Copyright Act 1968 and subsequent amendments, no part may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted by any means or process whatsoever without the prior written permission of the publishers.

Every attempt has been made to locate the copyright holders for material quoted in this book. Any person or organisation that may have been overlooked or misattributed may contact the publisher.

Cover design by Jenny Grigg

Typeset in Bembo 11.5/15pt by Cannon Typesetting

Printed in Australia by McPherson’s Printing Group

National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry

     Harding, Lesley, author.

     Modern love/Lesley Harding and Kendrah Morgan.

     9780522862812 (paperback)

     9780522862829 (ebook)

     Reed, Sunday, 1905–1981.

     Reed, John 1901–1981.

     Heide Museum of Modern Art.

     Art—Collectors and collecting—Australia—Biography.

     Art patrons—Australia—Biography.

     Art, Australian—20th century.

     Art, Modern—20th century.

     Heidelberg (Vic.)—Social life and customs.

     Morgan, Kendrah, author.

     709.940904

Contents

Preface

Prologue

1 Beginnings

2 Awakening

3 The Enchanted Domain

4 Modern Times

5 Angry Penguins

6 Love and War

7 Paradise Lost

8 Exodus

9 La Vie Bohème

10 A Child on the High Seas

11 A Gallery to Be Lived In

12 Agony in the Garden

Epilogue: Despair Has Wings

Notes

Bibliography

Copyright and Permissions

Acknowledgements

Index

Preface

WHEN JOHN AND Sunday Reed purchased their semi-rural property on the outskirts of Melbourne in 1934, they could hardly have imagined that eighty years later it would be the site of a renowned art museum and widely regarded as the birthplace of Australian modernism. The intricate way in which the Reeds’ lives unfolded has given rise to a beguiling mythology—the romanticised tale of Heide and its bohemian inhabitants—that has long captured the imagination of the public and scholars alike. Catalysts and benefactors, the Reeds were unremitting in their belief in the artists and writers they supported, and they helped revolutionise art in this country. Yet their embrace of intense experiences did not make for an easy journey for many of those who shared it with them.

Though encouraged by our publisher, Sally Heath at Melbourne University Publishing, we were at first daunted by the task of writing this book, given the proliferation of literature and opinion surrounding the Reeds, their relationships with several famous artists and their cultural contributions. We set out to unravel some of the assumptions about life at Heide and have relied strongly on primary sources: interviewing John and Sunday’s associates, investigating unpublished manuscript material held in public and private collections and reading the vast amount of correspondence they left behind.

The process of constructing the narrative was akin to putting together an immense jigsaw, with the pieces scattered across Australia and as far away as the tiny village of Presteigne in Wales. In time the picture slowly revealed itself. Friends of the Reeds provided vital clues, taking us into their confidence and sharing personal information in the interests of the full story of Heide being told. In some instances we found that the truth was stranger than fiction, and decided to withhold some particularly sensitive material out of respect for those still living. We are mindful that for people who knew John and Sunday and their adopted son Sweeney, this account will bring to the surface memories both good and bad, but hope that it will, as it has for us, extend understanding of them as individuals—with all their strengths and shortcomings—and as historical identities. We come away from this project with a new appreciation of John and Sunday’s determination and vision, and their extraordinary devotion to one another across five decades marked by love, loss, achievement, estrangement and heartbreak.

For the reader’s benefit throughout the book we have silently corrected spelling errors, missing words and errant punctuation when quoting from primary sources. In particular, the spelling of Heide has been standardised to that preferred by John and Sunday and the museum today.

Lesley Harding and Kendrah Morgan

10 August 2015

Prologue

SUNDAY BAILLIEU WAS worldly but damaged, and John Reed was just coming into his own when they met in 1930. Twenty-four and twenty-eight respectively, they were from the same privileged social echelon and shared a sense of rebellion against their expected paths. A solicitor with alternative views, John was strikingly handsome, with an aristocratic bearing and a calm disposition. Sunday, recently separated from a miscreant first husband, felt a little vulnerable in his presence and was yet to display her more capricious temperament. Physically she was slim and fair, possessing an uncommon beauty and an undeniable allure. They were reserved and slightly hesitant with each other in the early days of their courtship, although each recognised a kindred spirit, someone with a similar appetite for new experiences who sought a deeper fulfilment than life had offered thus far. Displaying the disregard for social proprieties that would go on to characterise their partnership, they would live together within the year.

