Janine Burke’s Australian Women Artists, 1840–1940 is a memento of the exhibition of women’s art initiated by the Ewing Gallery for 1975, International Women’s Year. An extraordinarily rich exhibition, it convinced me and many others who saw it on its tour of the eastern states, that Australian women painters, for at least the first 30 years of this century, must share the laurels equally with men.

I remember walking into the Ewing and being bowled over by the contrasting reds and greens, and unexpected, spidery pattern of Grace Cossington Smith’s painting of a smart Art Deco cafe in Sydney. I loved the dark, solid geometry of Margaret Preston’s Banksia, and the considered cubist rhythms of Grace Crowley’s Girl with Goats and Alison Rehfisch’s Still Life with Gardenia.