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Dear Sun: The letters of Joy Hester and Sunday Reed
Correspondence between Joy Hester and Sunday Reed.
Love's intention and the reverse of love's inention slowly mark my life...and on the banks of these dark rivers we become - become what we are to each other and become what we are to ourselves.
Sunday Reed I am so conscious of my own limitations that I'm afraid I'll never do the things I dream of - but always I think of you and wonder what you'd think...And how you have always given me so much pleasure because you bothered to follow what my silly dreams were... Joy Hester
Joy Hester was the only woman member of Angry penguins, Melbourne's radical art coterie of the war years, and the wife of Albert Tucker. Sunday Reed was her closest friend, a wealthy, charismatic patron of the arts. Their correspondence follows the ebb and flow of their creativity, struggles with illness and poverty, losses and gains in love, and their heated intellectual and artistic debates. Friends and loved ones cross the pages of their letters, among them, Albert Tucker, Max Harris, Sidney Nolan, Barrett Reid, John Percival and the Boyds.
Dear Sun is both the intimate portrait of a friendship between two extraordinary women and a fascinating insight into a remarkable period in Australian art.
Love's intention and the reverse of love's inention slowly mark my life...and on the banks of these dark rivers we become - become what we are to each other and become what we are to ourselves.
Sunday Reed I am so conscious of my own limitations that I'm afraid I'll never do the things I dream of - but always I think of you and wonder what you'd think...And how you have always given me so much pleasure because you bothered to follow what my silly dreams were... Joy Hester
Joy Hester was the only woman member of Angry penguins, Melbourne's radical art coterie of the war years, and the wife of Albert Tucker. Sunday Reed was her closest friend, a wealthy, charismatic patron of the arts. Their correspondence follows the ebb and flow of their creativity, struggles with illness and poverty, losses and gains in love, and their heated intellectual and artistic debates. Friends and loved ones cross the pages of their letters, among them, Albert Tucker, Max Harris, Sidney Nolan, Barrett Reid, John Percival and the Boyds.
Dear Sun is both the intimate portrait of a friendship between two extraordinary women and a fascinating insight into a remarkable period in Australian art.
- GenresArtBiographyNonfiction
276 pages, Hardcover
Published January 1, 1995
1 person is currently reading
35 people want to read
About the author
Joy Hester
5 books2 followersJoy St Clair Hester (21 August 1920 — 4 December 1960) was an Australian artist who played an important, though sometimes underrated, role in the development of Australian modernism.
Hester was born in Elsternwick. She studied art from an early age, and at 17 was enrolled in Commercial Art at Brighton Technical School. She then attended the National Gallery School in Melbourne.
Hester met Albert Tucker in 1937, whom she began to live with intermittently in 1938 in East Melbourne, and whom she married in 1941.
Hester was a contemporary of Sidney Nolan, Arthur Boyd, Charles Blackman, John Perceval, and Laurence Hope. She helped to establish the Contemporary Art Society (CAS) and was the only female painter in the modernist movement, the Angry Penguins. Hester and Tucker had a son, Sweeney Reed (1944–1979).
In 1947, when Sweeney was three, Hester was diagnosed with terminal Hodgkin's lymphoma. Believing she had only 2 years to live, she decided to move to Sydney to live with Melbourne artist Gray Smith, gave her son into the care of John Reed and Sunday Reed, the influential, Melbourne-based art patrons, who subsequently adopted him. It emerged many years later that Tucker was not Sweeney's biological father, and that he was probably the son of Melbourne jazz drummer Billy Hyde, with whom Hester had had a brief affair. Sweeney Reed committed suicide in 1979.
The illness impacted heavily on Hester's work and left an indelible mark on it, loaded with emotional content. Hester and Gray moved to rural Hurstbridge in 1948 and later lived at Avonsleigh and Upwey in the Dandenong Ranges. She married Gray in 1959. They had two children, Fern and Peregrine.
Hester had 3 solo exhibitions but struggled to sell work. She worked mainly in black ink and wash, using quick, spontaneous lines guided by stream of consciousness. She also wrote poetry and used her drawings to illustrate her words.
After a period of remission Hester suffered a relapse of Hodgkin's lymphoma in 1956 and died in 1960, aged 40.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joy_Hester)
Hester was born in Elsternwick. She studied art from an early age, and at 17 was enrolled in Commercial Art at Brighton Technical School. She then attended the National Gallery School in Melbourne.
Hester met Albert Tucker in 1937, whom she began to live with intermittently in 1938 in East Melbourne, and whom she married in 1941.
Hester was a contemporary of Sidney Nolan, Arthur Boyd, Charles Blackman, John Perceval, and Laurence Hope. She helped to establish the Contemporary Art Society (CAS) and was the only female painter in the modernist movement, the Angry Penguins. Hester and Tucker had a son, Sweeney Reed (1944–1979).