While John recalled that ‘it was not a dramatic meeting … and Sunday did not change my life’¹, his sister Cynthia quickly sensed the depth of his feelings, quipping that it seemed as if he had been struck with ‘the love disease’.² Indeed, Sunday’s impact was perhaps more decisive than John was willing to admit. Neither of them had come to this point in their lives via an easy journey.

Sunday was, John acknowledged, well-versed in modern literature when he encountered her. However, her direct contact with art—notwithstanding DH Lawrence’s notorious exhibition of erotic drawings, which she had seen in London in 1929—had hitherto been limited to the classics and the conventional: the paintings of feted artist and family friend Arthur Streeton, her portrait sitting with Agnes Goodsir in Paris, and the European Old Masters, though she had also made the pilgrimage to Monet’s Giverny.³ Her blossoming romance with John saw her welcomed into a circle of creative and energetic friends for whom art, ideas and intensity of living were the norm. Sunday understood the significance of John’s growing feeling for modern art and pushed him to explain and clarify his thoughts and reactions. He remembered the profound, vitalising effect she had on him: ‘So far as I was concerned, two things happened: I responded to her as a person, and at the same time she challenged me in a way no one else had ever done’.⁴ This push–pull dynamic of their interaction was at the very heart of the relationship, becoming the impetus behind the contributions that John and Sunday would eventually make to Australian culture and history. Each was extended and elevated as a result of their connection, the whole greater than the sum of the parts.

Sunday Baillieu c.1923

By mid-1931 Sunday’s divorce from her husband Leonard Quinn had been finalised and she and John wasted no time announcing their engagement in October. They were wed at St Paul’s Cathedral, Melbourne, on 13 January 1932 in a private ceremony. As Sunday had been married before, the union was not recorded in the cathedral’s official register. The couple instead took their vows in a side chapel after the bride’s father, Arthur Baillieu, made a substantial donation towards St Paul’s future building program, subsidising the completion of the two great spires. The reception was held at Vailima, Sunday’s aunt Amy Shackell’s house in Toorak, where a pink striped marquee was erected in the garden. Sunday wore a contemporary gown of chalk-white chiffon—‘soft and dreamy and just right’, according to her mother, Ethel—with a fur pelerine and a broad-brimmed hat of dressed, white panama straw serving as a ‘halo’ for her face. The wedding cake was a gift from one of the guests and firmly in the sights of John’s dog Karel, who reportedly attempted to make off with it. Writing to the newlyweds the following day, Ethel declared the day ‘went beautifully like silver bells’, Sunday never looking sweeter or lovelier and John giving a great little speech.⁵ Photographs were few, but Sunday’s younger brother Everard captured proceedings on his cinecamera, making it a most modern affair.

John Reed c.1940

Arthur and Ethel Baillieu must have been relieved, if not delighted, to see their daughter in John’s safe hands. He was an eminently suitable husband: educated, professional, sensible, monied and, most of all, he seemed to have all the patience in the world for Sunday’s emotional fragility and fickleness. John’s father, Henry Reed, was unlikely to have felt an equivalent satisfaction. A nouveau-riche and barren divorcee, Sunday can hardly have seemed a desirable catch, in spite of any agreeable personal attributes. It was Cynthia who warmed most to the new member of the family. After a period in England on a program of cultural self-education, then a year in Germany where she worked as a nanny, the youngest Reed daughter returned to Melbourne in time for John and Sunday’s wedding. Already close to her brother, Cynthia would go on to develop an intense friendship with Sunday, who was similarly cultivated and well-travelled, and bore an uncanny resemblance to her sister-in-law. Cynthia would play an important role in the couple’s early relationship.

