Colin Colahan was an Australian painter of outstanding ability and reputation who from the 1920s to the 1970s was remarkably productive. Colahan was one of the more brilliant pupils of the painter Max Meldrum. Identification with the unfashionable 'Meldrumites' is one explanation for Colahan's disappearance from the public gaze. The other has murkier origins in the still unsolved murder of his girlfriend, Mollie Dean, in 1930. There was nothing of substance to link Colahan to the brutal murder, but fevered public speculation cast a depressing shadow for many years and helped propel him to Europe in 1935. There he stayed for the rest of his long life. The story of Colahan's personal life is tantalising in itselfandmdash;three marriages, five children, numerous lovers, beautiful houses in England and Italy, portrait painter of the rich and famous. It was an urbane life. He was a witty, charming, talented man. This intimate, engaging portrait is indeed most welcome, and will restore Colahan's life and work to its rightful place in the history of Australian art.

The prominent Australian artist Nora Heysen has been said to have worked in the shadow of her father Hans Heysen, one of Australia's most recognised landscape painters. Letters between the two, however, reveal a different story. In 1934, when Nora first travelled to London to study art, she experienced her first time away from home and the first of many, often exotic places from where she would write home to Hahndorf, South Australia. The correspondence between Nora and Hans continued until his death in 1968. Theirs was a close and affectionate relationship, in which father and daughter shared a lifetime of thoughts about art and life, and a mutual respect and admiration for each other's work. Heysen to Heysen is a showcase of letters between Nora and Hans Heysen from the collection of the National Library of Australia. Accompanied by carefully selected images and text by leading art historian Catherine Speck, the publication lifts the lid on a vista of Australian art.

A Companion to Australian Art A Companion to Australian Art is a thorough introduction to the art produced in Australia from the arrival of the First Fleet in 1788 to the early 21st century. Beginning with the colonial art made by Australia’s first European settlers, this volume presents a collection of clear and accessible essays by established art historians and emerging scholars alike. Engaging, clearly-written chapters provide fresh insights into the principal Australian art movements, considered from a variety of chronological, regional and thematic perspectives. The text seeks to provide a balanced account of historical events to help readers discover the art of Australia on their own terms and draw their own conclusions. The book begins by surveying the historiography of Australian art and exploring the history of art museums in Australia. The following chapters discuss art forms such as photography, sculpture, portraiture and landscape painting, examining the practice of art in the separate colonies before Federation, and in the Commonwealth from the early 20th century to the present day. This authoritative volume covers the last 250 years of art in Australia, including the Early Colonial, High Colonial and Federation periods as well as the successive Modernist styles of the 20th century, and considers how traditional Aboriginal art has adapted and changed over the last fifty years. The Companion to Australian Art is a valuable resource for both undergraduate and graduate students of the history of Australian artforms from colonization to postmodernism, and for general readers with an interest in the nation’s colonial art history.

Volume 17 of the Australian Dictionary of Biography contains 658 biographies of individuals who died between 1981 and 1990. The first of two volumes for the decade, it presents a colourful mosaic of twentieth-century Australian life. It contains biographies of well-known identities such as Sir Henry Bolte, Sir Robert Askin, Sir Reginald Ansett, Sir Macfarlane Burnet, Sir Raphael and Lady Cilento, Sir Arthur Coles, Robert Holmes-O-Court, Sir Warwick Fairfax, Sir Edmund Herring, Albert Facey, Donald Friend, Sir Roy Grounds, Sir Bernard Heinze and Sir Robert Helpmann. Eminent Australian women in the volume include Dame Elizabeth Couchman, Dame Kate Campbell, Dame Doris Fitton, Dame Zara Holt and Lady (Maie) Casey. Although many of the women achieved prominence in those professions conventionally regarded as the preserve of women, othersandmdash;such as Ruby Boye-Jones, coast-watcher; Ellen Cashman, union organiser; Elsie Chauvel, film-maker; Dorothy Crawford, radio producer; Ruth Dobson, diplomat; Mary Hodgkin, anthropologist; Margaret Kelly, restaurateur; and Patricia Jarrett, journalistandmdash;demonstrate that some women at least were breaking free of the constraints of traditional expectations. The lives of fifteen Indigenous Australians are included, as are those of a number of immigrants who fled from persecution in Europe to establish a new life in Australia.

In the legend of King Arthur and the knights of the round table Montsalvat is the home of the Holy Grail. Australia's Montsalvat is an artists' colony in Eltham, established by the architect and artist Justus Jorgensen in 1934. It is home to over a dozen buildings, houses and halls built out of local stone, recycled timbers and rammed earth and set amongst richly established gardens on 12 acres of land on the outskirts of Melbourne. The colony of Montsalvat is a testament to the vision and work of Jorgensen, his family and friends and its detailed history reflects the lives of those people. But it is more than a set of beautiful buildings - it is a place steeped in the art and culture of Melbourne. And to walk around its grounds is to step into a bygone world where such a grand plan seemed more achievable. Perhaps that is why Montsalvat has created its own myths and legends. In addition to Jorgensen and his family, among the artists, intellectuals, tradespeople and artisans associated with life at Montsalvat are numbered Clifton Pugh, Gordon Ford and Joe Hannan, Betty Roland, Mervyn Skipper, his wife Lena and their three children - Helen, Sonia and Matcham. Arthor Munday, George Charlmers, Lesley Sinclair, Sue Vanderkelen, Ian Robertson, Helen Lempriere, John Smith, John Busst and Myra Skipper, Percy Leason, Leonard French and Albert Tucker. Montsalvat today is a place where emerging and established artists can work, present and perform their work. Its visual features are enjoyed by tourists from around the world, and its buildings are classified by the National Trust of Victoria. The Australian Heritage Commission includes Montsalvat on the Australian Register of National Estate.

Ian Burn has been one of Australia's most important artists since the mid-1960s. He was involved in the development of the Conceptual Art movement and in the activities of the Art & Language group, working first in London and then New York between 1965 and 1977. His work is found in art museums and collections in the United States, Europe and Australia. Writing has always been central to his practice as an artist. From the early-1970s, much of his writing has evolved as a trenchant commentary on the institutions of art, including art history. His studies in Australian art present interpretations which both compete with orthodox accounts and critically engage the problems of art historical practise. Often, Burn's arguments are focused through analysis of particular works of art, with the social and cultural dimensions of picture-making revealed in an accessible and incisive way. His writing on avant-garde practices draws directly on his own experience and allows the reader to glimpse the conceptual dialogue between art and language. Dialogue brings together essays written between 1968 and 1990, some of them previously unavailable in Australia. These can be read as a partial but coherent account of the past 100 years of Australian art. However, reading in the order of their original production gives insight into the emerging politicisation of art during the 1970s, a way of thinking which continues to be influential in Australian art and culture. Illustrated, and with an introduction by Geoffrey Batchen, Dialogue offers readers a critical view of the history of Australian art and the concerns of recent art.