Joy Hester: The Good Looker

April, 1947. The artist Joy Hester – The beautiful, peroxide-blonde bombshell of the Melbourne art world – discovers she is dying of cancer. She is twenty-seven years old. Hester responds to the news as only Hester could – within days, she abandons her artist husband Albert Tucker, leaves her two-year-old son Sweeney asleep in his cot and runs off to Sydney with a lover ...

Never widely acknowledged by critics in her day, Hester was one of the first to deal head-on with the inner world of love, sexuality and male–female relationships.

Now, fifty years after her death, she has become accepted as one of Australia's great artists along with her old friends, lovers, husbands and comrades – Sidney Nolan, Arthur Boyd, Albert Tucker, Charles Blackman and John Perceval.