It was through Cynthia that John and Sunday met and befriended an eclectic group of people united by their interest in art of the times. They were particularly fond of Herbert Vere Evatt, a former ‘legal meteor’ of the New South Wales Bar. Later a federal Member of Parliament, at the time he was on the Bench of the High Court of Australia—the youngest justice ever appointed.⁶ Cynthia dubbed him ‘Judgie’ and the Reeds knew him as ‘Bert’, though history has remembered him as ‘Doc’. Evatt’s wife, Mary Alice, was a supporter of modern art and studied at the two most advanced private art schools in Australia at the time—the Bell-Shore School in Melbourne and the Crowley-Fizelle School in Sydney.

Sunday and John Reed on their wedding day, 13 January 1932

Other friends of Cynthia, John and Sunday in the early 1930s included the art critic and pundit Basil Burdett; the newspaper proprietor Keith Murdoch and his wife Elisabeth; the writer Joan Lindsay and her husband Daryl Lindsay, an artist; and the Collins Street dentist and art collector Vivian Ebbott and his wife Sunny. But perhaps the most important of the introductions Cynthia made to the Reeds was a young painter by the name of Sam Atyeo.

The meeting with Atyeo in the first year of their marriage was the start of something significant in the Reeds’ lives. They felt a strong personal connection with him and before long he became their most intimate friend. With rugged rather than good looks and a certain roughness around the edges, Atyeo was nonetheless charismatic. His verve and appetite for life were infectious, and contact with his art and the process of its making made them feel they were participating in an endeavour that was not only creative but also tremendously exciting and important. Their affinity had other dimensions as well. Atyeo would join John and Sunday in their first experiment with an alternative model of relationship, one that would come to define the terms of their marriage: what the French discreetly call a ménage à trois.

CHAPTER 1

Beginnings

BOTH JOHN AND Sunday were born into establishment families founded in Australia two generations previously. Each had paternal grandfathers of humble origins who came to the Antipodes as young men ready to make their names and fortunes. Henry Reed senior and James Baillieu arrived in 1827 and 1853 respectively and proved prodigious—Henry became one of Tasmania’s most enterprising pioneers, astute businessmen and great philanthropists, while James produced a Victorian dynasty and set the wheels in motion for the Baillieus’ remarkable commercial success and social prominence.

John invariably avoided mention of his family history, claiming to have little interest in it.¹ Though he summarily dismissed his grandfather, Henry Reed was in fact a determined, ambitious and entrepreneurial man, with an exceptional capacity for hard work and charitable deeds. John regarded himself as utterly unlike his puritanical predecessor, yet he did inherit his grandfather’s qualities of fortitude, perseverance in the face of all odds, and strong sense of noblesse oblige.

Henry senior was the son of a Yorkshire postmaster, and arrived in Hobart Town, Van Diemen’s Land, as it was then known, in April 1827 at the age of twenty. He secured a clerk’s position in a mercantile business in Launceston and befriended John Batman—the future founder of Melbourne.² He then acquired a free land grant of 640 acres from Lieutenant-Governor George Arthur in early 1828, the first of his many properties.Henry’s fortunes continued to rise as he established his own operation as a merchant and purchased a small fleet of ships, commencing a series of whaling, sealing and general trading ventures between Launceston, Hobart, Sydney and London. Following two miraculous survivals aboard ships that seemed destined to sink, he was convinced that God had called him. After marrying his cousin Maria Susanna Grubb in London in 1831 he travelled between England and Tasmania, and became a devout Wesleyan and lay preacher.

Henry Reed senior, John’s grandfather c.1875

In 1835 Henry assisted John Batman’s settlement of Port Phillip, lending Batman £3000 and bringing migrants and supplies from Launceston. Henry also delivered the first sermon ever to be heard in Melbourne—or so he claimed—to John and Henry Batman, William Buckley and three Indigenous men.³ He then travelled up the Yarra River into the ‘wilderness’ with members of the Yarra Yarra tribe, probably with their conversion in mind.⁴ In all likelihood the group passed by the very site on the riverbanks at present-day Bulleen where John and Sunday would establish their home, Heide, exactly a century later.

