The Reeds’ former home, set in the gardens and parkland they made in the Melbourne suburb of Bulleen, survives as the Museum of Modern Art at Heide. In Canberra hang twenty-five of Sidney Nolan’s 1946–47 Ned Kelly paintings. These iconic works were made at Heide in an intense period of friendship between the artist and the Reeds, especially Sunday. In 1977, long after the death of this emotionally charged friendship, the paintings were ‘given with love’ to the National Gallery of Australia by Sunday Reed. As the writings of several scholars attest, the story of the Reeds is a part of the cultural history of Australia in the second half of the twentieth century. When the massive Reed archive in the State Library of Victoria is opened to researchers in 2003, it will be utilised as an essential reference for any considered examination of that history.

A taste of things to come is this handsome edition of a selection of the letters and public documents of John Reed dating from the 1920s (briefly, in one letter only to his sister Margaret written in June 1920) until the day before his death in December 1981. In the mid-1980s, the poet Barrett Reid undertook the task of selecting and publishing a collection of John Reed’s letters. Reid was an insider of the Heide circle and one of the oldest and most intimate friends of John and Sunday Reed. He had inherited a life tenancy of the old Heide house and had been assigned joint responsibility (with Philip Jones) as the Reeds’ literary executor. He was well placed to make an informed selection of the letters and to draw together an understanding of the extraordinary network of connections and influence of John and Sunday Reed.

With the onset of illness, it became clear that Reid could not continue his task unaided. He was joined by Nancy Underhill, a noted art historian and curator. Reid and Underhill worked profitably together. After Reid’s death in 1995, Underhill continued to work on the project which she has brought to fruition in an impressive volume. While the book appears as a work of collaboration, it is obvious that the major editorial task fell to Underhill. With Reid’s approval, she refined his initial selection of the correspondence while pursuing wide-ranging research of her own in order to make sense of a rich and complex story. Her debt to Barrett Reid as a key player in so many of the lives and events represented in Reed’s letters is as generous as it is ambiguous. She thanks him for the introduction he gave her ‘to the Reeds and Heide life as he interpreted them’. Underhill’s academic detachment from the many emotional currents that circulate still around Heide and those who were closely associated with it was probably her greatest strength in the long gestation of this book, but it presents some dangers of its own.

John Reed’s letters do not make easy or happy reading, although the story (or the many stories) they tell is rich and fascinating and, finally, profoundly moving. But Reed is not a great stylist and his letters have none of the verve and sweep or sheer malice that distinguish those of Patrick White. Nor do they have the sly subversive humour of Gwen Harwood’s letters. Put simply, Reed took himself and his causes very seriously indeed. His tone is often lugubrious, though he might himself have said it was businesslike. His correspondence was not, by and large, maintained as a pleasure and a recreation, but as a task. Its purpose was usually to achieve particular ends for the causes dear to his mind and, perhaps, also to his heart. Some correspondents, such as the painter and critic Elwyn (Jack) Lynn, eventually tired of this. To one of his cherished friends, Mary Christina Sewell (known once, deliciously, as Mary Christina St John of the Angels), Reed apologised for the perception that his letters lacked warmth. He confessed to a nature ‘rather on the cold side’ and to remaining always a lawyer. Still, those letters to Sewell are some of his best. Some touch on the deepest sadnesses in the lives of the two Reeds. The most poignant tells of the death of Sweeney Reed, the son he and Sunday had adopted from Joy Hester and Albert Tucker: ‘Five months ago Sweeney died – he took his life – and our world has fallen apart.’ And to Sewell he wrote, on the day before his death, his final letter. It is a dignified and courageous acceptance of the prospect of oblivion: ‘I must just await the outcome.’

Reed was a great campaigner and the champion of many causes, not just artistic ones. Most dear to him, though, was the cause of modern art and the means by which it might achieve greater acceptance. He wrote vigorously when he felt the need to do so (often) and honed his skills as moralist and complainer in many letters to various editors. Stung too sharply by a Reed rebuke, Eric Westbrook, as reigning Director of the National Gallery of Victoria, once cruelly dismissed him as ‘a small tired voice from Bulleen’.

History and biographers will surely judge Reed more generously, though the failure of so many of the intimate and personal friendships of this most civilised and generous of men poses troubling questions. At his best, Reed is very good indeed. Witness his (informed) layman’s response in a letter to Albert Tucker of Arthur Boyd’s ‘miraculous Ceramic Sculpture exhibition’ in September 1954: ‘All your faith in Arthur, all ours, is now beautifully realised in work which could be confidently placed anywhere in the world.’ And his relationship with Sunday Reed, too often only hinted at in these letters, is one of extraordinary tolerance, generosity and interconnectedness. That is another story.

As an historian, Underhill is clearly intrigued by the bio-graphical conundrum that is John Reed. This tempts her to interpret him for her readers rather than allowing his voice to be heard unmediated. While much of her contextual material is exemplary (some errors and misreadings creep in), and while she steers her readers through complex ideological and inter-personal territory, Underhill is sometimes an intrusive presence. Recurringly, she points out that Reed is ‘wise’ or ‘over the top’ or that he seeks to ‘call the cultural shots’. Not all will agree with these observations. In a published edition of letters, it seems best to allow readers to form their own judgment based on the authentic voice or voices of the central subject. Underhill seems to have been torn between her responsibilities as editor and her instincts as an historian faced with abundant riches. Reed’s self-portrait comes to us with filters.

But that self-portrait is impressive, if not always engaging. From his patrician background, Reed emerged as his own kind of democrat with a singular, if not always tactically skilled, commitment to advancing Australia’s cultural interests. His letters demonstrate that his marginalisation – which troubles Nancy Underhill – was largely self-inflicted. Reed himself remained curiously unreflective about the reasons for his failures. In the end, however, these letters of public disappointments and private sorrows tell an important and courageous ‘Australian story’ set within the larger framework of international modernism to which Reed was an early convert. His letters provide a vivid insight into one segment of the inner workings of a dramatically changed and changing national culture in the second half of the twentieth century.