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Chapter Two

The Secret Life of Girls

‘I was not educated, merely sent to school.’

— Daddy Sowed a Wind, dustjacket note, 1947

The Hermitage was Geelong’s Church of England Girls Grammar School, launched in 1906 to educate the sisters of the boys at their Boys Grammar School. Its headmistress, Miss Elsie Morres, belonged to the first generation of women able to gain professional qualifications at Melbourne University. She used her height to advantage, presenting an image of independent womanhood; she would have towered over Cynthia.

The Anglican Church had bought an Armytage family mansion on six acres to house the school and its teachers and boarders. It must have been odd to Cynthia that though the scale and design of her new environment was comparable to her own nineteenth century home, here there was no escape outside and little privacy inside. There was also a succession of missionaries and clergy visiting the school. Anzac Day and Armistice Day were rigorously observed, with services and donations from the girls for returned soldiers in hospitals.

For perhaps the first time, Cynthia had the opportunity to make friends outside her family circle. She learnt that her mother’s taste, like the family’s insistence on etiquette, belonged to a world before the Great War. On her first night in the dormitory, she found that her exquisite nightdress with its high collar was out-of-date; most of the girls wore pyjamas to bed.

In the post-war years, presiding over a much larger establishment, Miss Morres clung to the idea of her school’s traditions:

… foremost in the mind of us all is the necessity of putting duty and service to others before our own personal interests … A Hermitage girl is known by her good manners, her courtesy, her consideration and respect.

A Hermitage girl’s goal in society was to become

the womanly woman who makes her first thought the happiness of the home, who carries with her an atmosphere of refinement in speech and dress and who realizes that what the woman is the nation is.1

It is not hard to imagine Cynthia satirising her headmistress, enchanting her friends and scandalising the rest by her mimicry.

Eager to learn of life beyond the secluded privacy of Mount Pleasant and the confinement of boarding school, Cynthia rebelled against the strict conformity expected of her. It was summed up on the playing fields in a militaristic sporting spirit. Earlier in the century, Elsie Morres had been eager to introduce physical education for girls, making local history when she introduced bloomers for gymnastics in 1906.2 In the 1920s, Protestant girls’ schools grew a ‘mania’ for competitive games, especially hockey and baseball.3

Cynthia only played as a substitute at baseball. She would not join the Bible class, excel in the schoolroom and become Dux of the school like Margaret, or embrace its traditions, the sporting spirit and join the uniformed Girl Guides marching their colours like Barbara. Cynthia would hold no office in the school where her sisters had been Head Prefects. The only teaching she seems to have enjoyed came from her Elocution teacher, Carrie Haese, who shared her love of English poetry and theatre. At home, Lila was pleased — she detested the slack vowels of the Australian accent. The only time Cynthia performed well as a Hermitage girl was on stage at the annual public performances given at the year’s end.

Shortly before Cynthia’s sixteenth birthday, her grandmother died at the prodigious age of ninety-eight. The last glimpse we have of Margaret in her imperious aspect was in the aftermath of the Prince’s rejection of their hospitality four years previously, when the matriarch aired her disapproval in front of all at Mount Pleasant. She had, of late, retired to her room, venturing outdoors only when the weather was kind enough to allow her to sit on the terrace reading her Bible in gentle senility. Launceston’s Daily Telegraph published notice of her death on 9 September 1924. Margaret was interred alongside the husband she had so long outlived.

Barbara completed her schooling at year’s end, then embarked on a holiday to Europe, before resuming her life at Mount Pleasant. John completed his law degree in England, then returned to live in South Yarra and work in Queen Street for a legal firm. In England, Margaret graduated as a doctor. Cynthia was among a group of Hermitage girls who were confirmed by the Archbishop at St Paul’s Cathedral in Melbourne in 1925.

Cynthia regretted that she wouldn’t be matriculating the next year but would leave with only an Intermediate Certificate. In 1926, without examinations to face, Cynthia worked most with Carrie Haese, who lectured the girls on the ‘beauties of spoken verse’ and directed their theatrical performances. She would give Cynthia the only prize she got at school, for Elocution.

Carrie Haese commuted from Melbourne to the Hermitage. She was a protégé of Louise Dyer, a patron of the school. For her birthday in 1926, Louise gave a ‘divertissement’ at her home in Toorak. It gives a glimpse of the social world Cynthia inhabited, with Carrie Haese at its centre, reading Shelley’s poems.