With the end of the first pastoral boom and an Australia-wide depression in the 1840s Henry settled again in England in 1847, in Harrogate, Yorkshire, and devoted himself to preaching and philanthropy. Following the death of Maria in 1860 he married Margaret Frith from Enniskillen, Ireland, who was equally pious. With Margaret, Henry had five children, adding to the eleven he had fathered with Maria. The youngest was John’s father, Henry junior, born in 1870 in Tunbridge Wells, West Kent, where the Reeds had moved.

Henry’s final return to Tasmania was in late 1873, where he and his second family resided at Mount Pleasant, a magnificent hilltop property with panoramic views across the Tamar River and Launceston. In 1875 he gave support to Methodist missionary Dr George Brown to found the New Guinea Mission and came to acquire several Sepik River artefacts which, together with four John Glover landscape paintings, were, to John’s mind, the only artworks of note to grace the interior of the Mount Pleasant residence. Henry died at home on 10 October 1880 and was buried in the family tomb on the grounds.

Henry left an entailed estate in the age-old English tradition, with the assets passing to the eldest son, while the other offspring received a settlement.⁵ Walter, his eldest son with Margaret, should have received the principal inheritance, as Henry’s surviving sons from his first marriage were—for no clear reason—not taken into consideration. However, young Walter proved himself the black sheep of the family; he fell in love with a girl of convict stock well beneath his station⁶, and would eventually die tragically young in a brothel in London under mysterious circumstances. His name was never mentioned in the Reed household when John was growing up and Cynthia suspected that her own difficult relationship with her father may have stemmed in part from her close physical resemblance to her renegade uncle.⁷ Henry Reed’s vast estate thus passed to Henry junior, who was just ten years old at the time of his father’s death. Henry senior had left instructions for his wife about the boy’s education and upbringing in Tasmania, but Margaret disregarded her late husband’s wishes⁸ and in January 1882 took her son, together with his siblings, back to England.

Henry junior went on to study medicine at Cambridge and remained abroad until 1892, when it became evident that the matters of his father’s estate were in complete disarray.⁹ Another depression had struck Australia in 1890 as overseas investors withdrew their resources when financial returns proved less than anticipated. To his displeasure, Henry was forced to return to Launceston to take over the running of the Reed interests. He had no business experience and no great love for life on the land. In his favour was his extremely methodical nature, which, along with sound accounting skills, enabled him to be a very careful manager. John would inherit his self-discipline, analytical capabilities and exacting attention to detail.

After three challenging years Henry turned twenty-five and came of age, gaining independence from the trustees. He proposed to Lila Borwick Dennison, a raven-haired beauty from the Orkney Islands, Scotland, whom he had met in England, and they married in Bakewell, Derbyshire, in July 1895 after which Henry took his bride home to Australia. After the cool climes of her homeland, Lila had difficulty adjusting to the harsher conditions of Tasmania. Despite her humble Scots background, she affected to be more English than the English and abhorred the slovenly speech and informality of the locals.¹⁰ John’s own refined diction as an adult had surely been drilled into him by his mother.

Henry Reed, John’s father c.1910

Lila Reed (née Borwick Dennison), John’s mother c.1900

John Harford Reed c.1910

Henry and Lila initially lived at Fairview, in High Street, Launceston, where their first child, Coralie, was born in June 1896, then moved to Logan, Evandale, a pastoral property that the trustees had bought in the 1880s. Here their five other children were born: Henry, known as Dick, then Margaret, John, Barbara and Violet, always addressed by her middle name, Cynthia. John Harford Reed arrived on 10 December 1901 and grew into a dark-haired, fine-looking boy, very like his attractive mother. His abundant wavy locks caused his siblings to nickname him Paderewski, after the Polish prime minister and brilliant concert pianist of the era who sported a wild mane of hair. To his parents, however, he was known simply as Jack.

__________

Unlike John, Sunday remained proud of her family lineage. Born on 15 October 1905 across Bass Strait, in Melbourne, Victoria, Lelda Sunday Baillieu was an heiress to a family whose enterprise and influence would help shape the face of Melbourne. She could trace her ancestry to the French-speaking Catholic Baillieux family who were embroiderers and mercers in late-eighteenth-century Liège, and enjoyed telling friends that she belonged to a long line of lace-makers.

