Bulleen

Distinguished and Famous people from Bulleen

Bulleen's Heide property became a home, meeting place and working environment for modern Australian art. Its strongest connections are with the patrons who established it and artists who created important work there.

🎨 John and Sunday Reed

John and Sunday Reed bought the farmhouse and land they named Heide in 1934 and moved there the following year. They supported artists financially and personally, making the property a centre of creative work and discussion. Their garden developed alongside their art collection, and they later commissioned the modern house known as Heide II. The public gallery opened in 1981. Their Bulleen connection is a shared home and decades of patronage, leaving a place where buildings, gardens and artworks preserve different aspects of the same cultural history.

🎨 Sidney Nolan

Sidney Nolan's time at Heide included the creation of most of his first Ned Kelly paintings, working at the dining-room table with Sunday Reed's support. Those pictures became among the most recognisable images in Australian modern art. The domestic setting is a particularly vivid local detail: a table in a Bulleen home served as a workplace for a major artistic project. His later career extended well beyond Melbourne, but Heide remains an important site in understanding how that early body of work developed.