Phyllis Papps
Barrett Reid: a charismatic chameleon
On 8 December 1986 over 300 friends and colleagues of Barrett Reid gathered at the Heide Museum of Modern Art to help him celebrate his 60th birthday and his life. Painters had been as much a part of it, as had writers. The tributes on this memorable occasion reflected his life-long passions. A book entitled
A Flash of Life1 was compiled by fellow poets Shelton Lea and Robert Harris and it contained a diverse selection of poems and drawings by writers and artists who had known Barrett Reid over many decades.
Reid was a visionary who had an illustrious career in the library and literary world. He was a highly skilled and experienced professional who had a major impact on public library development, both in city and country areas in Victoria from the late 1950s to the 1980s and beyond. He was an experienced political negotiator and consummate politician and the very strong network of public libraries in Victoria today is mainly due to his vision, leadership, dedication, commitment, determination and drive. He was also a man of many talents: a man of letters, a man of culture and a man of nature. He was a poet, an editor of literary magazines, a writer and book and art critic.
From the 1940s until his death in 1995, Reid worked closely and socialized with many notable artists, painters, writers, musicians, poets, filmmakers, politicians and bureaucrats at local, state, national and international levels. His portrait was painted by Sidney Nolan in 1947 after their trip to Fraser Island while Albert Tucker painted portraits of him in 1983 and 1984. There are also countless photographic portraits of Reid by well-known photographers and many poems written about him, and for him, by notable writers.
Over the years, Reid was lovingly called 'Half angel, half devil,' (by Ruth Cowen),
2 'The young Rimbaud' (by Vida Horn),
3 'Lord Barrett' (by Shelton Lea),
4 'The Prince' (by Sidney Nolan),
5 and 'L' enfant Baudelaire',
6 a nickname given to him by the 'Heide Circle'.
As a young man, Barrett Reid lived a bohemian and controversial life in Brisbane during the
1940s and this period in his life has been extensively researched and documented.
7 But one major aspect of his life since coming to Melbourne in
1951 became almost totally overshadowed because he ensured that his sexuality and his romantic relationships were not public knowledge and did not become part of the public arena.
Piecing together the last 13 years of Barrett Reid's public, professional and personal life has been challenging and very similar to putting together a jigsaw. People's memories change and fade and many of his contemporaries are no longer alive. It has also been important to look at the critical circumstances in his life before retirement in order to understand the transformation and revitalization that occurred afterwards. The key factor that has been taken into consideration when writing about Reid was to respect the
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extreme protectiveness he had for his private life. Barbara Blackman, (neé Patterson) a close friend of Barrett Reid's for 50 years, described him as, 'enfant terrible in his saucier moments' who was always a pillar of society.
8
In his last years living at Heide, he sorted through his correspondence to ensure that the public record was clean of anything controversial. In the five major interviews recorded during
1981-
1995 there is no mention of his sexuality, his personal relationships and romantic loves. This careful separation of his private life from his public life was summed up by Stephen Murray-Smith, founding and long-standing editor of
Overland when giving his speech at Barrett Reid's 60
th birthday: 'he is both a public figure with an intensely-lived private life, and a private man with an extraordinary public life'.
9
Compatible and contrary loves and contradictions.
Barrett Reid was a highly charismatic man who had more than one persona. He was a paradox and a chameleon
10 – a man of contradictions. He had many passions, many lovers and countless friendships and relationships, both in his personal and his professional life.
Very early in his teenage years living in Brisbane he developed a reputation as a rebellious non-conformist. He was one of the founding editors of the
Barjai magazine and part of an avant-garde group of young artists and writers. It was a period of time in Brisbane and other Australian cities where a bohemian and homosexual sub-culture was being developed and when literature, art and music interacted.
11 Barbara Blackman gives wonderful descriptions of the key members of the
Barjai and Miya group – writers and artists such as Laurie Collinson, Vida Horn (neé Smith) Thea Astley, Cecel Knopke, Laurence Hope and many others. Barbara was a young poet at the time and captured the true essence of Barrett Reid in the
1940s:
Barrie Reid was the essential romantic hero, verging on vain – but with a rascally wit. Straight, [sic] handsome, with a fall of blond hair above engaging blue eyes, he was the helmsman, the front runner, in his soft commanding voice electrifying us with his paper on the artist in the modern world . . . or reading his own personal, well-formed poems.
