A Pictorial History of Australian Painting

The unique qualities of the Australian continent have intrigued successive generations of visitors and settlers since Britain's First Fleet dropped anchor in January 1788. From its lowly origins as a penal colony, the Australian continent developed rapidly as a goldrush economy in the decades after 1850, its promise attracting fortune-seekers from California and China alike.

With the Federation of the independent colonies in 1901, the nation of Australia rapidly emerged as a rich and powerful presence on the world stage, a role confirmed in two World Wars. After 1945 especially, Australia's original Anglo-Celtic culture diversified with the arrival of migrants from many European countries; post-Vietnam, the nation has accepted a new generation of citizens from that war-torn country.

Today, as a rich culture drawing on many backgrounds, Australia faces new challenges to her resources in coming to terms with her own history, and in defining her place among the rapidly changing Pacific nations. 

The art of Australia is especially rich, though too little known abroad, and offers a rewarding insight into the imaginative traditions of the nation. Paintings are testaments of individual vision whose immediacy of insight spans the centuries.

We marvel at a convict artist's delicate rendering of Sydney Harbour in the late 1790s, or at a contemporary Aboriginal artist blending traditional and Western images to interpret today's urban Australia.

In their informative illustrated introduction the authors, both scholars of Australian art with extensive and varied experience of the continent, trace significant developments in Australian history and culture, while a detailed discussion of almost 100 pictures painted in Australia between 1792 and 1987 shows that all such images require, as much as tell, a story.

No mere list of facts', this absorbing study will prove both enjoyable and thought-provoking for all those interested in Australia, whether as residents or visitors; at once outspoken, critical and enthusiastic, it is a history of painting worthy of the Australian people themselves.