Miss Haese was robed in trailing garments of white, with the tiny sleeves and V neckline outlined with gold braid. With her brow band of gold Liberty leaves she looked like some Greek statue warmed to life and colour. Both her gown and Mrs James Dyer’s picturesque trailing robes of celestial blue silk were designed for the occasion by Mr Blamire Young.4

The most original extracurricular offering at school that year was arranged by Louise, who was growing in confidence and influence as a patron of artists and musicians. She asked the debonair Professor of Music at the University, Bernard Heinze, to visit the Hermitage and play his violin with an accompanist on the piano. He would soon have a profound influence on Cynthia’s life as her first lover, who opened up new vistas for her. He surely felt her huge eyes fixed on him and noted her rapt, pale face.

A highlight for Cynthia in her last year at school was seeing Anna Pavlova dance in Melbourne, the first ballerina to reach a large audience. The senior girls had begged their headmistress to go. Cynthia, who had her mother’s talent for charm and powers of persuasion, was probably instrumental. Miss Morres had contacted Pavlova, who replied with a telegram ‘signifying her willingness to perform the Swan Dance at the matinee’. Her tutu was made of real feathers. At the Hermitage, five cars, to transport forty girls and a large bouquet of flowers, were ordered. Great was their delight when the bouquet was received by the famous dancer ‘amidst much applause’.5

Coached by Carrie Haese, Cynthia ended her public performances dying triumphantly as a heroic French noblewoman in If I Were King. She was excited to leave school behind — in her second novel, Hyacinth leaves school shouting ‘Tyranny is dead!’ — and determined to improve on her education.6

At home she read voraciously, and began plotting out a novel with the working title Parents — Your Daughters. She wanted her writing to be a conversation with the reader in a contemporary vernacular, like the American Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, but in Australian idiom.

To placate her irritable father she took some golf lessons, and to escape the house went riding on her horse with her new dog, a black Alsatian she called Woden. The nicknames Henry gave his children were taken from his favourites among his working dogs and hunting hounds. (He hated Cynthia’s Woden, however, perhaps because of its German origins.) Henry in turn was dubbed ‘the Hatter’, after Lewis Carroll’s Mad Hatter in waistcoat and top hat — with his height and strong bony face, Henry cut a fine figure in his top hats. Cynthia was called ‘Bob’, a name she must have liked for its brevity and implicit androgyny, for she kept it for her friends as well.

Bob was now free to visit Melbourne and stay with Margaret, who was working in the city. She and John grew closer, regularly exchanging books and letters. Barbara returned home, happy to resume the social round of parties and agricultural shows, with men talking of wheat and wool. She was content with her lot in Launceston, contemplating a life like her parents.

At home, Henry Reed grew more impatient, retiring to his study to worry over accounts. Lila complained about headaches he could not take seriously, as he wrote to John in South Yarra:

Mother is up and down. I think her state of health is largely caused by worry, she rebels against modern conditions and will not make the best of them, this keeps her in a constant state of perturbation.

Unlike his children, with their new experiments in living, Henry had done his duty by the family, whether he liked it or not: ‘It was up to me to take hold of the Estate and manage things for Granny and your aunts.’

Dick had defiantly gone his own way. Margaret had removed herself from the family to follow her profession. John had been compliant, but his father was concerned by his political views: ‘You seem to think our Class doesn’t worry exerting itself much about Public life. Universal suffrage has practically cut our Class out of Public life.’7 It was ten years since Henry had last been active in public life, when he went to Egypt to assess the effectiveness of the Red Cross.

At eighteen, Cynthia’s appearance as a guest at various local events was noted in the papers: at a private dance, she is seen in an ‘uncommon frock of gold lame veiled with layers of grey and black’. Her coming-out party with a hundred guests at Mount Pleasant was reported at length in Launceston’s Examiner in May 1927. For the last time, her full name is given: Miss Violet Cynthia Reed.

Cynthia and her mother had planned a perfect evening. Swinging Oriental lamps on the verandahs, in the conservatory and in the main rooms gave the elegant house an exotic air. A marquee linking the exterior of the main entertaining rooms was added to serve claret cup and ices. For dancing the fox trot and waltzes, a saxophone orchestra was set up in the Big Room. Supper was laid in the dining room among the masses of chrysanthemums and poppies, a diminutive but recurrent motif of violets, her namesake flower nestled in fern.