12
She also described the 'big brother' relationship she had with him:
For years Barrie and I had been seen as the perfect couple, a pose that suited us both, he homosexual and I virgin. Not being able to marry me himself, he made it his mission to introduce me to a succession of brilliant young men.
13
In
1951 Barrett Reid decided to leave Brisbane because, as a homosexual, he felt restricted and under pressure. In an interview in
1995 he recalled:
Brisbane was quite close, arid and stifling . . . Police would stop a man in the street if he wore suede shoes or a yellow jumper – a pretty stifling environment . . . Brisbane was highly provincial.
14
Reid hitchhiked to Melbourne with painter friend Laurence Hope. However, it should be remembered that in the
1940s, it was not just Brisbane, but post-war Australia
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that was narrow, xenophobic, homophobic and supremely intolerant. Reid soon found that Melbourne during the early
1950s was no different from Brisbane: 'I thought I'd left a small town in Brisbane. I found I was still in a small town with a pretty narrow society'.
15 When he started working at the Public Library of Victoria (now the State Library of Victoria) he described the atmosphere as 'purely Dickensian', and bitterly resented the whole culture of censorship, self censorship and restricted access to materials in the library collection.
16
Reid's homosexuality was no secret in the
1940s in Brisbane, but he chose not to publicly 'come out' in Melbourne once his career in librarianship was established (possibly because of the extreme conservatism of the State Library of Victoria and of Melbourne in the
1950s and
1960s). It was 13 years after his retirement that he publicly declared his homosexuality, and this was after his death in his only book of verse,
Making Country, published posthumously but carefully prepared by Reid before he died. In this revealing collection of poems, he described his lovers, his passions, his friendships and his thoughts on life, nature and death. Stephen Williams in
Overland described it as 'a fine self-portrait'.
17 When reviewing the book, Michael Sharkey summed up the various facets, diversity and contradictions of Barrett Reid's life:
He was a superb public servant and artistic mentor; and a writer of such exemplary cunning verse that it will require an extraordinary biographer to catch all the paradoxical nuances of a life filled with compatible and contrary loves and talents.
18
In an extract from the poem 'Go Gently', Reid talked about love, life and death:
I had some joy, I had some pain,
Some sense they may not come again.
Loved much, but too carefully. Do not rage
But love madly to furnish your old age.
19
In an extract from another poem entitled 'A Kind of Love' dedicated to S. C. (presumably Scott Carter, a close friend of Sweeney Reed) he gave tribute to an unlikely but enduring love affair:
A kind of love
was the best we had.
The time was rarely right
the places often wrong
Friends unknowing
or discreetly shocked.
Too much learning going on.
20
In 'Songs of Innocence', Barrett Reid spoke of the tricks and techniques he used and secrets he hid, as he was getting older in order to attract a younger lover:
Dreaming of love for hours
rested and sweet, eyebright,
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I wait for the prince and the powers
I need to get fucked tonight.
The garden at eve is romantic
the white doves sleep in the tree
the pink globe is kind. My frantic
dreaming is working wickedly.
Games of myself I'm playing
I've perfected the part. I've paid.
The verses I plan on saying
excuse my tricks to get laid.
21
Making Country also included 'Miss Porteous Stops the Party', previously published in a few literary magazines. It is a wonderful description of gay life in the
1950s and is based on his old-fashioned landlady when Reid was living for a short time in a bed-sit in Sydney. It shows his astute ability to 'send up' the Aussie accent as the oft-quoted following extract shows:
Writers, actors and artists
Youse call yerselfs,
Actors, artists and writers,
I know youse for what youse are,
prostitutes, pimps and pooftahs
and the police has been called for.
[...]
that while writers, artists and actors
we may be
there was a certain truth
Although Reid was a homosexual, he loved the company of women. Philip Jones, Barrett Reid's long-term partner from the mid
1950s until
1984, wrote about their bisexuality, experimentation with sex and their relationships in his memoir,
Art & Life:
We were appallingly arrogant – ahead of our time in a frank expression of our (bi) sexuality and general mode of life- and we despised suburbia . . .