In 1947, when Sweeney was three, Hester was diagnosed with terminal Hodgkin's lymphoma. Believing she had only 2 years to live, she decided to move to Sydney to live with Melbourne artist Gray Smith, gave her son into the care of John Reed and Sunday Reed, the influential, Melbourne-based art patrons, who subsequently adopted him. It emerged many years later that Tucker was not Sweeney's biological father, and that he was probably the son of Melbourne jazz drummer Billy Hyde, with whom Hester had had a brief affair. Sweeney Reed committed suicide in 1979.
The illness impacted heavily on Hester's work and left an indelible mark on it, loaded with emotional content. Hester and Gray moved to rural Hurstbridge in 1948 and later lived at Avonsleigh and Upwey in the Dandenong Ranges. She married Gray in 1959. They had two children, Fern and Peregrine.
Hester had 3 solo exhibitions but struggled to sell work. She worked mainly in black ink and wash, using quick, spontaneous lines guided by stream of consciousness. She also wrote poetry and used her drawings to illustrate her words.
After a period of remission Hester suffered a relapse of Hodgkin's lymphoma in 1956 and died in 1960, aged 40.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joy_Hester)
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
March 23, 2013
Where do I start to describe this book? It is not just a collection of letters between two intelligent and independent women. It is much more than that. It is an insight into the art world of Australia in the 1940s and 1950s; it is a glimpse of a battle of wills and probably most important of all it is an example of how hard it is to survive on art alone.
Joy Hester was an interesting and I’m guessing sometimes difficult woman and as a writer and a mother who has tried to juggle both over the years I am appalled at the decisions she made in regards to her son and first born Sweeney, particularly (and cruelly) as she had two more children that she decided to keep. As to why she made that particular decision is not really revealed in the letters and I don’t think that is a spoiler because (unfortunately in a way) many things are NOT revealed in the letters, much to this reader’s frustration.
At first this didn’t matter. Janine Burke’s excellent essays between the letters and her extensive footnotes on all the people the two women write about is very impressive. Despite what must have been a slightly needy and controlling personality, Sunday was a marvellous friend to Joy Hester and without her support it’s obvious her art would not be remembered or recognised as it is today. I applaud her for that, for the money she sent Joy, particularly when she set up home with her second husband, the artist Gray Smith. Their struggles to make three homes bring in a small income with chooks and vegetable gardens and the like is sometimes harrowing reading, yet strangely idyllic at the same time.
Maybe it is just the pull of nostalgia but it must have been wonderful to have such a place as Heide to visit and stay and its obvious with each of her houses that Joy was trying in some small way to recreate the place, a place where you could gather around the fireplace and discuss art and your latest project. I wish in this 21st century world there was such a place! I am actually trying to create a practical equivalent in Newcastle, Australia but it won’t have Sunday’s home cooked meals, her garden and her vegie patch. See www.starvinginagarret.com
The relationship survives the events surrounding the custody of Sweeney and the book reads well up until Sunday and John Reed return from Paris and then it all goes wrong. I won’t say much more but it is at this point, strangely, that Burke seems to take a step back. There are hardly any notes from her - no pointers and this reader was left floundering as to what was happening between the two women, the reason behind the misunderstanding and even the nature, the new form of the relationship during the last ten years of Hester’s life. There are just no details, no known facts presented which is confusing as Burke is very knowledgeable about both women. I know an editor should be unbiased but I still believe that readers should be given some pointers (reliable accounts even) to base their interpretations of what is being “said” in the letters. This was regrettably very much absent during the last, crucial fifty pages.
Apart from this criticism, Joy’s two poems on pages 246 and 247 are exquisite and her art striking.
Recommended with reservations.
Joy Hester was an interesting and I’m guessing sometimes difficult woman and as a writer and a mother who has tried to juggle both over the years I am appalled at the decisions she made in regards to her son and first born Sweeney, particularly (and cruelly) as she had two more children that she decided to keep. As to why she made that particular decision is not really revealed in the letters and I don’t think that is a spoiler because (unfortunately in a way) many things are NOT revealed in the letters, much to this reader’s frustration.
At first this didn’t matter. Janine Burke’s excellent essays between the letters and her extensive footnotes on all the people the two women write about is very impressive. Despite what must have been a slightly needy and controlling personality, Sunday was a marvellous friend to Joy Hester and without her support it’s obvious her art would not be remembered or recognised as it is today. I applaud her for that, for the money she sent Joy, particularly when she set up home with her second husband, the artist Gray Smith. Their struggles to make three homes bring in a small income with chooks and vegetable gardens and the like is sometimes harrowing reading, yet strangely idyllic at the same time.
