I got an inkling as to why soon after I met Lee-Brown. This was shortly after my arrival in Sri Lanka in 1989 on a diplomatic posting. As it happened, this wasn’t my first visit. These days, Sri Lanka is off the beaten track, but in the century between the opening of the Suez Canal and the advent of mass cheap air travel, Ceylon, which gained independence from the British in 1948 and was renamed Sri Lanka in 1972, was usually the first point of call for Australians travelling by ship to Europe. So Colombo had been my own first taste of Asia, as an enthralled seven-year old stepping off a P&O liner.

 Over lunch, Lee-Brown told me that she had been pilloried by Patrick White, who, she said, had used her as the model for the manipulative socialite Olivia Davenport in his novel The Vivisector (1970). This was not implausible: like Davenport, Lee-Brown was an Eastern Suburbs personality who had returned to Sydney after two marriages and a period spent abroad – and incidentally, she had returned just at the time The Vivisector was in gestation. On the other hand, White’s biographer, David Marr, identifies White’s cousin Eleanor Arrighi as the model for Davenport.

One way or another, Lee-Brown’s sense that she had been ridiculed by White was part of her rationale as to why she preferred war-torn Sri Lanka; she detested what she regarded as the claustrophobic world of Sydney. To become ‘a force in Australian art’, she would have had to live there, and this was a greater price than she was prepared to pay.

I first met Lee-Brown and her partner Les Barwick at their Nilaveli home, Monkey Beach Estate. It was 1989 and Sri Lanka’s civil war was in full flood. The main protagonists were the Sri Lankan security forces and the Tamil Tiger insurgents, but during its course the war drew in other actors, such as the Indian Army, and other Tamil militias opposed to the Tigers. At one point or another, all of these combatants fought around Nilaveli, and a less adventurous pair than Lee-Brown and Barwick would have left long before. But they were staying on, and once one had seen the beauties of Monkey Beach Estate, it was easy to understand why.

Nilaveli had provided the couple with the space and the labour force to create an exquisite garden, with paths winding through the palm trees down to the water’s edge. At night, one could sit on the patio and look through the trees at the lights of the fishing boats out at sea, like jewels winking in an ebony setting. The place had a timeless music to it: wind in the palm trees, surf on the beach. After dark, the frogs started up to the accompaniment of the booming rattle made by the giant squirrels. Then, in the hour before dawn, came the call to prayer from the mosque.

This paradise was threatened on all sides. Nilaveli was a cluster of hamlets: like Sri Lanka itself, a mosaic of communities living cheek by jowl. To the south of Monkey Beach Estate – on a treeless, sandy stretch of the peninsula – lived the Muslim fisherfolk of Iqbal Nagar. To the west, straggling along the main road, was the hamlet of Gopalapuram, home to Hindu Tamil farmers. There was a separate Tamil community, refugees driven from their homes further north. And right next to Monkey Beach Estate was the thing which made it such a dangerous place: a military post, home to whichever armed force – Indian or Sri Lankan or Tamil militia – happened to be ‘in control’ of Nilaveli at the time.

So Mitty and Les were literally right on the front line. Les – a superb builder and gardener, a Kokoda veteran, a cousin of Australia’s longest-serving chief justice, Garfield Barwick, and a great source of historical gossip – told me that, over two decades, sixty people had been killed by landmines on the road between Trincomalee and Nilaveli. He and Mitty travelled that road every week.

To stay afloat in this maelstrom they had to remain on good terms simultaneously with three groups, all potentially lethal. First were the Tamil inhabitants of Gopalapuram – where the Tigers had a presence; second were whichever anti-Tiger force occupied the military base next to Monkey Beach Estate; and finally, there was the Sinhalese government. It was a delicate balance, but Lee-Brown and Barwick kept it up for decades. They had a gift for connecting with Sri Lankans, and as employers they were an economic asset to Nilaveli.

The crowning glory of Monkey Beach Estate was Lee-Brown’s art collection: astonishing to see in the middle of a war zone. There were works by Rupert Bunny, Girolamo Nerli, Roy de Maistre, Robert Hughes, Russell Drysdale, Donald Friend, William Dobell, and Thea Proctor. And then there were Mitty’s own paintings. There was a wonderful study in grey, brown, and dark blue of ‘Our Papas’, a Greek Orthodox priest riding a donkey side saddle along a street in Kos, where Mitty and Les had lived before settling in Nilaveli. Another of my favourites was Sea Things, a view of a tidal rock pool with the seaweed and shells represented more by bursts of colour than by delineated shapes. This was her mature style: one can see it in her painting Spring in the collection of the Art Gallery of New South Wales.

A few years later, I returned to Australia. In 2007, hearing that Les was gravely ill, I went back to see them. Monkey Beach Estate had survived the 2005 Indian Ocean tsunami (Les: ‘not a wave, a wall of fucking water ten feet high’), but it was a sad visit. Many of their possessions, many of the paintings, had been destroyed. Although they were now in their eighties and the civil war was still raging, they had determined to stay and revive the garden: ‘Where else are we going to go?’ Then came Les’s cancer diagnosis.

Mitty kept painting for some years after arriving at Nilaveli, but then she stopped. One day, with some temerity, I asked her why. She replied, ‘I can’t paint in the tropics’, before turning away to supervise a gardener. It was not a subject she wanted to discuss.

My guess is that Mitty Lee-Brown knew that for all her manifest talent as a painter, her real genius – and her abiding passion – was for landscape gardening, and that Monkey Beach Estate was Mitty’s masterpiece. She had stopped painting for the audience that was ‘Australian art’ and started gardening for herself. Even in a war, even after a tsunami, Nilaveli was a good place to do that.