Miss Reed wore a charming French frock of white georgette over a very pale shade of pink, the bodice being of straight-lined effect and sleeveless. The low waistline was emphasised by crystal and silver bugle beads … Tiny silver medallions adorned the bodice, and Miss Reed carried a sweet posy of pale pink carnations, violets and maidenhair fern …

The straight-lined effect was what she wanted, rather than the hourglass figure of her elders. It was a common practice to flatten fulsome breasts with bindings. The journalist also noted her mother ‘gracefully gowned in a handsomely beaded black French frock in jet’.

The harmony Lila and Cynthia had so carefully designed for her party was short-lived. Dr Margaret Reed returned in late 1927. The first published photograph of Cynthia appeared in the Launceston Examiner, on Station Pier in Port Melbourne, welcoming her big sister’s return on a large steamship carrying over a thousand passengers and bedecked with streamers. Standing in the middle distance with her back to the camera, a small figure in a long coat wears a cloche hat, a style worn with short hair. A year or two previously, to her family’s dismay Cynthia had her long hair cut short, an act of defiance that reverberated in the family chronicle.

John kept three of the letters she wrote him in 1927. They had found more in common through their shared interest in books, fashion, ideas and people of individuality. John had started paying more attention to his little sister and wanted to know what men she might have her eye on now she was in the marriage market. The first began: ‘Dear-with-difficulty-tolerated brother’ and explained only that she was ‘in correspondence avec deux hommes’.

She was reading The History of Pendennis: ‘I adore Thackeray at his best’. It was Thackeray who wanted his novels to be ‘a conversation with the reader’.8 Cynthia was also teasing her brother. The comic parallels between their siblings and Thackeray’s main characters are inescapable. Laura is the bright one, eager to learn but confined to a domestic life in an English village, while her manly cousin Arthur goes boating at Cambridge University, and follows fashion and parties in London, just as John had done.

Dame Nellie Melba had visited Mount Pleasant. Cynthia dismissed the venerable old lady as ‘passe to a rather painful degree’. Cynthia was impressed by Melba’s accompanist, an Englishman called Stuart Robinson:

… most devastating voice and glorious personality, he (of course I don’t want to go on but it’s hard to get off a subject so attractive) … had the most marvellously cut suits that were a revelation to me, I’m afraid he would have looked rather silly in the sheep yards though …

She was looking forward to John’s next visit home, when he was bringing his friends the Wards to see the fine house, lined and furnished in Tasmanian timbers. Fred Ward was a designer eager to learn all he could about using local timbers. Cynthia wrote:

I hope the Wards will be unalarmed by the family, I should think they will find me a good restorer from the well behaved and correct critical rest of the house.

Fred had been sharing a house in South Yarra with John before his marriage, and hence already knew something about the Reed code of civility. John would be already dressed at breakfast, raising his eyebrows at Fred’s appearance in pyjamas. Fred also noted that John still played Rugby with his grammar school mates on Sunday mornings.9 He was in appearance and decorum most like his handsome father. The next letter opens on an ominous note: ‘I’m very unpopular with the family at present’.

Lila had announced that John was coming after Christmas, bringing only one male friend. Cynthia explained the source of her present unpopularity in a letter sent to John before he arrived:

I injudiciously remarked ‘How marvellous.’ … Everyone sat up and glared with disapproval … Tho’ why it shouldn’t be a marvellous thing when two males are introduced into this frightful atmosphere of femality I fail to see. Really one would think the place a blessed harem the way Dad stalks about with us flocking behind — do you realise there are eleven — 11 — women here, counting the maids? … Thank you for not coming over at Christmas, these family parties are too terrible — I always wake up on the 25th filled with gloomy foreboding. Anyhow there’s one thing, this year it’s on a Sunday so we won’t have to go to church twice in the one week.

Cynthia ended her letter on the duties expected of her:

Simon’s party’s on Saturday, the family misguidedly think that I’m going to push thirty kids up and down the drive in go-carts, so I can see more scenes for I consider my duty is to talk to the mothers, they don’t see through me as rapidly as the children do.

