Arts, Architecture & Design Books

This handy, practical and inspirational little book is perfect for the pocket or art bag. It shows watercolour painters of all levels how to loosen up their paintings and maintain spontaneity by painting simple watercolour studies in no more than 10...

What is steampunk and why are people across the globe eagerly embracing its neo-Victorian aesthetic? Aesthetic program, literary genre, philosophy, and subculture, Steampunk embraces a universal vision that questions our relationship with time itself...

On October 20, 1882, future actress Margaret Dumont was born in Brooklyn, New York. A Broadway regular by the 1920s, Dumont found lasting fame once she started appearing with the Marx Brothers. Tall and regal in bearing, her character provided the...

Millers Point Songbook is a play, performed in the Garrison Church during May, and it tracks the lives and stories of the people of Millers Point, Sydney and the history of Sydney itself.In words and music, the characters of Millers Point come to life...

A leap of faith by two architects and urban designers saw a new venture to design, manufacture and sell furniture for the public domain of cities. The initiative kick-started an industry in Australia, and supported an emerging focus on urban design,...

Fiona Hall: Wrong Way Time presents the extraordinary creations of Fiona Hall figures woven from military camouflage, painted clocks, botanical illustrations on banknotes, sardine-tin sculptures, nests of shredded money, strange driftwood and more.Hall's...

Patricia Piccinini: Nearly Beloved is the first and only major monograph about her work. In this book Helen McDonald discusses the complex ideas associated with the work of Patricia Piccinini, making both the work and the ideas accessible...

Julie Rrap is a trickster who uses her own body in photos, videos and sculpture. Victoria Lynn's text explores how Julie Rrap 'discloses' the human body, and unravel the ways in which it has been represented in art and elsewhere. For the most part, Rrap...

When Gough Whitlam moves into her street in Cabramatta in 1957, eight-year-old Christine has little idea how her new neighbour, one of the most visionary and polarising political leaders of Australia, would shape the direction of her life. Born to...

Knig's queer decomposing shows us that our self-composition is more than simply identity. Who we are is part of 'we' as well as 'I'. This is a book you can do things along with: read it in self-isolation, on the bus, during sex, or on a walk, say, by the...

Madjem Bambandila is a stunning celebration of the artistic and cultural practice of acclaimed Wergaia and Wemba Wemba artist Kelly Koumalatsos.Co-written by Kelly Koumalatsos and Dr Paola Balla and featuring the voices of a broad range of artists,...

Showcases a unique and rarely seen collection of cultural objects from New Guinea. Referred to as 'war trophies' during the German possesion of New Guinea, before the takeover by Australian military forces in 1914. The Australian War Museum...

Visions of Colonial Grandeur explores Melbourne'sinternational exhibitions through the art collection of 19th-century businessmanJohn Twycross. John Twycross, also known as Top Hat, was a merchant and artcollector who lived and worked in 'Marvellous...

Enter the musical world of Stuart and Georgian Britain, of concert-going, music makers and thinkers, printers and publishers. Written to accompany the upcoming collections-in-focus exhibition at the National Library of Australia, this book invites you...

The modernist RSL club, the Art Deco cinema, the stilted Queenslander or the elaborate Edwardian. The iconography of Australia's regional towns is familiar to many of us, whether we live, work and play in these places, or just journey through. A...

'Petite, plucky and always immaculately dressed in the constraint of Victorian finery...throughout her life she was acclaimed internationally, winning 29 medals, and accolades from leading art critics. Her work was also collected by royalty,...

'[Cazneaux's] work is what matters, its place in the history of Australian photography and its influence on past, present and future generations of photographers.' - Max Dupain, 1978Harold Cazneaux (1878-1953) is widely considered the...

**Shortlisted, 2024 Queensland Literary Awards, The Courier-MailPeople'sChoiceQueenslandBook of the YearAward**William T. Cooper is considered a master painter of birds. He painted them for many books, mainly bird monographs. He also created...

William T. Cooper was one of the world's most esteemed bird painters. In his paintings, birds nibble at plump red berries, they rest on twisted vines and branches covered with lichen, and they clutch forest fruits and leaves in their claws. These...

Collaborating with artist Anna Pignataro, we have created a calendar for 2025 called Champignons, introducing a gorgeous mushroom illustration each month.

A Parisian dream... We have created this beautiful Calendar called A Secret World in collaboration with Elise Hurst.

Collection of indigenous art, full colour hardcover over 100 pieces of art, painting and sculpture.The Torch Collection showcases extraordinary artworks by Indigenous men and women who have come in contact with the criminal justice system in...