Marriages and relationships (hetero or homo) were rarely shattered by our liberated stance. The prospect of sexual experimentation was an aphrodisiac, but we tended to be faithful to our partners in our own fashion. One-night stands (mostly on Fridays) were common, and the bounds of gender preferences were frequently crossed.
23
In his memoir Jones is very candid about Reid's love affairs, some named and some unnamed. Names such as Charles Osborne,
24 Sidney Nolan,
25 Lesley Stack,
26 and
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Roderic Anderson,
27 have also been mentioned elsewhere. But there were many other sexual encounters and love affairs during Reid's life – both men and women.
Reid's most enduring and life-long love, however, was for John and Sunday Reed and their home Heide on the outskirts of Melbourne. This later became a crucible of the Australian modern art movement ats the Heide Museum of Modern Art. Here Reid met and mixed with artists and writers such as Sidney Nolan, Joy Hester, Mirka Mora, Les Kossatz, Charles Blackman, Albert Tucker, John Perceval, Arthur Boyd, and Max Harris. The Reeds played a key role in the development of the modernist art movement in Australia and Barrett Reid became one of their life-long disciples. His relationship with the Reeds and Heide was, 'psychologically charged and defined by his desire to live an almost surrogate life there'.
28
There are conflicting views regarding the nature of the Reed's involvement with their protégées. Charles Osborne, former lover of Barrett Reid, expatriate Australian poet, opera critic and man of letters, knew the Reeds in the early days of Heide but took great care never to become fully an inhabitant of their world, which he found both precious and claustrophobic. In his autobiography,
Giving It Away, he recalled that period of time:
The official party line was that John and Sunday Reed were virtually angels. They were certainly very generous with their money, their time and their interest, but they seemed to want one's soul in return.
29
Barrett Reid's second major love was for Sweeney Reed, son of Joy Hester and Albert Tucker. Sweeney was later adopted by John and Sunday Reed. Sweeney was an art gallery owner, a publisher of fine press books and a poet. He was Barrett Reid's godson (this was due to a promise Barrett made to Joy Hester),
30 surrogate son and younger brother. Barrett had great love for him and speculated why Sweeney Reed suicided at the age of 34:
Sweeney's whole story was he could never leave Heide, would never really leave Heide to the day he died . . . Heide had an incredible bonding on Sweeney and he was never fully happy anywhere else. He made heroic efforts to establish himself elsewhere, but he always came back, always – never ever freed himself of Heide although he tried.
31
In his final years, Barrett Reid finally spoke of his third and most enduring love – for Shelton Lea the poet. It was in the last few months before his death, when he was highly vulnerable and suffering from the debilitating effects of Hodgkin's disease, that Reid finally wrote about, and acknowledged, this long-standing love. Even though Shelton Lea was heterosexual and Barrett Reid was homosexual, they had total admiration, respect and love for each other. It was a love that developed into a deep bond over 25 years. Diana Georgeff, Shelton Lea's biographer, elaborated on this love when she first met Barrett Reid at Heide:
Throughout that first meeting Barrett was agreeable but he remained composed and proper. Before I left, I asked if there was anything he wanted to add. He said, seemingly out of the blue, 'We [Shelton Lea and I] love each other very much. It's as simple as that'.
32
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In the last letter/poem Barrett Reid wrote at the Austin Hospital several weeks before he died, he described his love for Shelton and tried to put into words their twentyfive year relationship:
Love?
Yes.
But love, because what is already made is not spoken.
We don't want, need to 'make love'.
Love like a carving has been made.
[...]
And yet I like to try and understand this last wonderful mystery
We've made of each other.
You say in so many ways you love me
and I know it because I'm happy,
need only to be near you.
33
Catastrophes and changes
Barrett Reid's life changed dramatically in the late 1970s due to a series of catastrophic events that affected both him and Philip Jones, his life-long partner. Jones described the feeling of apprehension and portent in March 1978 when he was staying at Horsham and was handed a note to ring John Reed immediately. He rang John and was told that Greenhill in St Andrews (Reid and Jones' home since the 1950s) had burned down the previous day during a bush fire.
