1930

*…’ it is high time we began to make our homes more Australian in atmosphere … Oh those wretched kookaburras, gum leaves and wattle blossoms done on cushions … These … are degrading the art sense of a young nation. The time has come for us to establish an Australian school of design … ‘

(‘Away with poker-worked kookaburras and gum leaves’, Sunday Pictorial 6 April 1930)

1935

* ‘I am trying in my work to start at the beginning and not at the finish … I’m trying with my cultivated knowledge to do away with all the imitativeness, the copying of the past great masters of the world … I am trying to find even one form which will express Australia in some way’

(‘Some recent paintings by Margaret Preston’, Art in Australia May 1935)

Image: Margaret and William Preston’s bookplate by Adrian Feint. Preston archive, Art Gallery of New South Wales