![the musician ii by loudon sainthill the musician ii by loudon sainthill](https://img.aasd.com.au/16005560.jpg)
"Les went down to the beach for a swim one day," said Lee-Brown, "and a shell exploded nearby, blowing off his bloody sarong!" Stray mortars regularly exploded in their garden. Their lives were at risk every day but they soon seemed to accept the situation. In 1983 the Sri Lankan civil war began and Lee-Brown and Barwick found themselves in the middle of it.
THE MUSICIAN II BY LOUDON SAINTHILL GENERATOR
With its water tanks, windmill, electricity generator room and large walk-in coolroom, the house was like a large, comfortable homestead on a Northern Territory cattle station. She designed the house and garden and Barwick, with the help of local labourers, built it. Then, in 1978, Lee-Brown bought a 20-hectare coconut plantation on the sea at Nilaveli, 20 kilometres north of Trincomalee, in Sri Lanka. They fled Cooma in early 1967 and lived in Bali, Hong Kong, the Dordogne and Greece. An important factor in the success of their relationship was the keen mutual pleasure derived from her designs and his construction. Les Barwick was a simple, undemanding man who seemed always to toe the line. He was related to Sir Garfield Barwick, who had recently been appointed Chief Justice of Australia. Her carpenter was Les Barwick from Cooma, and Lee-Brown immediately fell in love with him. She threw herself with great energy into enlarging the house and garden at Bobingah.
![the musician ii by loudon sainthill the musician ii by loudon sainthill](https://img.aasd.com.au/33026460.jpg)
Sadly, Lee-Brown and Gordon were unsuited and she felt increasingly stifled living in the bush despite an abiding love of the Australian landscape. She treated children as grown-ups (rare in Australia in those days), encouraging them to paint, ski, read, learn languages and, above all, to feel passionately about life. She took an extraordinary sense of exoticism and excitement to the Cooma district. In 1963, Lee-Brown accepted a proposal from a grazier, William Gordon, and went to live on a property called Bobingah, near Cooma. Decorating the house, planting the garden and a hectic social life seemed almost of equal importance. Her paintings, by now partially abstract, showed tremendous promise but are for the most part surprisingly bland, never matching the strength of her personality. Friend had just returned from Ceylon and they had a joint exhibition at Clune Galleries in Sydney in about 1963.Īt this stage, Lee-Brown probably still had the chance to become one of Australia's greatest contemporary painters but the truth was that, financially secure, she lacked the motivation to work hard. Returning to Sydney in the early 1960s, Lee-Brown bought Runnymede, an attractive 19th century house with large garden in Woollahra. In the 1950s she married the Italian poet Nelo Risi and they lived in a grand apartment on the Isola Tiberina - the island in the Tiber - in Rome. Lee-Brown married and divorced Dr Peter Russo, then lived from the late 1940s until the early 1960s in Paris, Rome and Ischia.
![the musician ii by loudon sainthill the musician ii by loudon sainthill](https://www.gratefulweb.com/sites/default/files/images/photo-gallery/Loudon%20Wainwright%20III%20Philamonjaro-2668.jpg)
Her friendship with Lowe and her love affair ("from which I never really recovered") with Alec Murray, the photographer, were the highlights. Lee-Brown often said that living at Merioola was one of the happiest times of her life. Those who knew it - let alone lived there - claim it was the centre of young, daring, creative Sydney in the late 1940s. Merioola was a large house on Edgecliff Road leased by the eccentric Chica Lowe, whose rented houses and ''PGs'' (paying guests) were her vocation. Later, like Rickards, Lee-Brown became part of the Merioola Group of artists, among whom were Donald Friend, Justin O'Brien, Francis Lymburner and Loudon Sainthill. She studied painting at East Sydney Technical College with Jocelyn Rickards (the artist and costume designer credited with giving British cinema the '60s look). From that moment until her death, she had no close relations for support. Mitty, aged 21, was left with a large income as the beneficiary of a family trust. Then, as World War II loomed, she returned to Sydney, where her mother died in 1943 after a traffic accident in Palm Beach. Mitty went to Ascham and, after her father's death, Westonbirt School in Gloucestershire.