Jones recalled the tragic events:
The drive back to Melbourne was horrible. I had lost my home, and I couldn't begin to think what else had gone. Letters, books, records, memorabilia, works of art . . . I thought about Barrie and some terrible intuition informed me that this disaster would portend the end of our relationship. In addition I was filled with a foreboding that the fire was just the beginning of a series of disasters . . . I was right on both counts.
34
However, one Nolan landscape painting on loan from John and Sunday Reed had been saved. This, as well as a housing loan and financial assistance from the Reeds of $2000, paid for a new home to be built at Greenhill, a little further down from their original home.
A few months after their home was destroyed, Reid was diagnosed with Hodgkin's lymphoma. During that critical time, Reid and and Jones lived in the Aspendale holiday home of John and Sunday Reed whilst their new home was being built. Barrett was still working at the State Library of Victoria. In the same year (1979), Sweeney Reed suicided and Barrett lost his godson and surrogate son. When John and Sunday Reed died within two weeks of each other in December 1981, Barrett Reid was devastated.
In the space of less than three years he had lost his home and all his personal
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possessions (including his books, manuscripts and poems), was diagnosed with Hodgkin's disease, lost his surrogate son and then his surrogate parents. All these catastrophic events naturally had a major impact on Reid. In
1982 he retired after his illustrious career in librarianship due to ill health.
The Will of John and Sunday Reid bequeathed the original homestead at Heide to Barrett Reid and Philip Jones and they were granted full tenure until their death.
However, after a near 30 year relationship Reid split up with Jones in 1984 when he indicated that he wanted to 'live on his own' at Heide. Jones reluctantly agreed, even though the homestead at Heide had been inherited by both of them for life. Reid also became Executor and Trustee for both John and Sunday Reed and had control of access to all the papers left in their home. These were eventually housed at the State Library of Victoria after Barrett Reid's death in 1995, but a restriction in his Will ensured they could not be accessed by the public until 2003.
One can speculate on whether Barrett Reid re-invented himself and lived a sort of surrogate life from
1982 onwards after his surrogate parents (John and Sunday Reed) and his surrogate son (Sweeney Reed) had died. They were the surrogate family he craved all his life and Heide had become his surrogate home. Diana Georgeff commented on this period of his life:
When Barrett Reid moved into Heide there was some criticism that, to an extent, he took on the role of the Reeds . . . but he relished his place there as a mentor of young poets and artists. Some of his peers now saw his position as counterfeit. Some thought he had become grand, a self-appointed cultural pooh-bah.
35
Yet Reid was totally rejuvenated:
As for the old farmhouse where I now live among the hundreds of shrub roses and the towering eucalyptus, I think they would be pleased that a literary journal is partly edited here, that young poets and painters crash in the front room and think 'all that stuff was ages ago' and that new paintings are still stacked in the hall.
The other day a young New Zealander made two sculptures near the 'Doll's House' where Sunday stored Nolan's paintings before sending them all to London. Galvanized iron cows. An indigenous material. They are not in the least sacred cows. John and Sunday would have joined in my laughter and enjoyment. Galvanized irony.
36
Barrett Reid's activities in literature and the arts did not end when he retired in 1982. Despite his battle with Hodgkin's disease, there were years of remission. These were his most productive years and they had an inter-connecting theme. They were years where he integrated his love for John and Sunday Reed with his passion for Heide, for the arts, for painting, for editing and for writing. He was finally free to focus on his lifelong passions.
In
1985 Reid signed a contract with Penguin books to edit a collection of John Reed's correspondence. This was going to be his final homage to the Reeds. He planned to tell the story of their vision and contribution to the arts and literature. The correspondence would also cover the lives of many artists, writers, friends and family
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members who were part of the 'Heide Circle'. This was a massive undertaking that took over 15 years to complete. By
1993, due to the enormity of the project and his health, Nancy Underhill who was Head of the Department of Art History at the University of Queensland became co-editor of the volume. The
Letters of John Reed: Defining Australian cultural life, 1920-1981 was published in
2001, some six years after Reid's death
While Reid was working on the mammoth task of sorting and editing the letters of John Reed, he was still involved in other projects. In 1987 he was the curator for A Landscape of a Painter. This was the Sidney Nolan major retrospective exhibition held in Melbourne at the National Gallery of Victoria, then Sydney, Adelaide and Perth. One year later he wrote the definitive essay entitled 'Making it New in Australia: Some Notes on Sunday and John Reed'. This was part of the detailed catalogue of the exhibition Angry Penguins and Realist Painting in Melbourne in the 1940s – originally shown at the Hayward Gallery in London in 1988, then throughout Australia.
