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‘All machinery may be beautiful, when it is undecorated even. Do not seek to decorate it. We cannot but think all good machinery is graceful, also, the line of the strength and the line of the beauty being one.’

Although ridiculed in his own day as a fashion victim in dress and manners, Oscar Wilde, the exemplar of the excesses of the Aesthetic Movement, is not normally quoted in design histories. Being Wilde, what he wrote above is probably not in praise of the machine, but its inclusion in Nikolaus Pevsner’s Pioneers of Modern Design: From William Morris to Walter Gropius (first published in 1936) shows the breadth of reference in this excellent and now classic introduction to modern design and twentieth-century modernism.

There is something immensely satisfying about a work so ambitious and comprehensive as Deborah Edwards’s Margaret Preston, published by the Art Gallery of New South Wales to accompany its current retrospective on this pre-eminent Australian modernist. From the outset, we are introduced to Preston’s perennial capacity to stimulate not only debate but also downright factionalism. The introductory chapter takes the form of multiple quotes, leaving no doubt that Preston continues to ignite debate over issues surrounding an authentic Australian vision.

Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art has dedicated its latest issue to the theme of ‘Masculinities’. This is a timely contribution to debates about the construction of male identity in visual and popular culture in the wake of Brokeback Mountain. The controversy this film has generated has focused on the love affair between two cowboys and the threat seemingly posed to an archetypal bastion of manhood, but if you remove the queer element, you have a work that isn’t so different from conventional films such as The Man from Snowy River. A similar quandary is posed by Ross Moore’s standout essay on James Gleeson and the ‘de-gayification’ of his paintings by art writers. Gleeson may have avoided decades of controversy, but delete the queer reading from his imagery and he becomes unproblematically Australia’s greatest surrealist painter.

This book is a milestone in the historiography of Australia and Papua New Guinea. It puts paid to sterile debates about whether PNG’s independence came too early. ‘Decolonisation,’ Professor Donald Denoon concludes, ‘is by no means complete and independence is a work in progress.’ What happened on 16 September 1975 was the beginning of a ‘trial separation’: ‘Australian rule over the territory was not a marriage made in heaven, and it could never be consummated by full integration. Yet those countries are so close in so many ways that the divorce cannot easily be made absolute.’

Thea Proctor’s long career spanned the 1900s to the 1960s. Sadly, she lived to see her reputation decline. Barry Humphries, in private life a noted art collector, relates here how his characteristic appreciation of the aesthetically démodé led him to seek out Proctor’s acquaintance in the 1960s. A new generation of professional curators sniffily dismissed the grande dame, then in her eighties, as a ‘minor artist’, more important as a teacher and passionate champion of other modernists than in her own right. To Proctor, though, an aesthetic reputation was everything. ‘If I have not got that a life’s work is wasted,’ she despaired to a friend.

This exhibition book from the National Gallery of Victoria is enthralling. It presents the imagery of British emigration, hitherto unstudied; fifteen million people fled during Queen Victoria’s reign (1837–1901). There is a mix of art history with social history: major and minor paintings and popular-culture prints; memorabilia and relics. A wedding ring salvaged from the dreadful 1857 wreck of the emigrant ship Dunbar reminds us that there was only one survivor when, at the end of the voyage, she crashed into Sydney Heads.

The heroine of Marion Halligan’s latest novel has little time for reviewers. More often than not, she complains, they are ‘patronising ignorant nobodies’ who wouldn’t know a book from a biscuit. I will not hazard a biscuit metaphor, but I will venture a complaint. The Apricot Colonel is as elegantly written as any of Halligan’s novels. It provides the linguistic curios, surprising digressions and insights into storytelling that made Lovers’ Knots (1992), The Fog Garden (2001) and The Point (2003), among others, so exciting. Next to these, The Apricot Colonel is startlingly slight. In Halligan’s best novels, strong story lines tether the witty digressions and thoughtful asides together. In The Apricot Colonel, the plot never seems quite sturdy enough to hold them.