In 1961 the Tasmanian Historical Research Association published Clifford Craig’s Engravers of Van Diemen’s Land, which proved to be the first of several books in which Craig attempted to document every nineteenth-century print with a Tasmanian subject produced in Tasmania, mainland Australia and overseas. Craig, in the next two decades, produced follow-up volumes expanding the area covered and including recently discovered prints. His work remains unique in Australia. Sadly no other collector, scholar, curator or librarian has taken up the challenge and attempted to document the printed images of another state.

Over the past twenty-six years, Roger Butler, as Senior Curator of Australian Prints and Drawings at the National Gallery of Australia (NGA), has developed the most comprehensive collection of Australian prints in existence: a truly national collection of 36,000 works. In 1988 his Bicentennial exhibition, Prints in Australia: Pre-settlement to the present, at the NGA, offered the first authoritative account of the history of Australian printmaking. Unfortunately, the NGA’s publication budget did not run to publishing the text then available. Since then, Butler has several times revised and greatly expanded his text, and the result is best described as extraordinary.