I’ve just been informed I’ve got to take the part of an Irish biddy in a big reading of three plays next week … I’m afraid good Australian will be continually showing through.

Her next letter was written shortly before their mother’s unexpected death.

At present I’m being amused by the female who is supposed to be keeping up my music. She exists on milk and oranges, has for years, and is an enthusiast for people flitting round in pieces of gauze, so you see even Launceston is not wholly devoid of people who believe in cultivating their own individuality.

What time she could garner for herself was spent reading and drafting a novel critical of the education girls endured.

Parents — Your Daughters has been started in well over a dozen styles, and I’ve already got infinite amusement from it. Now I seem to be going ahead all right, but I think the title will have to be changed.

Lila had made an extended trip to England, perhaps after Cynthia’s coming-out party. She had returned and seemed to regain her strength. It was Cynthia who cared for her when she was not well, but her letters show no sign of concern for her.

In late June 1928, on Wednesday, Lila had been to Launceston, busy as usual with people. Her sudden death was reported in The Mercury in Hobart. She was on her way home with the chauffeur Holmes, when she suffered a heart attack. Lila had outlived her mother-in-law by less than four years. She was buried alongside her in-laws in the tomb ground. Cynthia grieved wholeheartedly for her, marked by this untimely loss. Lila’s death changed everything; Mount Pleasant became Mount Unpleasant.10 As the year drew to a close, it seemed to his children that Henry was too soon emerging from mourning and already paying attention to another woman.

Cynthia spent all the time she could in Melbourne. She may already have met Bernard Heinze, but her affair with him probably happened after Lila’s death. A scholarship boy from Ballarat, Bernard, now conducting the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, could show her a side of life she hadn’t known. A self-styled man of the future, emanating charm and charisma, Bernard had risen in society, using his talents and intelligence to succeed. He was studying in London when the war began and had served on the Western Front. At the war’s end he had studied in Paris and Berlin, before returning to Australia in 1923. Bernard judged people by their abilities rather than by their social status. Cynthia found freedom in his company; she would always be drawn to women and men who had the temerity and creativity to succeed on their own terms.

Cynthia pondered her future and thought she might pursue nursing, but was dissuaded by friends and family; she was thought too frail for the demanding work and too volatile for the discipline. Bernard was horrified at the thought.

Women were fundamental to Bernard’s success; a committee of women had funded his orchestra. One of Bernard’s ambitions was to modernise the music industry in Australia and to reach the size of audiences Pavlova’s had attracted. The practice of music was too commonly dismissed as the amateur province of politely educated spinsters. Bernard’s professional modernity was based on masculine practicality. He knew boys dismissed the violin and piano as ‘sissy’, and believed his mission was to give access to its many arts back to children. Bernard was soon giving concerts to school children, reported as Kiddies Agog, and would pioneer radio broadcasts to the nation.

The society magazine Table Talk carried a long article on Melbourne’s most eligible bachelor. His stellar career took off in 1926, when the university created its Conservatorium of Music with Heinze as its Director. Only thirty-two at the time, a youth in Establishment Melbourne terms, he was also the first Catholic employed at the university. The unnamed journalist professes surprise on meeting him. A clean-shaven professor, he looks just like a businessman, and moreover is just as interested in ‘the man who solves the parking problems’ as he is in Beethoven or Paganini: ‘His energy is boundless, his ambition the same. He has freshness and charm’, but no time or inclination ‘to settle down, ideals defeated … a cultivated Australian with a scornful eye for the trivial the humdrum and the dull’.11

In 1928, Bernard was thirty-four, Cynthia twenty. He opened up a new world of music for her, taking her to concerts at Melba Hall. He showed her the low-life of Melbourne entertainment at cabarets, and took her on long drives in his new motor to explore the countryside. Despite their differences in age and experience, Cynthia thought they understood each other because they were both ‘poseurs’. She might have fancied she could hear her father’s roar from his bedroom balcony across Bass Strait, and more distantly her grandparents’ groans from the tomb ground. Heinze’s grooming and diction had been carefully cultivated, while she played the part of a sophisticate. Cynthia would later reflect that with Bernard she had ‘lived in a trance’, and paid tribute to him for what he had given her:

the utmost happiness, the utmost hell, he changed my whole outlook, he made me see the sky was blue, and flowers were sweetest small. He gave me kindness and a great understanding.12