Then in 1988 Reid became editor of Overland, after its founding editor Stephen Murray-Smith died. Barrett Reid had a long-standing involvement with Overland since the late 1950s as Poetry Editor and, from 1965, as Associate Editor. With help from Michael Dugan, Shelton Lea and many others, he edited the literary journal until 1993 when he retired due to ill health.
Reid continued integrating his passion for arts and literature when he curated Words on Walls: a survey of contemporary visual poetry, exhibited at Heide in 1989 and in 1992 he wrote a detailed catalogue, Of Dark and Light: the art of John Perceval, to accompany the exhibition that he (Reid) curated at the National Gallery of Victoria. One of his final public appearances before his death was to launch the opening of The Angry Penguins Exhibition held at the Benalla Art Gallery on 16 April 1995, where he read from his carefully researched notes.
Caretaker, choreographer and chameleon
Nancy Underhill, co-editor with Barrett Reid of the
Letters of John Reed, spoke of Reid's passionate involvement with the Reeds and Heide. She stated that she had never been tempted to position herself as a surrogate participant in the Reed's life:
By the time of Barrett's death on 6 August 1995 . . . he seemed assured that he had introduced me to the Reeds and Heide life as he interpreted them . . .
In turn I knew that I had met and worked with a quite extraordinary man who believed that without John Reed's papers any interpretation of the Reeds or understanding of today's Museum of Modern Art at Heide would be less than whole.
37
While in
1999, John Barnes in the
La Trobe Journal made the following succinct comments regarding Barrett Reid's passionate involvement with Heide:
For him 'Heide' had literally been a meeting place of artists and writers. He had shared in the dismay at the collapse of Angry Penguins, but in his own life he had kept alive its spirit, becoming in his last years a kind of informal historian and
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guardian of the narrative of 'Heide'. And he lived long enough to see that brave avant-garde venture in which he had participated revalued and celebrated.
38
Others were more critical. Barbara Blackman wrote to Judith Wright in
1990 about the change she saw in Barrett Reid:
He sits there at Heide 1 [the original home at Heide of John and Sunday Reed] holding court in a kingdom of his own making, making up his people as he goes along, or refusing to remake them where they have remade themselves. He is a living monologue of himself, like Charlie B. [Blackman] ... I hope he makes a better job of editing
Overland than he does of editing his own story.
39
He seemed to be so seduced by the Reeds that he surrendered something of his own authority . . . Barrie is as ever, the hero of his every story.
40
Several months after Reid's death in
1995, Philip Jones commented on how much Reid had changed:
It seemed as though he had something of a personality change after John and Sunday Reed died. He started recreating himself. 'Barrie' became 'Barrett', for example, and
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something of a rampant ego emerged. He invented a family history for himself ... He deliberately shunned many of his old friends. And he was determined to adopt, singly, the mantle of Heide.
41
And three years after Reid's death, Kathy Hunt, poet and protégée, wrote a satirical piece about her visit to Heide. She used expressions such as, 'He was assuming that I had come to worship at the shrine'. She described Heide as 'a site sacred to art mythologists and the more impressionable members of book clubs and writing groups . . . The small Egyptian palace . . . was really a tomb after all, built to the glory of designated deities. The very spirit of art was mummified here'.
42
Philip Jones's response to Hunt's satirical article was, 'a mixture of unholy joy and unhappy reflection':
After the deaths of John and Sunday Reed in 1981, Barrie resolved to be their sole representative and to guard their sacred shrine.
Virtually everyone who had known him since he was young was excluded from his life. I who had been his partner for 27 years – and had jointly inherited with him the old Heide farmhouse, was pressured out . . . Barrie became Barrett the 'grand seigneur' who traded in old friends for new sycophants . . .
