Joy Hester - Heide Period

Heide Period

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.