Sweeney Reed was an exhibited artist, gallery director and concrete poet, the son of artists Joy Hester and Albert Tucker. When he was two years old Hester was diagnosed with Hodgkin's disease and told she had only two years to live (although this did not in fact turn out to be the case), and in response to this news she left Tucker and moved to London. When it became apparent that Tucker, who was painting in Europe, would not be available to be a father to Sweeney, he was first fostered and then formally adopted at the age of five by John and Sunday Reed who lived an artistic life at Heide in Bulleen, Victoria.
When Reed was 18, he went to London where he worked for a time at the Institute of Contemporary Art. After returning to Melbourne, in 1965 he opened an art gallery, Strines, which was financed by the Reeds and displayed contemporary Australian art. After the gallery closed in 1969, Sweeney enrolled in a printmaking course at the Victorian College of the Arts in the hope of becoming a curator, and later opened the Sweeney Reed Gallery, which was open from 1972 to 1975.
Reed was also good friends with Phillipe Mora, son of artist Mirka Mora, and starred in a few of Mora's short films, including Back Alley (1964), Man in a Film (1966) and Give It Up (1967). Sweeney Reed took his own life in March 1979, aged only 34.
