It used to be the case that readers interested in the visual arts in Australia had to put up with long dry spells between the publication of art books. But, over the last three decades in particular, writing about the visual arts in Australia, in terms of its scholarly and especially in terms of its numerical strength, has undertaken a quiet revolution.

With more than a hundred public galleries, art museums and commercial publishing houses publishing art books and catalogues, accessibility and dispersion of information on the visual arts have reached a hitherto unknown level. It has had its parallel in the large increase in the overall number of books published in Australia; recent figures suggest that some 5,000 books a year are now published here. But it has also grown out of a budding confidence for the worth of what is being created locally.