Amongst other activities, John Reed published the modernist literary magazine Angry Penguins, which earned its place in Australia's cultural history with the notorious Ern Malley hoax in 1943.
Around him were a circle of highly innovative and creative young and wealthy Melburnians including his sister Cynthia Reed Nolan, psychiatrist Reg Ellery, musicians Mansell Kirby and Bernard Heinze, curator Clarice Zander, artist Will Dyson and literary patrons Nettie Palmer and Vance Palmer, establishing a pattern that would extend into the years at Heide.
Albert Tucker, Sidney Nolan, Danila Vassilieff, Gray Smith and Joy Hester, amongst others, all worked at Heide.
David Rainey's 2014 play The Ménage at Soria Moria is a fictitious performance piece exploring the relationship between the Reeds and Sidney Nolan – both the heady days at Heide during the 1940s, and the less well known degeneration over the next 35 years.
[2] The Heide Circle continued in their commitment to Figurative Modernism through the 1950s and 1960s, with several of the artists forming a group known as the Antipodeans and taking a stand against the new abstract art.