The third volume in π.O.’s long-running poetic project (24 Hours, Fitzroy: The Biography), Heide is an epic poem that reconstructs the making of modern art in Australia.

Centred on the Heide circle—Sunday and John Reed, Sidney Nolan, Albert Tucker, Joy Hester—it expands outward into a wider map of patronage, labour, class, gender, and the marginalisation of Indigenous art.

The book is an assemblage: facts, quotations, numbers, fragments, visual structures. π.O. builds something closer to an archive-in-motion than a conventional poem, definitely an homage to the tradition of oral history. The result is dense but oddly buoyant—political without heaviness, critical without flattening the energy of the scene it describes.

Winner of the Judith Wright Calanthe Award, and part of the body of work that earned π.O. the Patrick White Literary Award, this sits firmly in the Australian avant-garde—poetry as document, argument, and form experiment at once.

Paperback, Giramondo Publishing (2019). Good condition.