That afternoon at Heide we wandered around the grounds that were once a farm. Inside the modernist house the limestone walls glowed pale pink, butter yellow or deep orange depending on their orientation to the low winter sun.
The 1967 house, now a sparse gallery, was built when bohemians John and Sunday Reed outgrew the old farmhouse, now known as Heide Cottage, thirty yards up the hill and obscured behind rambling garden beds and some ancient spreading trees.
Almost sixty years later the design brief for the building has been fulfilled: that it should ‘... have a sense of mystery and weather over time to take on the appearance of a ruin in a landscape’. Indeed, it now recalls the white walls of Eucla's abandoned telegraph station. At age ten I had visited a similar house at the edge of a forest, disappearing with the occupants’ children into the trees; and the clean-lined modernist building seen from the distance was a low white cave radiating soft yellow light in a dusky steel sky.
I left the house and walked up the hill to the old farmhouse, now a gallery, office and library. Paintings by Danila Vassilief line the old kitchen, depicting the decaying Victoriana of 1930s Fitzroy as the backdrop to underfed children rolling hoops in the streets, haggard hobbling pensioners, stray dogs, fading weatherboard houses flush with the street, and hopeful shop hoardings; like preserved specimens in microscope slides of earlier lives. Exactly eight miles south, Fitzroy’s Victorian architecture is restored now, and its inhabitants wander the café-lined streets deciding whether the milk in their takeaway coffee will come from a nut, a grain, or a cow.
In the main front room of the farmhouse the library is a mid-century trove of bohemian thought and culture, a microcosm of the leaf-filtered sunny enlightenment of inner urban Melbourne. Literally thousands of books on culture music politics world affairs literature architecture sociology film theatre art modern and classical on three walls; and around and over the door in the fourth. This room alone was worth the visit to Heide but every shelf was locked under glass. Being unable to actually examine a book was like dining in a virtual restaurant. Still, it would lose its mid-century stopped-clock slumbering state were it open to the ravages of accidental visitors from the far eastern suburbs.
Heide’s newest building is a hideous metal barn boasting a ‘black titanium zinc facade (that) strikingly contrasts with the white limestone of Heide Modern while echoing (its) ... modernist spirit’ and contains the two inevitable banes of ‘destination’ architecture: a souvenir shop selling $50 tea towels and a café - ‘a spectacular new dining experience’ - (website). Gallery managements hate these obsessions and would prefer to simply hang pictures; but they also know that the paying public won’t look at anything before slurping coffee in public.
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That night I dreamt my grandmother, who brought up five children in Fitzroy during the Depression, was pushing an old pram along Scotchmer Street towards the shops at St George’s Road, when she saw a man wearing a beret sitting on a stool behind an easel. In the pram was my father, age two, riding through a painting.
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Heide Museum of Modern Art, 7 Separation St, Bulleen.
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