Heide, like Fitzroy, comprises interconnected portraits of local landmarks and historical personages. The first section details the founding of the State Library, the National Gallery of Victoria, and a School of Painting, though the main action happens to be unfolding elsewhere, namely in the plein-air artists’ camps at Box Hill, Mentone, and Heidelberg. The second and much longer section charts the rise and fall of the Reeds’ home as a synecdoche for the fortunes of Australian modernism. The villains in this story are institutions as much as individuals. Π.O. pulls no punches: Sidney Nolan emerges as a vicious and vindictive ‘root-rat’, while John Reed is dismissed as a ‘fellow-traveller’ who had ‘credentials, Zero. / Can’t paint. Can’t draw. Can’t sculpt. Nothing.’ These personal failings are merely the surface irritations of a much more systemic malaise that the poet diagnoses as ‘the dead weight of / a Patron’s hand’ and the invidious cult of genius such hands sponsor.

Cutting across the vertical relationship between artist and patron is a whole network of horizontal relations held together in ‘divine delirium’. The history of modernist art in this country is an intimate history of couples (and their uncoupling): the Reeds, Moya Dyring and Sam Atyeo, Joy Hester and Albert Tucker, Mirka and Georges Mora, Ailsa and Vic O’Connor, Cynthia and Sidney Nolan. (Heide itself is dedicated to Sandy Caldow, an artist and poet as well as Π.O.’s partner and collaborator.) More than one modernist work of art has sprouted from the ash heaps of a marriage, and Π.O. tallies the cost of the radical experiments in art and conjugality, a cost largely borne by women and children. In a sense, the Heide story really begins with Sunday’s first marriage to an American adventurer, Leonard Quinn, who left her infertile after infecting her with gonorrhoea, and ends with the suicide of Sweeney, the Reeds’ adopted son. In one of the book’s most delicate moments, a poem about Cynthia Nolan concludes with a sequence of names (‘Cynthia’, ‘Hansen’, ‘Nolan’, ‘Reed’) cast adrift across the page, testifying to a self serially made and unmade by love. Obsessed by the shipwrecked Eliza Fraser, Sidney was blind to the wreckage closer to home.

Many of the stories in Heide have been told before, but seldom with such gusto, and always with an unexpected kink. The Ern Malley hoax is recounted as an act of cultural terrorism (‘Suppose, one could load / a train carriage full of explosives, and // rail it into / the very heart of Modernism’) with a surprising connection to the Whitlam dismissal. But the handling of this celebrated scandal is emblematic of one way in which Heide falls a little short of the brio and freshness of Fitzroy. While the hoax unfolds in the sequence of poems entitled ‘Fort St. Boys High’, the schoolyard shared by the hoaxers is neither lined with lived experience nor realised with the pungency of local detail we might expect; it is merely a convenient framing device.

Heide’s cast of characters is not always easy to like, though the poet’s ambivalence does not forestall his fascination with mavericks such as ‘(the wit / twit)’ Alister Kershaw, a poet who penned two Denunciads against the Heide set and later wrote a history of the guillotine. The fascination is partly autobiographical: Kershaw’s father almost single-handedly set up the Bonegilla Migrant Camp where Π.O. and his family were first settled. But it is also temperamental: both poets are deeply sceptical about cultural gatekeeping of any kind.

One is also grateful for the return of Danila Vassilieff, a Russian-born Australian painter and sculptor who served in the Don Cossack cavalry, exhibited in Paris, and settled in Australia in 1935. ‘He painted Fitzroy, like a ghetto’ and ‘by the 1950s he’d worn-out / his ethnic credentials’. In 1958:

[…] He died of a heart attack
in John Reed’s arms, out at Heide
(collecting up
all the sculptures, he left stored there).
It’s good luck
to find a knot, in a shoelace.
The left part of
                the brain, is in charge now.

In Fitzroy, the poem had ended with Vassilieff’s clearing out a shed ‘(where they / stowed their Nolans)’. The muting of migrant pathos in the new version perhaps suggests the poet’s own wariness about ‘wearing out his ethnic credentials’.

Π.O.’s work has always emanated from the right part of the brain of Australian poetry, and it is an irony that the eminently modernist Heide is unlikely to be available at its namesake any time soon. This is a shame. Who better to reconsider our heritage industries than the pre-eminent poet of local heritage himself? As Sunday Reed once put it: ‘What big sooks we are.’