Sunday’s direct ancestors, among the Belgian Baillieux, were actually professional dancers. Her great-great grandfather Etienne Lambert Baillieux (known as Lambert) immigrated to England in 1792 and completed his dancing apprenticeship in Bath before taking up a teaching position. Within a few years he had anglicised his surname by dropping the ‘x’, converted to Anglicanism, settled in Bristol and married Ann Taylor, with whom he had three children.

Lambert’s eldest child and namesake, Lambert Francis Baillieu, became a dance and music teacher in the market town of Haverfordwest in Pembrokeshire, Wales. There he met and married Elizabeth Morgan in 1829, and the couple had fourteen offspring. Perhaps to lessen the financial strain on his parents, their third son, James George, went to sea in 1849 at the age of seventeen. He was Sunday’s grandfather.

James’s seafaring career brought him out to Australia on the barque Priscilla in January 1853. While in quarantine at Portsea, James and crewmate Jeremiah Twomey attempted to desert ship, but were caught and brought back. Their actions were prompted—according to family legend—by the behaviour of the captain, who was fond of drink and used to ‘knock them about’.¹¹ James escaped the Priscilla on his second attempt, climbing down the anchor chain then swimming and staying afloat until he reached the beach on the Queenscliff side, a considerable feat of endurance. A picturesque version of events told by a local fisherman saw James avoid detection by hiding in a cave inhabited by the former convict William Buckley, who was famous for spending thirty-two years with the Watourong people after absconding from his ship in 1803.

Unlike many deserters James was not tempted by gold fever. Instead he took advantage of the vacancies made available by the sailors-turned-prospectors, finding employment as an oarsman on the hospital ship Lysander. Thus he settled in Queenscliff, a wise decision given the hard-luck stories coming out of overcrowded Melbourne. Later that year he met Emma Lawrence Pow—a ‘strong, healthy and most lovely’ lass who arrived from Liverpool with 370 women on the Australia on 17 September 1853.¹² The ship was full of beautiful girls and the men at Queenscliff were wildly excited by its arrival. Emma came from meagre beginnings in Dorset, England, and after the death of her father her impoverished mother decided to send her young daughter to the colonies, where employment and better prospects were virtually guaranteed.

Although Emma’s age was recorded as nineteen on the Australia’s passenger list, she was in fact only fifteen. When she and James married two months later, on 3 November 1853, at St James’ Cathedral, Melbourne, they gave their ages as twenty-two and twenty-one to circumvent the necessity of parental consent. They lived for the first year of their marriage in a tent on Queenscliff’s eastern beach, then in a small cottage that would be their home for the next twenty-six years. James eventually became the assistant lighthouse keeper at Point Lonsdale. He and Emma had sixteen children, of whom thirteen survived into adulthood—ten boys and three girls. Among the boys were William Lawrence, known as ‘WL’, a business genius and the next patriarch of the family, and the much younger Arthur, Sunday’s father, born in 1872.

James Baillieu c.1885

Emma Baillieu c.1900

James is remembered as an honest, good-natured and communityminded man who transcended class barriers to be elected to the Queenscliff borough council in 1884 before becoming mayor in 1892. He was an active Freemason, as were his sons, a point of consequence in terms of the professional network it opened for the family. Together James and Emma fostered high moral principles and strong loyalty and love in their close-knit family. Sunday would also hold love and fealty dear, applying these values beyond the familial sphere to the artists she and John later gathered around them.

Although James was not known as a businessman, in 1881 he advanced his family’s wealth and notability by constructing a grand Italianate hotel on the Queenscliff foreshore, designed by architect William J Ellis and initially called Baillieu House. The likely source of financial backing for this venture was the Carlton Brewery owner Edward Latham, one of the wealthy Melburnians who summered at Queenscliff. Latham had established a friendship with the young WL, who would marry his daughter Bertha in 1887. Baillieu House was soon renamed the Ozone Hotel after one of the paddle steamers that ferried passengers between Melbourne and Queenscliff and the fashionable hotel was a resounding success, patronised by an elite clientele. As a result James and Emma were able to send the younger children to private schools, with Arthur attending Geelong College before joining WL in his real-estate firm, which was formed in 1892 in an effort to recoup devastating losses sustained by his previous company in the recent land boom collapse and onset of economic depression.