Why did Reid turn himself into a poseur worthy of ridicule? My death notice for Barrie Reid read: "In loving memory of the man he once was".
43
Culture, creativity, consistency and completeness
Barrett Reid was a man of immense cultivation, creative drive and cultural breadth. At the funeral oration delivered on
10 August 1995, John Philip summed up his diverse life:
Barrie's life is remarkable for its consistency and completeness. If we are really to grasp the true dimensions of the man, we must look at samples from his curriculum vitae. His impact has been so great and so diverse that the list is a long one.
44
Philip Jones, in the obituary he wrote about his long-term partner (which some people called 'frank and affectionate', whilst others called it 'warts and all'), described Barrett Reid's professional career and skills as a consummate politician:
he channelled his energies into administration as head of the public libraries division of the State Library [Library Council of Victoria]. This work consisted of setting up new library systems and maintaining high standards of service. During these years – the 60s and 70s – he developed as a tough political negotiator, but against his better nature this style reflected a coarsening of his sensibility.
45
Four years later, John Barnes in the
La Trobe Journal captured the true essence of Barrett Reid:
Those familiar with the range of his professional activities could be misled into thinking that his literary activities were marginal to his life. In reality, he had a long and quite separate career as a creative writer and literary editor, a career that began when he was a schoolboy and ended only with his death.
46
Contribution to librarianship, arts and culture
Barrett Reid devoted his life to librarianship, the arts and literature and had little interest in reward or personal fame. It was only after his retirement that his major contribution to librarianship, the arts and culture was acknowledged. In
1983 he received an Order of Australia (AM) for services to librarianship. Two years later he gave his views on being famous:
Some people get famous and other people don't, and some people avoid fame and other people don't . . . Time may or may not sort all that out and it doesn't really matter because we won't be here and I don't believe in posthumous fame, have no interest in it, I don't give a fuck and never have about it. I've always tried to avoid any kind of fame because I find it embarrassing. People see you as a metaphor rather than as a person.
47
In 1994 he was granted a Fellowship of the Heide Museum of Modern Art and in 1995 he was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Laws at the University of Melbourne.
Several weeks beforehand, knowing that the cancer had spread to his brain and death was imminent, Barrett Reid planned every single part of his funeral oration including who was to speak, the poems to be read and the music to be played.
Shelton Lea, Maudie Palmer, founding Director of the Heide Museum of Modern Art, and his carer/housekeeper Beryl Glasson were there when Reid was dying. Diana Georgeff described the scene:
Barrett was determined to die as he had lived. He had a penchant for management and wanted his death to be well organized. He began to orchestrate his last hours. He wanted to die at Heide in John and Sunday's bed. He wanted to hear Shelton reading poetry as he died. He specified Wallace Stevens, and Coleridge's 'Kubla Khan' . . . At his funeral he wanted no reference to God. He chose the music and the poetry that Shelton would read. He chose his poem called 'Nothing'. He wanted to choreograph the reading because he knew Shelton could never resist gilding the lily.
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Reid's final wish was also granted. He wanted his ashes scattered under the old red river gum tree (Aboriginal Scar tree) where the ashes of John and Sunday Reed were scattered 14 years earlier.
Conclusion
Barrett Reid was a highly dedicated man and a visionary in the public library world who was passionate about the arts and cultural issues within society. His death in 1995 due to Hodgkin's disease is not the end of his story, because he left behind a major legacy in the arts, in libraries, in literature and the publishing world.
This legacy continues to live on – with his comprehensive art collection of 145 works bequeathed to the Heide Museum of Modern Art, the annual scholarships in librarianship, and the annual poetry award. He bequeathed some of his books to Shelton Lea and several of his art pieces to special people in his life, but the remaining
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collection of books, papers, correspondence and pictorial materials are now held by the State Library of Victoria, the Heide Museum of Modern Arts Library, and the National Library of Australia.
It is perhaps fitting to give Reid the last word, via his poem 'See You':
See you later. We've gone
down the road a day
to walk to the horizon
and arrive where we may
(if we walk on and on)
hear earth breathing. Might even find
in open country a mind
with the moon in it, and sun,
and a bouquet wild and strong
smelling of history. And bring them back.