In the wake of her mother’s death and the uncertainty of her future, she was drawn to people older and wiser in the things she wanted to learn. She made lifelong friends in Melbourne, especially with the controversial psychiatrist Reg Ellery and his wife Mancel Kirby, a professional musician who worked with Heinze. One of Ellery’s closest friends was the radical cartoonist Will Dyson. Dyson, tiring of producing political cartoons Keith Murdoch would accept for The Age, preferred etching portraits. He asked Cynthia to sit for him, swiftly outlining her piquant face in a linocut, the medium suited to the strong lines of her face. Dyson’s discreet, delightful mistress Clarice Zander and Cynthia grew close, and would collaborate on art and design exhibitions in Melbourne in the 1930s.

Despite her father’s disapproval, Cynthia refused to return home for that first Christmas without Lila. This family gathering would be even more terrible than usual. Henry complained to John:

I would not say one word to bring her against her Wish, if she concludes Woden more important than keeping in contact with her Family there is no more to be said.13

She was back in March 1929, writing to John on the family notepaper. He had sent her two books for which she was grateful. She also thanked him for his letter and his ‘commendable constraint’ in writing not to curse but amuse her. She returns the favour: ‘I’ve been indulging in archaeology, if that’s the word for it, and found something genuinely antique in the way of artists — Tom Roberts my dear, too tottery …’

A second antique artist was her mother’s friend, Charles Ritchie, a key figure in the Launceston Art Club that Lila had supported. Ritchie had asked Cynthia to sit for him without the ‘beastly modern hat’ she was wearing. In his portrait she looks more like her round-faced mother.

So of course I went and continue to go and wander round the studio as he gets to know me — then I sit down among the cushions and sofas and eiderdowns and drink tea and eat tomato sandwiches and look at books while he trots round gathering chalks and talking of Augustus John and Chelsea … and Will Dyson … all very educational … I bring him armfuls of zinnias feeling just too inspiring and Lady Hamiltonish — of course I thought how marvellous because I will be his genius and will go down to posterity the same way she did.

Her self-mockery anticipates and parodies the role she would one day play in the life of Sidney Nolan. Ritchie had instructed her to gaze on life and think of Piccadilly. She leaned forward with ‘a sparkling expression and lips parted’. Instead she thought Ritchie painted her as if ‘comatose’. Nevertheless, it was a portrait she kept.

Visiting her mother’s old friend in his studio in Launceston was welcome. Life at Mount Pleasant was utterly changed. Henry was determined to seize his chance for happiness with a widow, Kate von Bibra. According to Kate, she and Henry had fallen in love when young but were denied marriage because she was the baker’s daughter, Kate Dean. Henry indulged his new wife — unlike Lila, she could make what changes she liked to the family home.

Of the siblings, only Barbara readily supported her father, and gladly welcomed Kate and her two grown sons. Cynthia had sympathy only for the younger one of the trio, Kenneth, who dreamed of things other than wheat and wool. He admired her determination to leave home and travel second-class, and alone, to Europe.

Sources include the Hermitage, Old Girls’ Association, school archive and the school magazine Coo-ee 1920–6; Cynthia’s letters to John; Reed Papers, March 1927 to August 1930, State Library of Victoria; Henry’s letters to John c.1920s.

1 Miss Morres, Annual Reports 1924 and 1926, in Coo-ee.

2 Ivan Southall, The Story of the Hermitage, Melbourne: Cheshire, 1956, p. 17.

3 Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Solid Bluestone Foundations, Australia: Pan MacMillan, 1983, p. 141.

4 Louise Hanson Dyer Papers, MS 10770, State Library of Victoria.

5 Reported in Coo-ee, 1926.

6 Cynthia Reed, Daddy Sowed a Wind, Sydney and London: Shakespeare Head, 1947, p. 60.

7 Henry to John, letter, 13 June 1926.

8 Thackeray, W. M., ‘Preface’, Pendennis, England: Penguin, 1972.

9 Fred Ward, cited by Judith O’Callagan, p. 6.

10 Cynthia Nolan, Open Negative: An American Memoir, p. 203.

11 Table Talk, 26 August 1926, p. 17ff.

12 Cynthia to Sunday, letter, c.March 1934.

13 Henry to John, letter, 13 June 1926.