In the 1890s the Baillieus worked hard to restore the family fortunes and the loyalty between the siblings remained extraordinarily tight. No one stepped outside the circle or did anything unexpected. Arthur would later describe them to his children as a ‘team of workers—in an opportunity for one would be seen an opportunity for another … but believe me, the team work meant that each one had to pull his or her own weight’.¹³ Following these tenets Arthur, along with his brother Edward, known as Prince, became WL’s trusted assistants. The many Baillieu enterprises would soon be run from Collins House, the impressive building at 360 Collins Street in the heart of Melbourne where John later had an office. It was completed by WL in 1912—a symbol of Baillieu power and to its socialist critics an epicentre of Australian capitalism. Detractors called it ‘Glenrowan House’ in reference to the last stand of the notorious bushranger Ned Kelly, and claimed that its dictum was ‘when on thin ice skate fast’.¹⁴

Arthur Baillieu, Sunday’s father c.1935

Ethel Baillieu (née Ham), Sunday’s mother c.1930

James Baillieu died on 10 December 1897, and around this time Arthur fell in love with Ethel Ham, a gracious and cultured society girl from Ballarat in regional Victoria. Ethel’s father was the prominent local politician David Ham, who had arrived in Victoria from Launcells, Cornwall, in 1849 and after modest beginnings in a grocer’s establishment in Geelong found success in gold mining, then real estate and share broking. With two other colleagues he sank the first shaft of the famed Canadian Gully on the Ballarat goldfield, opening up some of the richest alluvial ground in the district and discovering the first Canadian nugget weighing two and a quarter pounds. With his Irish wife, Mary Jones, he built Wyvenhoe, their stylish residence in Ballarat, where they brought up their family of nine. David then became a Member of Parliament, representing the Wellington province for eighteen years. He was also known as a generous philanthropist to charitable causes and Sunday was proud of his donation in 1893 of a pair of lion statues carved in Sicilian marble for the entrance to Ballarat’s Botanical Gardens.

It was likely that David Ham’s commercial ventures with the Baillieus in mining and company takeovers brought Arthur into contact with Ethel, though theirs was definitely a love match rather than a mutually beneficial family arrangement. They married on 15 November 1899 at Wyvenhoe. Their first child, Kingsbury, or ‘King’, was born in 1900. Another son, Darren, followed in 1903, then Lelda Sunday, the only daughter, in 1905. Her parents always used her middle name, a fond reminder of the day on which she was born. A younger brother, Everard, joined the family seven years later in 1912.

Whereas her father had been born and raised in a humble cottage by the sea, Sunday’s childhood could not have been more different, certainly in a material sense. She and her elder brothers were born at Bringa, Arthur and Ethel’s spacious Queen Anne–style villa at 81 Broadway, East Camberwell, which Arthur had built on one of WL’s subdivisions in the year of their marriage. A doting husband and father, Arthur indulged his wife and children. He enjoyed taking them on luxurious overseas trips and in 1908, when Sunday was two, they sailed to England for a ten-month holiday accompanied by Arthur’s sisters Florence and Lizzie, and Lizzie’s young son Lambert, known as ‘Pozzie’. Their departure was preceded by the death of Ethel’s father David, who passed away unexpectedly on holiday in Queenscliff on 4 January, and it is possible that this tragedy precipitated the plan to spend an extended period away, as a distraction for Ethel from her loss.

The travellers left Port Melbourne on the stately ocean liner the Mooltan on 2 March, arriving in London in April. They took in the sights and usual tourist attractions, then departed for the seaside town of Folkstone, Kent, for the summer, where King and Pozzie attended school for a time while the children’s Australian nanny, Violet Lennox, cared for the younger ones. Arthur and Ethel took the opportunity to travel to Scandinavia and the Continent, as well as around England, Scotland and Ireland.¹⁵ In September the children returned to London with Violet, who kept them on a program of cultural edification of which their cultivated mother would have approved: the Tate Gallery, Victoria and Albert Museum, Hampton Court, Naval Museum, Crystal Palace, St Paul’s Cathedral and Kensington Palace.

