Dear Sun

Correspondence between Joy Hester and Sunday Reed.

Correspondence between Joy Hester and Sunday Reed.

Love’s intention and the reverse of love’s inention slowly mark my life…and on the banks of these dark rivers we become - become what we are to each other and become what we are to ourselves. Sunday Reed

I am so conscious of my own limitations that I’m afraid I’ll never do the things I dream of - but always I think of you and wonder what you’d think…And how you have always given me so much pleasure because you bothered to follow what my silly dreams were… Joy Hester

Joy Hester was the only woman member of Angry penguins, Melbourne’s radical art coterie of the war years, and the wife of Albert Tucker. Sunday Reed was her closest friend, a wealthy, charismatic patron of the arts. Their correspondence follows the ebb and flow of their creativity, struggles with illness and poverty, losses and gains in love, and their heated intellectual and artistic debates.

Friends and loved ones cross the pages of their letters, among them, Albert Tucker, Max Harris, Sidney Nolan, Barrett Reid, John Percival and the Boyds. Dear Sun is both the intimate portrait of a friendship between two extraordinary women and a fascinating insight into a remarkable period in Australian art.

‘A rare and compelling record of a passionate friendship…’ The Sunday Age ‘More than anything, Joy and Sunday talk of love…Another kind of love sustains this book- the intense commitment to a project, the complex attachment to a subject, of a biographer.’ The Age