It’s a clear winter’s day when we drive out to the Heide Museum of Modern Art. Cool, bright skies; a touch of warmth to the sun. Perfection distilled.
We head into the main galleries which are small and precise, taking us from South Korea to the Spanish Steps in 1954 and on down a hallway lined with geometric designs that soothe with their repetitions. But it’s in the modernist house that Heide really shines.
John and Sunday Reed’s Heide II by McGlashan and Everist, 1967, was designed to become a future ruin – a modernist masterpiece sunk into the slope of a former dairy farm’s hill that would weather and settle into the landscape over time.
The lived-in gallery – once a home, now a museum – is lightly filled with an exquisitely curated mix of works Heide has acquired in the last 10 years. Two works stand out: a graceful, powerful portrait of a young indigenous woman by Brook Andrew and a text-based work by Richard Tipping declaring that poetry is ‘the selection and rearrangement of silences.’
Around it, the bones of the house – broad blocks of Mount Gambier limestone, a cantilevered staircase, a sunken cavity that forms a conversation pit – stand proud. There’s a quiet confidence to the building, a surety about who lived there and how they wanted to use the building, and why it was located within its particular surrounds.
My favourite space in the house is the study with a writing desk that stretches along the window, the winter sun streaming through the blinds and dousing the room in a caramel glow. There, John Reed would write letters. His typewriter remains, placed just left of centre with a view of the kitchen gardens and the bushland beyond it.
We tour the sculptures scattered throughout the grounds, mindful of the way recent rain has turned many of the paths into muddy, slippery slopes. In the kitchen gardens we notice small flowers that look slug-like, like cartoon characters about to break into song. I stand and admire the way the shadow of a gum ripples and dances across the limestone expanse that forms the back of the house.
We want to know more about John and Sunday, more about the house, more about the Heide Circle, so turn to the internet while the sun warms our faces, the insides of our wrists, the back of our necks. Sidney Nolan painted all but one of his Ned Kelly works on the dining room table. Joy Hester and the rest of John’s Angry Penguins were part of the Heide group. In later years, a young Charles Blackman was a regular visitor to the house. Like the Bloomsbury Group taking to Sissinghurst, Heide was a place where young creatives could thrive, flourish and, well, have affairs away from the prying eyes of the city’s elite.
We eat lunch in the greenhouse-like café before driving back to the inner north, sated by art, sun, good food and better company, with the afternoon stretching languidly before us.
‘It wasn’t that these things were fragments, thought Anna. The world was fragments.’
– Richard Flanagan, The Living Sea of Waking Dreams
After the Sydney Writers’ Festival in mid-May comes Semi Permanent. I attend a session on design and inclusivity and am blown away by We Are Warriors. Presenting a live case study about their formation in 2020, Nooky and Ben Miles walk step by step through their first meeting in a Chippendale pub to partnering with major brands in order to improve the lives of indigenous kids in Australia. Ben talks of the importance of listening. Not to rush into action, not to throw money at a cause in lieu of action, but to listen. A change of pace to allow for a different result.
I always seem to forget the profundity of experiencing a moment of art with others but am reminded of it again and again and again as Sydney rolls through a spate of winter arts festivals. There’s the sense of sharing a moment with others – never to be replicated. There’s the joy of hearing from others you would never hear from others. The eyes opened to new perspectives, new ways of doing things, other walks of life.
It’s my first gig ‘since before Covid’, I tell friends. Really, it’s been longer.
It’s overwhelming, in the very best way. It’s so easy to forget the feeling of moving in time to music surrounded by a bunch of strangers doing the same. All connected by the same goal: to hear a musician we adore, live, together.
The gig starts late, especially for a ‘school night,’ and we sit on the concrete floor chatting and catching-up between the support act and the act we’re here to see. But when Cate Le Bon walks onto the stage, bold orange electric guitar strapped to her chest, and the distorted sax sounds out the intro, the time is meaningless. We’re transfixed.