Aboriginal art practice in southeast Australia is dynamic, innovative and powerful. This is clear from the diverse artworks in this book which celebrate contemporary Aboriginal artists and their continuation of Ancestral knowledge. The artworks shown are...

Ngirramanujuwal is one who adds colour.Walmajarri man Jimmy Pike (c. 19402002) manifests colour as strokes of ink on paper: the saturated hues of the desert sky at dusk, and the glimmers of the sun on the water's surface. His vivid and exceptional...

The Goddess and the City: Kali and Kolkata brings in to focus one of the world's most vibrant living Victorian cities. It was the capital of British India from 1722 until the Raj relocated to Delhi in 1911. The architectural wealth bedazzles but no more...

Tokyo Midnight explores the Asian megalopolis, and the ways Tokyo comes to life between dusk and dawn in a futuristic neonscape, a time when the natural light disappears, and the artificial light takes over.The images were photographed in early 2019 and...

Kalyakoorl, ngalak warangka, (Forever, we sing), is a celebration of rare Noongar language, and the things we share as community. Over many years, Noongar language has been reduced to a whisper, there are currently less than 400 fluent speakers.The...

Hear the Art is the essential poetry-as-art collection, loaded with Richard Tipping's elegant, wry and telling concrete poems made as sculpture and as picture. He is fascinated by words found within words, and articulating their iterations.Tipping works...

This Aussie Heroes series introduces primary-aged children to heroes who have made a contribution to Australian society. Each hero has helped others in need and in turn shaped history.Six-year-old Helen Porter just wanted to sing on stage. As a child,...

This publication accompanies New Zealand collective et al.'s first Australian survey exhibition at Monash University Museum of Art (MUMA). The exhibition marks the largest presentation of the artists' work outside New Zealand since representing the...

In times of inflationary investment and explosive urban growth, Building Mixity! challenges the status quo of expansive and unequal development in Melbourne, Australia. The long forgotten and unique post-industrial suburb of Cremorne serves as a...

When Vincent van Gogh picked up his pencil and set out on his artistic career, it was not with the intention of becoming a leader of the avant-garde art world. Rather, his aims centred on earning a reasonable wage and living within the middle-class norms...

BernardSmith (19162011) was unquestionably one of Australia's greatest humanistscholars and its finest art historian. His EuropeanVision and the South Pacific, 17681850 (1960) was a foundationaltext of post-colonialism, and in AustralianPainting (1962)...

Renee So's idiosyncratic practice in ceramics and textiles, and occasionally furniture and glass, is inspired by art history, collections in museums and gendered symbolism. Her work is distinguished by its embrace of craft methods and cross-cultural...

The first full-length history of rock journalism in AustraliaFor over fifty years, Australia has maintained its own rock press - a vibrant, passionate, sometimes volatile industry of dozens of papers and magazines committed to the coverage of the...

The work of Shelley Lasica reveals a sustained exploration of dance, movement and the varying contexts in which they can occur. WHEN I AM NOT THERE has been produced to accompany a performance exhibition reflecting on forty years of Lasica's...

What do we want and need from our public spaces? As the world emerges from the profound limitations imposed by the COVID-19 crisis, this reader offers a range of possibilities from the domain of art. With contributions from twenty-five leading Australian...

Not many can boast of careers that lasted successfully for nearly seventy years, but that is what both Googie Withers and John McCallum achieved. She acted everything from brazen murderesses to Lady Bracknell, taking in blonde nitwits, wartime Resistance...

In 1956 Bernard Smith wrote that we in Australia were migratory birds. This was to become a leading motif of his own thinking, and a significant inspiration for Peter Beilharz. Beilharz came to argue that the idea of the antipodes made sense less in its...

Photogrammetry is the process of obtaining digital three-dimensional models of objects, features, or landscapes from a series of overlapping, focused, and well-exposed two-dimensional photographs. Photogrammetry is becoming standard practice for...

Animal Activism On and Off Screen examines the relationship between animal advocacy and the film and television industries. Leading scholars, activists, and film industry professionals critically analyse the ways in which animal activism has been...

Natural history television on the ABC has been one of the public broadcaster's most popular formats. For many viewers, TV has been an important contact zone for engaging with animals they would never encounter in everyday life. These animals have also...

Yuupurnju: A Warlpiri song cycle documents a ceremonial song cycle situated within the traditional kurdiji "shield" ceremony, as sung by Warlpiri Elder Henry Cooke Anderson Jakamarra at Lajamanu, Northern Territory, in 2013.The song cycle relates to a...

Warlpiri songs hold together the ceremonies that structure and bind social relationships, and encode detailed information about Warlpiri country, cosmology and kinship. Today, only a small group of the oldest generations has full knowledge of ceremonial...