After returning to Melbourne in late January 1909, Arthur put Bringa on the market. By this time he was fully immersed in the world of real estate, having taken over the management of the Baillieu firm in 1904. He moved his family to Toorak that May, which was then a semi-rural version of the exclusive residential suburb it is today and destined to be the next Baillieu stronghold. Most of Arthur’s siblings and their families were shifting there from Camberwell and his brother Clive, known as ‘Joe’, had already built Kamillaroi, a palatial Arts and Crafts revival–style house in nearby St Georges Road, where the acclaimed opera singer Dame Nellie Melba was a regular visitor. Ethel named their commodious new home Balholmen, after a picturesque Norwegian fjord town that had captured her imagination the previous year.

This genteel residence was where Sunday spent the rest of her childhood, leading a privileged, if sheltered, existence. It was for the most part the source of positive early memories, and certainly a stable and loving home. Even after she began to reject the strictures of her upbringing and move away from the bosom of her family, the deep affection established with her parents continued. That her own home as a married woman, was extraordinarily modest by comparison with Balholmen was a deliberately anti-establishment statement which marked her later desire to separate from the affluent, circumscribed world into which she was born. She was the first Baillieu to break out of the family mould.

Sunday and her brother Everard c.1914

__________

In contrast to Sunday’s rather cossetted first years, John’s early childhood at Logan was adventurous, with much of it spent out of doors, exploring, picnicking and swimming, learning to ride, shooting small game, and gradually becoming aware of the world of birds, which would be an enduring interest. The Reed children’s lives were, however, mostly confined to the property, isolated by its considerable distance from the nearest neighbours and town. Transport was by horse and wagonette. They were taught at home by governesses and the girls learned piano. They were permitted to read, yet although their father’s study was full of books, those that were not religious tomes were pedestrian novels and their mother burned any publications she considered unsuitable for the youngsters.

Religion played a predominant part in everyday life. The family was Presbyterian—doubtless at Lila’s behest—rather than Wesleyan like Henry senior, but Henry junior quarrelled with the local minister and they subsequently worshipped at the Church of England. On Sundays secular activities were strictly forbidden and the children had to prepare a lesson from the Bible to read aloud. John remembered feeling terrified each week when they retired to the study to learn their psalm or passage by heart, as he would receive a belting from his father if he failed.¹⁶

While Lila was devoted to her children she had extremely reactionary ideas about how they should behave and ambitions for their futures that made little allowance for their individual personalities. John later realised that his mother tried to shape them to meet her criteria and was intolerant of any deviation from accepted convention.¹⁷ His father was slightly more open-minded and willing to listen to his children’s personal inclinations and wishes—as long as they never queried God, King or country.¹⁸ Both parents talked endlessly about career choices and prospects for their offspring. At one point John was taken to see a phrenologist who examined the shape of his head and pronounced him most suited to study the law.¹⁹

Left to right: John and his siblings Coralie, Cynthia, Dick, Barbara and Margaret 1909

The pattern of John’s childhood was rudely interrupted in 1909 when Henry and Lila resolved to send their three eldest children back ‘Home’ for formal schooling. Like many members of the Australian landed gentry in the Victorian and Edwardian eras, the Reeds considered the British education system far superior to its local equivalent. John’s older brother Dick observed with hindsight that their parents probably found them quite an unruly brood, and this may have influenced the decision to send them away.²⁰

Passages to England were duly booked for Lila, Dick, Coralie and Margaret—John was initially considered too young to go—on the Waratah, the Lund Blue Anchor Line’s newest and largest steamer. At the eleventh hour it was decided John should join them and the trip was briefly postponed. He later said that the family all had him to thank for saving their lives, for as it happened the Waratah disappeared en route from Durban to Cape Town in July 1909 and no trace of the ship or its 211 passengers and crew has ever been found.²¹

It was surely traumatic for an eight-year-old boy from Launceston to be deposited at a bleak English boarding school, not to see his parents more than once in the next five years. Dick, who was twelve, stayed with John at Pinewood Preparatory School in Farnborough only for a short time before proceeding to Cheltenham College in Gloucestershire. Towards the end of his life John would remember Pinewood as ‘terrible’—both the boys suffered bullying and Dick, uncompliant by nature, was often beaten. The conditions were so cold and primitive that John contracted pleurisy and nearly died through the school’s neglect, prompting Henry and Lila to remove him to Cheltenham as well.²²

Although considered one of England’s top ten public schools, Cheltenham was, in the boys’ opinion, ‘just as bad if not worse’ than its predecessor, under the oppressive regime of a deeply unpleasant headmaster.²³ The author Patrick White would attend the same school just over a decade later and find it no better, describing it as a prison sentence.²⁴ Cheltenham had a strong military and sporting tradition and John became proficient at cricket, rugby and tennis; yet still he felt that he didn’t fit in. The only respite came in the form of holidays with friends of the Reeds and various aunts. One holiday in 1912 was spent in Devonshire when, after three years away, his father paid them a short visit.²⁵ It would have been a relief when, with the outbreak of war in 1914, Lila came over to bring Coralie, Margaret and John home, though Dick was left at Cheltenham to finish the rest of the year.

John (right) with his brother Dick c.1907

Margaret Reed (Grannie) c.1910

Back in Launceston life required some adjustment. The little quartet that had departed in 1909 returned as four independently minded adolescents, unaccustomed to parental authority. During their absence Henry and Lila had moved to Mount Pleasant at the invitation of Henry’s now elderly mother Margaret, who required her son and daughter-in-law’s assistance to manage the household and property. A formidable presence known universally as ‘Grannie’, Margaret enforced the ban on secular activities on Sundays and refused admittance to the house of any of the children’s Catholic friends. Indeed, according to Cynthia she would hold her hands before her face as if warding off the devil if the words ‘Roman Catholic’ were so much as uttered.²⁶ At Grannie’s insistence there were scriptures painted on the ceilings of the bedrooms, and the children were expected to recite them before going to sleep.²⁷

It was an austere, rigidly structured environment, and not surprisingly the returnees upset the status quo. Their father, ‘used to being an absolute autocrat’, couldn’t understand why they wouldn’t conform, and Dick remembered constant arguments.²⁸ He wanted to go on the land against Henry’s wishes, while Coralie clashed with Lila, and Margaret insisted on studying medicine at university, which her mother considered very unladylike in an era when girls were expected to make socially advantageous marriages.²⁹ At this stage John was less assertive than his older siblings and tended to take a back seat. The children had some reprieve when Henry volunteered for the Red Cross and departed on a self-funded six-month assignment to Egypt to drive ambulances, taking his chauffeur Holmes as his batman.³⁰ However, when he returned he was withdrawn, suffering from depression, and it took him some time to recover.

Coralie went into war service driving ambulances herself, and Dick, under pressure from his father, attempted university before leaving Tasmania to train as a jackeroo in South Australia. The four younger children were once more dispersed to boarding schools: Margaret, Barbara and Cynthia were sent to the Hermitage at Geelong in Victoria, and John was dispatched to nearby Geelong Grammar, then known as the Eton of Australia, and a breeding ground for politicians and men of influence. Here he endured yet another six years of education, which he later dismissed as basically ‘a waste of time’.³¹ He lamented more than anything the lack of encouragement he received at school to develop a sense of intellectual enquiry, although he was able to establish a habit of reading, which he sustained into adulthood.

John had an unwelcome reception at Geelong Grammar owing to his English accent and attire. When he eventually made friends, it was with an amiable boy called Alan MacNeil, nicknamed Scotty, whose family owned the hardware merchants Briscoe’s, and Warwick Fairfax, son of the Sydney newspaper mogul James Fairfax. Warwick, like John, would later champion the arts and from the 1930s financed the pioneering magazine Art in Australia.

One of the highlights of John’s Geelong years seems to have been the number of times he crossed Bass Strait to and from Tasmania for the holidays, which he recorded as a total of fifty-six.³² Breaks were most often spent at Mount Pleasant, largely occupied with horseriding, playing tennis at various neighbours’ properties and aggravating the adults. Cultural or artistic pursuits did not feature regularly and the children had a limited social life, for although the house was maintained in great style, very little entertaining was