One Saturday I venture towards the coast to celebrate a friend’s housewarming. I’m the first to arrive – so keen to CELEBRATE – and follow the fairy lights around to the garden. The scent of fragrant curries spills out from the kitchen – warm and wintery – and welcomes me into the embrace of the abode. There’s a film installation set up in the empty shower and a photographic print of Uluru stretches down the hallway. The house reflects its inhabitants in a way that’s striking and reassuring. I feel at home seeing my friends’ personalities mirrored in the art on the walls, in the choice of sofa, in the fabric chosen for a lampshade.
I head to Melbourne to visit my friend, newly returned from London. We share meals and go for our signature walk and talks – sharing the joys and frustrations of our lives and catching each other up on all that’s happened since we last saw each other nine months and half a world away.
We talk of enjoying the anonymity of London then and the enjoyment of being part of new communities now.
One afternoon is spent browsing cookbooks on a couch while a record turns and sings, lulling us into a lazy stupor. I feel relaxed in a way it’s often hard to feel in the rigmarole of life’s churn.
The walk to meet another dear friend for breakfast takes me winding around the bank of the Yarra. The hill opposite is covered in tall, scraggly gums and with the chirps of finches and the sun gliding across the surface of the river, it feels as if I could be far away in the countryside, instead of in Melbourne’s inner north.
The fenced-in small paddocks of the children’s farm are coated in a thin layer of morning mist. The remaining yellow leaves of the trees by the convent catch the morning sun. The whole effect makes me feel even further away – for suddenly it’s December and my uncle is driving me along a motorway, looking out across the fields of Berkshire.
Here, there. The similarities highlighting the contrast between the two.
Solstice evening and home to a flat reminiscent of London’s council houses. I dump my work bag on a kitchen stool and head out again. I’d asked colleagues where’s best to go when eating alone. One recommended a Collingwood pub – ‘it has different levels to explore’, he said. Another recommends a pub that ‘feels like England.’ Without a second thought I choose the latter.
When I arrive, the pub is packed. I almost turn away. Still, after all the years of solo travel involving countless meals eaten alone, there’s part of me that thinks pubs are best when shared.
I take a deep breath, push open the door, find a spot I can perch at alone. I order at the bar and the barman says he’ll bring my Guinness to me. By the time the freshly poured pint – the creamiest pint I’ve had this side of Dublin – arrives, I’m glad I held my nerve. Life is always better when shared but some things are good to do alone for it’s better than not doing them at all.
‘That there is exposure in living one’s life alone.’
– Meg Fee, Places I Stopped On The Way Home
In the writing of this newsletter as a monthly ritual, I find myself naturally categorising time into chunks of the same time. That was the month of moving, or of settling in, of loneliness or of finally feeling more at peace.
But of course, time means more than that. A month is full of too many moments – too many highs and too many lows – to be neatly contained within a single idea.
A friend shares that she’s finding it easier to take it week by week at the moment. I roll the idea over in my mind. If I were to summarise June by way of weeks it might look something like the week where winter arrived, the week of dancing and gigs and films in packed cinemas, the week of an eagerly-anticipated reunion with a friend, the week of testing out different ideas for the future. I like seeing it in that light.
‘How excited she felt, how invigorated. Adventure, the best medicine.’
– Sarah Winman, Still Life
There’s always something about travelling – and this trip to Melbourne was no exception – that makes me feel alive to new possibilities. Something in the newness of it – new things to see, places to visit, food to eat, hugs to hold – that takes me out of the day-to-day and makes me feel more hope, more joy, more optimism for what the future might bring.
There is magic in contrast. A cosy afternoon indoors feels more delicious after a morning spent exploring outside.
The cool air on an evening walk home feels all the more refreshing after a hot and sweaty yoga class.
The peculiarities singular to Melbourne are more noticeable after being in Sydney, the birdsong of Australia sings of home more so after time spent away.
A lazy Sunday concludes with a yoga class. The room is heated – as seems to be unavoidable in Sydney yoga studios – but comforting. There’s something so deeply reassuring about settling into the same poses as everyone else in the room, our breaths moving in and out at the same time. A mammalian response to being safe and warm and protected within a group. I leave already looking forward to returning at the same time, same place next week.
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Safety, warmth, to feel connected to – and in charge of – our own bodies. It feels like such a small thing to hope for and yet, now more than ever, I know not to take it for granted as I wish that same feeling for everyone.