Maybe it is just the pull of nostalgia but it must have been wonderful to have such a place as Heide to visit and stay and its obvious with each of her houses that Joy was trying in some small way to recreate the place, a place where you could gather around the fireplace and discuss art and your latest project. I wish in this 21st century world there was such a place! I am actually trying to create a practical equivalent in Newcastle, Australia but it won’t have Sunday’s home cooked meals, her garden and her vegie patch. See www.starvinginagarret.com
The relationship survives the events surrounding the custody of Sweeney and the book reads well up until Sunday and John Reed return from Paris and then it all goes wrong. I won’t say much more but it is at this point, strangely, that Burke seems to take a step back. There are hardly any notes from her - no pointers and this reader was left floundering as to what was happening between the two women, the reason behind the misunderstanding and even the nature, the new form of the relationship during the last ten years of Hester’s life. There are just no details, no known facts presented which is confusing as Burke is very knowledgeable about both women. I know an editor should be unbiased but I still believe that readers should be given some pointers (reliable accounts even) to base their interpretations of what is being “said” in the letters. This was regrettably very much absent during the last, crucial fifty pages.
Apart from this criticism, Joy’s two poems on pages 246 and 247 are exquisite and her art striking.
Recommended with reservations.
January 5, 2018
I bought this book second hand, in a bookstore on Fitzroy St in St Kilda, years ago. A book of letters, written between two artistic women was appealing to me. I was still deep in the years while I was raising my children and it was a time when I was constantly searching for answers about how people balance life between their creative urges and ambitions, and the commitments to family, friends and work. I was also in Melbourne, the place where all these artistic dramas had taken place. In fact, Joy Hester and Albert Tucker had lived just down the road in St Kilda in the 1940s.
I read about half the letters and then put the book down. Then in 2017, I picked it up again and started from the beginning and read the entire book in a few sittings. I think the first time through, there was a lot of human behaviour that I had trouble comprehending - leaving one's child and husband behind, running off with someone after knowing them for hours instead of years - all of this was a bit beyond my small and unchallenged life. I needed to mature before I could go back and read both the facts of Joy Hester and Sunday Reed's life as well as truly hear their voices through their letters.
Janine Burke has done us a great service through her scholarship of Joy Hester. Perhaps because Joy died young at only 40 years old, perhaps because she was a woman, perhaps because her medium was drawing instead of painting, Hester never really got the recognition she deserved within her lifetime. When Janine Burke began her scholarship of Joy Hester, she was breaking ground for us; for those who see Joy Hester's images and can't help but feel she speaks for us on some level. She is by far my favourite artist of this great group of Australian modern artists (Nolan, Tucker, Percival, Atyeo, Hester, and Vassilief). So, I am grateful for the more than a decade that it took Janine Burke to sight, gain permission, and compile this personal and intimate correspondence between to creative women. Her introduction to this volume of letters provides an excellent historical, cultural and psychological context to the letters and also analyses the women's relationship, as revealed in the letters and in Janine Burke's wider studies.
As the vagaries of time, and lived experience is not even, nor are lives necessarily destined for study or record keeping, the collection of letters is patchy and somewhat uneven. After all, they were letters written between two close friends, aware that their wider circle of partners and children may read them, but they were not planned for publication. In the first half of the book, Joy did not seem to keep many of Sunday's letters - so we hear more of Joy's loving and expressive but also poverty stricken and needy voice. In the second half of the book, which actually covers a greater expanse of time, Sunday does not seem to have kept all of Joy's letters and so we hear more of Sunday. And it is at this time that the friendship seems to be so much more tested than it had been in the early, slightly more intense period when Joy first hears her diagnosis of Hodgkin's disease, her abandonment of her husband Albert Tucker and son Sweeney, her flight to Sydney with Gray Smith and her ray treatment for cancer of the lymph nodes, and their mutual poverty. Even though this sounds like a more trying and desperate time, the friendship, as evidenced through Joy's letters, and then Sunday's letters while they travel Europe to resolve the adoption of Sweeney, stays firm. For me, it was quite marvellous to read the open, loving and affectionate tone between the two friends.
In the second half though, it is obvious some tension grows, but from exactly what it is a bit difficult to tell. Janine Burke has her theories and signposts them for us. I felt just a little bit sad that the collection was uneven at this time, because it is the time when Joy will experience the birth of two more children, Peregrine & Fern, and then a short time later will relapse back in Hodgkin's disease. I so much would have loved to read Joy's letters from this period. However, Sunday's letters provide us with insight into the events of this period and into her frantic and loving attempt to support Joy through these years.
Janine Burke comments on how Joy's letters lack any reference to her prolific artistic output through these years. I found that interesting. It was the art that had brought them together. The letters are full of life events, impressions of what is happening and being experienced, discussion of emotional states and reasons for actions, books being read, films being seen, and comments on mutual friends. They are also, of course, a constant reference to their own loving and, at times, strained friendship. Interesting to me, a lover of history and sociology, there is almost no commentary on events of historical or political significance. Sunday Reed is in Europe a few short years after the war - 1947-48 and yet there is not a single comment on what Europe is like post-WW2.
Just before I finish my review, I want to comment on how much I love the photo on the cover. For people who will leave a legacy of visual art, it seems to me a perfect image of the two intense and creative women and their deep, loving, friendship. Two stylish women, walking in the countryside, close, heads bowed towards each other, deep in conversation, intense views being expressed and shared, a baby carried in a sling. It is a perfect image of a friendship captured in a moment of time. The beauty and tragedy that will come, has not happened yet.
I read about half the letters and then put the book down. Then in 2017, I picked it up again and started from the beginning and read the entire book in a few sittings. I think the first time through, there was a lot of human behaviour that I had trouble comprehending - leaving one's child and husband behind, running off with someone after knowing them for hours instead of years - all of this was a bit beyond my small and unchallenged life. I needed to mature before I could go back and read both the facts of Joy Hester and Sunday Reed's life as well as truly hear their voices through their letters.
Janine Burke has done us a great service through her scholarship of Joy Hester. Perhaps because Joy died young at only 40 years old, perhaps because she was a woman, perhaps because her medium was drawing instead of painting, Hester never really got the recognition she deserved within her lifetime. When Janine Burke began her scholarship of Joy Hester, she was breaking ground for us; for those who see Joy Hester's images and can't help but feel she speaks for us on some level. She is by far my favourite artist of this great group of Australian modern artists (Nolan, Tucker, Percival, Atyeo, Hester, and Vassilief). So, I am grateful for the more than a decade that it took Janine Burke to sight, gain permission, and compile this personal and intimate correspondence between to creative women. Her introduction to this volume of letters provides an excellent historical, cultural and psychological context to the letters and also analyses the women's relationship, as revealed in the letters and in Janine Burke's wider studies.
As the vagaries of time, and lived experience is not even, nor are lives necessarily destined for study or record keeping, the collection of letters is patchy and somewhat uneven. After all, they were letters written between two close friends, aware that their wider circle of partners and children may read them, but they were not planned for publication. In the first half of the book, Joy did not seem to keep many of Sunday's letters - so we hear more of Joy's loving and expressive but also poverty stricken and needy voice. In the second half of the book, which actually covers a greater expanse of time, Sunday does not seem to have kept all of Joy's letters and so we hear more of Sunday. And it is at this time that the friendship seems to be so much more tested than it had been in the early, slightly more intense period when Joy first hears her diagnosis of Hodgkin's disease, her abandonment of her husband Albert Tucker and son Sweeney, her flight to Sydney with Gray Smith and her ray treatment for cancer of the lymph nodes, and their mutual poverty. Even though this sounds like a more trying and desperate time, the friendship, as evidenced through Joy's letters, and then Sunday's letters while they travel Europe to resolve the adoption of Sweeney, stays firm. For me, it was quite marvellous to read the open, loving and affectionate tone between the two friends.
In the second half though, it is obvious some tension grows, but from exactly what it is a bit difficult to tell. Janine Burke has her theories and signposts them for us. I felt just a little bit sad that the collection was uneven at this time, because it is the time when Joy will experience the birth of two more children, Peregrine & Fern, and then a short time later will relapse back in Hodgkin's disease. I so much would have loved to read Joy's letters from this period. However, Sunday's letters provide us with insight into the events of this period and into her frantic and loving attempt to support Joy through these years.
Janine Burke comments on how Joy's letters lack any reference to her prolific artistic output through these years. I found that interesting. It was the art that had brought them together. The letters are full of life events, impressions of what is happening and being experienced, discussion of emotional states and reasons for actions, books being read, films being seen, and comments on mutual friends. They are also, of course, a constant reference to their own loving and, at times, strained friendship. Interesting to me, a lover of history and sociology, there is almost no commentary on events of historical or political significance. Sunday Reed is in Europe a few short years after the war - 1947-48 and yet there is not a single comment on what Europe is like post-WW2.
Just before I finish my review, I want to comment on how much I love the photo on the cover. For people who will leave a legacy of visual art, it seems to me a perfect image of the two intense and creative women and their deep, loving, friendship. Two stylish women, walking in the countryside, close, heads bowed towards each other, deep in conversation, intense views being expressed and shared, a baby carried in a sling. It is a perfect image of a friendship captured in a moment of time. The beauty and tragedy that will come, has not happened yet.
August 27, 2017
I really enjoyed reading Sunday and Joy's letters as I found out lots of things about Joy and the day-to-day lifes of them both. Even though this was some miscommunication, they managed to still communicate their feelings to each other.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews