The Historical Literature of Australian Domestic Interior Design 1945-1975

ABSTRACT

This article surveys the formation of the historiography of Australian domestic interior design and decoration from 1945 to 1975. The review aims to understand the inclusions and omissions of Australian interior design history, indicate their possible causes and propose methods for re-evaluation. From its inception, the history of interior design in Australia was framed on architectural lines and its practitioners viewed as tangential to the central disciplines of the built environment and decorative arts. Despite a subsequent flowering of community and museum interest in mid-century design, scholarship on professionally designed interiors has been limited. Amongst thousands of post-war Australian practitioners, all but Marion Hall Best have escaped substantial attention. Diminished by a lower status in history’s hierarchies of practice, professional interior design in Australia remains largely unstudied. It is ripe for mining by scholars open to new perspectives on global debates and the shaping of contemporary practice.

Introduction

At the first historic interiors conference held in Australia in 1983, architect Howard Tanner presented a paper on 20^th century interior design which acknowledged a troubling status quo: the field was confined by an “extremely limited” literature.¹ As Tanner foregrounded architects Harry Seidler, Sydney Ancher and industrial designers Grant Featherston and Gordon Andrews, modernism’s paramount position was assumed; but several interior designers were also identified as important, including Audrey Borkenhagen, Marion Hall Best, Margo Lewers and George Freedman. This was challenging territory to stake in 1983.

Scholarship in the 40 years since has mostly failed to track the paths indicated by Tanner’s sketchy map. Lewers’ interwar interior design practice was routinely misrepresented by art historians until, bolstered by commissioned research, my 2022 book chapter reassessed its significance (Figure 1).² Although commercial interiors – enhanced by association with heroic architecture and large public projects – have fared marginally better than domestic, Borkenhagen and Freedman nevertheless receded from design history for another 30 years.³ Of the interior decorators Tanner identified, Best alone has been the subject of substantial investigation: Michaela Richards’ The Best Style (1993) remains the only historical monograph on an interior designer yet published in Australia.⁴

Figure 1. Interior by Margo Lewers, Emu Plains, 1956. The daybeds she designed in 1935 were originally available to order from her consultancy, Notanda, Rowe street, Sydney. Photograph Penrith Regional Gallery and Lewers Bequest.

From its inception, narratives of interior design in Australia were framed by architects, in relation to architecture as the assumed central discipline of the built environment and modernism as the naturally superior lens through which to approach its history. This mirrored British and American historiographies of interior design, in which Penny Sparke identified the problematic nature of disputed historical disciplinary boundaries, especially the persistent “aesthetic and political projection of architectural and design modernism, which, in the hands of a group of progressive architects, drew on [in the domestic sphere] style conscious, minimally furnished living areas.”⁵ Sparke proposed that a dominance of design writing “rooted in modernist thought” had impoverished scholarship on interiors; others observed the perversely concealed and occluded occupation in relation to associated disciplines.⁶

In a 2014 review, Daniel Huppatz critiqued the nationalist historical discourse which validated Australian design by its response to modernism, suggesting such frameworks be dispensed with in favour of “transnational, diasporic and global histories.”⁷ Some Australian research, as this article surveys, has since turned towards the foregrounding of histories of migrant designers and interdisciplinary considerations. Yet overall, the unstudied histories of interior design in Australia remain ripe for mining by scholars open to multiple new perspectives on global debates and the shaping of contemporary practice.

Practitioners of interior design and decoration in Australia had operated from the late 19^th-century, but during the interwar years a distinct occupation developed.⁸ In the limited scholarship, this formative interwar period has been a focus for Australian historians, with feminist theory instrumental in attempts to redress gendered occupations. The diminution of interior design and designers by association with femininity (and by implication amateurism, fashionability and transience) has been widely acknowledged as problematic in an extensive international literature. Sparke established that marginalisation of certain styles and practices, often underpinned by gender bias, occurred within an established “true canon” of modernism.⁹ She identified the characteristics of omitted practices as visual (decorative, ornamental and colourful) and occupational (the customised domestic decorating service provided by the innately “tasteful” practitioner). Anne Massey proposed that architecture’s eminence was derived from its oppositional status to the ephemerality of interior decoration, legitimised by the “fetishisation of permanence” found in the modern movement — a “Platonic perfection designed to last forever.”¹⁰ In recent years, John Potvin has called for greater academic recognition of queer theory as a neglected lens by which to reassess the relationship between interior design and decoration and phobic attitudes to homosexuality and effeminacy, and the historical legacy of derision on the preferences of the field of study.¹¹

The problems of marginalisation of interior designers and decorators by association with gender or as aesthetically oppositional to the modernist project are, arguably, two sides of the same historiographical problem. Derision of feminine practice is indivisible from the masculinity of modernism’s encroachment into the occupational territory of the interior.¹²

In Australia, despite some attention to interwar practitioners, mainly via legitimisation by association with fine arts or validation as “progressive,” documentation and critical evaluation of the occupation itself has been scant. Biographical models of recovery have been important in reclaiming the names of women designers, but, as Karen Burns and Lori Brown suggested for architects, these become absorbed into the canon, but do not necessarily change it.¹³

The comparatively understudied practices of the post-war decades in Australia were highly significant: economic expansion, migration and geopolitical shifts created new opportunities as consumption of designed interiors increased and the profession became organised and institutionalised.¹⁴ By 1971 SIDA listed 144 members in NSW alone: this crucial era for Australian interior design warrants far greater analysis.¹⁵ This review focuses on understanding the inclusions and omissions of the history of these practices and indicates possible methods for re-evaluation.

This article introduces selected historical literature on Australian domestic interior design and decoration in the post-war period of the 20^th-century. Interior design’s relationship to post-war architectural modernist agendas, its own overlooked primary sources and the impact of museum publications are considered in terms of the formation of the field. Recent scholarship reveals tenacious foundational narratives, but also new directions from researchers seeking to expand the field of study. While acknowledging the restrictive influences of architectural modernism on the formative development of interior design history, the potential causes for an ongoing paucity of publications and research are questioned more broadly. Can the observable omissions be explained by the manner in which incipient histories were formed? Within this bibliographical essay, particular attention is paid to the impact of institutional apparatuses on the emergence of inclusions and research gaps in the Australian context.

Connotations of elitism, “superficiality and high-style chic” and a perceived “lack of grand themes” as Peter McNeil observed, may have diminished scholarly enquiry – yet the omissions are not confined to upmarket, professionally design interiors.¹⁶ Working class and demotic interiors are also understudied, and a dearth of social histories of post-war home decoration is another facet of the same problem: where historical accounts of interiors occur, modernism still exerts a preferential influence, resulting in a highly selective record that obscures aesthetics and practices outside its orthodoxies. If modernism’s hierarchies are institutionally absorbed as part of an implicit “true canon” then universities and museums help maintain a status in which interiors are devalued and ignored, providing serious impediments to the development of new research.

As institutions have retreated from both ends of the interior design history spectrum, their attention has shifted, not even to the middle, but towards the concerns of contemporary practice. Deeper, carefully researched histories are challenging to produce in the context of universities’ straitened funding environment across the humanities. Museums which expanded the interior design canon in the late 20^th century have lately looked to fashion, sustainability and contemporary art, architecture, and craft commissions, often at the expense of historical enquiry.

The literature suggests the consequent absence in Australia of a seam of writing on interior design history such as can be found in Britain, Europe and the United States, exemplified by scholars such as Penny Sparke, Anne Massey, Deborah Sugg Ryan, Judy Whitfield, John Potvin and Alice T. Friedman, amongst others. Although interior design training transitioned to universities in Australia in the 1980s, bolstered academic status did not, evidently, amplify the historical literature. The “college” of Australian scholars who identify as design historians is small and, possibly affected by weak institutional and financial support, empirical research and theoretical writing has been concerned with places and practices outside Australia. Hence, although new directions have emerged, there is a continuing problem in Australia in the fundamental documentation of professional interior design activities, let alone academic engagement with the range of discourse found in wider international scholarship.

Literature: Origins and Frames of Reference

Prior to the late 1980s, literature on post-war interiors and furnishings was associated with decorative arts or adjunct to discursive texts on Australian architecture. Peter McNeil’s 1993 review represented the first survey of Australian interior design history: although confined to the interwar period, it remains foundational.¹⁷ McNeil found interior design’s position at the margins of art and architecture had resulted in object-based histories and writings by practitioners about practice “overridden with personal tastes and agendas.”¹⁸ The new field inherited models of connoisseurship, linear stylistic histories and selective heroicism privileging International Style modernism.¹⁹

McNeil identified that it was writings outside of these fields, especially feminist theory, which challenged the positioning of design, whose historical omission he attributed to occupational gendering as feminine. He argued that the interwar interior decoration field ̶ seen as amateur and intuitive, elided with domesticity, fashion and applied arts ̶ was trivialised and eventually demoted by the post-war rise of (male) architects designing interior spaces and furniture.²⁰ McNeil concluded that design history must embrace interdisciplinary approaches to offset decontextualization or risk becoming another orthodoxy.²¹

Attention to interwar decorators continues, enhanced by emphasis on their close relationship to the “legitimate” arts. Figures like Thea Proctor, Adrian Feint, Sam Atyeo, Hera Roberts, Fred Ward and Cynthia Reed are now routinely referenced as design practitioners whose interdisciplinary work included interiors.²² Locating interior design within interwar modernism has, however, proved a narrow fit in uncovering the wider commercial field operated by small retailers, large department stores and within architecture firms. On occasion, conventional narratives have been contested, such as by Nanette Carter in Savage Luxury:Modernist Design in Melbourne 1930–1939 (2007), McNeil’s chronology of Sydney’s earliest commercial studios and John McPhee’s positioning of Maie Casey’s contribution as a client of Ward.²³ Margaret Betteridge’s 2022 exhibition catalogue on Ruth Lane Poole’s 1928 interiors at The Lodge was unique in documenting an early advisory practitioner unsanctioned by modernist orthodoxies.²⁴ Carol Morrow’s 2005 PhD, a rare investigation extending into the immediate post-war years, identified Thea Proctor, Nora McDougall, Margaret Lord, Phyllis Shillito and Mary White as foundational to the advancement of Australian interior decoration; the culturally privileged Proctor aside, mainstream histories have not capitalised on Morrow’s research.²⁵ (Figure 2)

Figure 2. Phyllis Shillito enrolling students at East Sydney Technical College where she was Head of Design, c1940. Photograph National Art School archives.

Architectural History’s Impact

Writing the history of post-war interior design has been challenged by its problematic status relative to histories which advanced the authority of the architect, the supremacy of permanent structures and the dominance of modernism. Architecture’s self-appointed position of “natural” superiority took hold, argues Sparke, in a field of practice that involved substantial contributions by interior designers.²⁶

Australian architectural history itself was forged by practitioner-critics, with Robin Boyd in particular shaping architectural narratives in post-war Australia. Boyd’s privileged status as an expert on modernism and its history was underpinned by the authority of his prolific publishing.²⁷ His reformative public mission extended to suburban interiors and furnishings²⁸ in provocative writings teasing traditionalists, speculative builders and consumers, less for their lack of expertise than a nebulous quality, “taste.”²⁹ In a field lacking broader enquiry and analysis, Boyd’s writings assumed historical authority, proving central to considerations of aesthetic bias in the formation of histories which omitted the work of professional interior decorators.³⁰ This continues to shape scholarship into the 21^st century.

Beginning with Victorian Modern: One Hundred and Eleven Years of Modern Architecture in Australia (1947), Boyd’s pantheon was seminal to the inclusions that defined the historical development of modernism in the state.³¹ Goad contended that, in the absence of a documentary Australian history of architecture, Victorian Modern acted as a surrogate: a “landmark piece of selective architectural history.”³²

In Australia’s Home: Its Origins, Builders and Occupiers (1961), Boyd contrasted interwar “Stylism” with the modern movement as practised by a select few.³³ Goad argued the scornfully anti-middlebrow text which pitted so-called poor taste against the authority of the architect came “to be used as a history of Australian domestic architecture” in the absence of anything else on the subject.³⁴

Not only did Boyd’s framing of the field’s priorities dismiss (via omission) interior design practices, but modernism’s pre-eminence excluded any consideration of more decorative, historicist work that traversed a middle ground ̶ an exclusion related to his position on “Featurism.” The ironic term equating embellishment with dishonesty in design gained currency through The Australian Ugliness (1960).³⁵ Beyond materiality, Featurism was a complex “compression of ideas … aimed in various directions.”³⁶ Boyd’s targeting the “crust” of suburban culture implicated the modernist architectural agenda in setting the parameters for interior decoration’s relative status.³⁷ The two fields’ oppositional relationship was played out in Boyd’s advancement of Functionalism as the remedy for the visual clutter of cultural attitudes and architectural expression labelled “Stylism.”³⁸ Extending his critique to the clients of interior design – which in the post-war boom was led at the top end of the market by European Jewish migrants – aspirational decorating taste was positioned as an ornamental interference irreconcilable with the architect’s expertise.³⁹ Jewish migrant designers were notably absent from Boyd’s accounts to an extent that, McNeil has argued, masked their role as a “negative default position.”⁴⁰

This centralised rejection of ornamentation is evidence of a sustained marginalisation not only of those working outside Boyd’s preferred modernism, but more generally of interior decorators and their clients. Boyd’s positive “good design” and negative “taste” was simply another form of distinction – modern architecture as a higher status than middlebrow Australian suburban taste.⁴¹ The visual language of decorators whose fundamental practice method relied on the mediation of culture, historicism and ornamentation excluded them from the parameters of Boyd’s canon, which elevated progressive modernist architects over other practitioners and expressions of the modern interior. Although they dominated a field that lacked substantial publications, Boyd’s polemical “surrogate” histories were not a substitute for historical documentation. His model was highly selective and his allocation of bad taste as oppositional to good design is prejudicial. Histories of modern design and architecture eventuated, but Boyd was a dominant force in the selective framing of the canon.⁴²

Other post-war architecture practitioner critics such as Harry Seidler, Walter Bunning, Kenneth McConnel, Kenneth McDonald, Neil Clerehan and George Beiers have had an enduring impact on interior design histories, especially in their advancement of modernism’s pre-eminence and derision of decoration and ornament. This shaped historical literature selectively framed by architects, via professional and popular publications.

The Viennese born, North American-trained Seidler, a prolific and skilled communicator for the cause of modernism, was prominent in the press from 1948. Seidler supplied copy and images for popular magazines and published a volume of domestic commissions, Houses, Interiors, Projects (1954).⁴³ Staged photographs projected an authoritative model of the aesthetics of the modernist interior in the public imagination.⁴⁴ Bunning, also an architect, wrote for The Home, Art and Australia and the Sydney Morning Herald and his book Homes in the Sun: the Past, Present and Future of Australian Housing (1945), included a historical review. Echoing Boyd, Bunning criticised the taste of the “nouveau riche” whose “degenerate” houses used an “opulent façade as a symbol of their owner’s commercial success.”⁴⁵ Historical taste was expressly linked to ostentatious public expressions of new wealth.⁴⁶

Others, such as McConnel, attempted to find cohesion between historical architectural forms and contemporary practice.⁴⁷ Beier’s Houses of Australia (1948), also bid to contextualise contemporary practice within an historical tradition, illustrating interiors that showed diverse aesthetics ̶ though the decorators responsible remained anonymous.⁴⁸

JM Freeland’s Architecture of Australia: A History (1968), was the first to be understood as a critical history of the field.⁴⁹ Like Boyd and Bunning, he equated ornamentation with dishonesty, especially in the suburban house with pretensions to the modern, opposing the “brassy abandon” of historical and cultural references.⁵⁰ Although interior decoration bore the brunt of his criticism, no interior designers were included in Freeland’s account. Instead, houses by architects, especially Seidler, were given primary attention followed by Romberg, Grounds, Ancher, Baldwinson and Bunning. Like Boyd, Freeland did not distinguish between history and criticism of public taste in scrutinising the Australian home and interior as representations of individualism, wealth and status.

Key Australian architectural journals also record contemporary attitudes to interior design’s comparative relationship to architecture. Architecture and Arts claimed to be for “everyone concerned with the creation of houses.”⁵¹ In practice, both this magazine and Architecture, the journal of the Royal Australian Institute of Architects, assigned authorship of copiously illustrated domestic interiors to architects, while interior designers were routinely disregarded or trivialised.⁵² In 1950, for example, Architecture published the transcript of a public lecture to the NSW chapter of the RAIA by interior decorator Margaret Lord, in which, under provocative audience questioning Lord asserted that “most of the big architecture firms employ a decorator on their staff,” revealing the underlying bias of the professional journals. ⁵³ In both publications minimal, functional interiors, often with furniture by Eames, Saarinen and Hardoy represented the accepted appearance of the American influence on modern Australian homes.⁵⁴

Postwar architectural criticism set a pattern for later histories, in which the contrast between exterior and interior was seen as evidence of the gap between architectural modernism and decorating taste. In Charles Pickett and Caroline Butler-Bowdon’s Homes in the Sky (2007), an image of the Stanley Korman flat, ostensibly at Frederick Romberg’s Stanhill (1942–47), reduces the meaning of the decorated interior for architectural historians to an unaccountable paradox, the modern exterior implicitly superior over the apparently contradictory interiors, which seem to denote ignorance or lack of sophistication on the part of the client.⁵⁵ (Figure 3). That the interior referred to was not located in Stanhill but in the Kormans’ home in Rameta flats nearby somewhat diminishes the line of argument.⁵⁶ Many decorated interiors, such as by Melbourne’s Reg Riddell for example, could just as easily be dismissed as conflicting with the modern buildings containing them (Figure 4).⁵⁷ Recent international design history writing has shown that closer investigations can lead to a meaningful recognition of the “boundary zones” of soft furnishings’ intersection with functionalist buildings, but the allowance of this kind of ambivalence is difficult to find in an Australian discourse where Boyd’s implicit prejudices still hold intellectual sway.⁵⁸

Figure 3. Stanley and Sylvia Korman at their home at Rameta flats, 67 Queen’s Road, Melbourne. They were clients of Melbourne furniture store Berkowitz and later, of Noel Coulson. Photograph by Wolfgang Sievers, National Library of Australia.

Figure 4. Advertisement for Riddell Interiors from George Beiers’ Houses of Australia, 1948, showing a modern flat’s “boundary zone” where architecture meets the “soft” interventions of the decorator’s furnishings.

Interior Design Historical Commentary

The popular press remains the greatest resource on post-war Australian interior design. Numerous articles on home decoration, including many professionally designed interiors, were published in magazines and newspapers aimed squarely at homemakers, in which reporting frequently centred on the client and their lifestyle. Unlike the architectural press, which profoundly shaped ensuing historical preferences, interior decorating magazines and books have had far less impact on canonical narratives, arguably diminished by their status as consumed by women and homemakers and their more measured attitudes to aesthetic variety. Australian post-war interior design publications have rarely been studied for their potential to document and analyse the profession, its clients or commissions. This despite extensive and accessible public collections, and an established international scholarship on household advice and domestic economy manuals, retail catalogues and their relationship to consumption, etiquette, taste and social change.⁵⁹ Household advice to the DIY homemaker was, however, only one function of Australian interiors publications; in presenting images of a variety of professionally designed homes, they occupied a space between household manuals and upmarket American magazines such as The House Beautiful and Architectural Digest, which were available in Australia’s capital cities but had no local equivalent.⁶⁰ The aspirational qualities of home décor magazines were highly significant, exposing Australian readers to the desirable, if unaffordable; their role in taste formation at all levels of the market, as well as community attitudes to the value of professional design, has been underestimated in histories shaped by architectural literature. In contrast to modernism’s shift away from aristocratic models of taste formation observed by Grace Lees-Maffei in Britain, Australian publications often documented the sharp trajectories of post-war migrant parvenus, who funded some of the most extensive professionally designed domestic interiors ridiculed in the architectural press. These publications were not solely consumed by householders whose choices were, as Lees-Maffei characterised, “everyday, amateur,”⁶¹ rather, in the Australian context in which interior designers had no professional journal, decorator archives demonstrate that home magazines and books were closely followed as records of their field.⁶² While internationally scholars have focused on the narrative values of comparable publications, I would argue that the selected key sources outlined here have research value in terms of the fundamental documentation of the field, which in itself might challenge the canon of designed interiors.

Some of the key commentators from the late 1940s to the 1970s were Nora McDougall, who wrote for The Australian Women’s Weekly, Beryl Guertner, editor of House and Garden, Mary White, editor of Australian Home Journal, Steven Kalmar, who had a weekly column in Sydney’s Sunday Telegraph and Babette Hayes, design editor of Australian Home Journal, the Australian Women’s Weekly and Belle. Other magazines also published articles and pictorial features on home interiors, especially New Idea, Woman’s Day and Vogue Australia, which launched Vogue Living in 1967.

Books on interior decoration also increased in Australia in the 1940s. McDougall authored 12 advice booklets on planning and decorating the home, Guertner edited more than 30 volumes on houses, furnishings and gardens and Kalmar published You and Your Home (1964). Margaret Lord’s Interior Decoration, a Guide to Furnishing the Australian Home (1944) and An Interior Decorator’s World (1969), were popular publications.⁶³ Clive Carney wrote three significant books, beginning with Furnishing Art and Practice (1950).⁶⁴ International Interiors and Design and Impact of Design (1959), reflected Carney’s observations of modern design made during international buying trips, where he commissioned hundreds of photographs to bring overseas work to Australian readers.⁶⁵

Guertner aside, these authors were all interior design practitioners. McDougall trained and worked in New York in the 1920s before returning to Australia to practise, write and teach.⁶⁶ Lord studied at London’s Central School and enjoyed a stellar career designing international exhibitions and ocean liners.⁶⁷ Hungarian architect Kalmar was a successful furniture designer and retailer.⁶⁸ A founding member of SIDA, White ran a renowned design school.⁶⁹ Carney, an interior decorator since 1933, owned Artistry, a Sydney studio and wholesale furnishing importer, a lynchpin in mediating American products to Australians. Hammersmith Art College-trained Hayes opened a Sydney interior design consultancy in 1975, while continuing her successful magazine career.⁷⁰

Collectively, the agenda pursued by this group of writers was comparatively broad: the elevation of standards of professional design. McDougall advocated for a popular modernism based on principles of peacefulness and appropriateness, comfort and contentment, economy and purpose.⁷¹ Guertner used images of professionally designed interiors to encourage readers to be “their own decorator.”⁷² Kalmar’s columns provided practical inspiration for the homemaker, emphasising “functional and affordable modernity.”⁷³ Carney admired the light airiness of functionalism, but rejected “Swedish” modernism, believing a “little inartistic blonde wood furniture” in bare white rooms unsuitable for Australia.⁷⁴ In Interior Decoration Lord advocated five principles which O’Callaghan argued shaped “good design” marketing in Australia in the 1950s. O’Callaghan also identified as significant Australian Home Beautiful’s endorsement of the “contemporary style” for consumers wanting to align living environment with the modern world.⁷⁵

In contrast to the architect/critics, the Australian home decoration press expressed a wide-ranging interpretation of what constituted a modern interior (Figure 5). Australian House and Garden, for example, advised on planning a minimalist interior, but also suggested “Queen Anne” furnishings for readers reacting against “purism and starkness.”⁷⁶ Instructions on modernising old furniture were popular, but the magazine also published British American designer TH Robsjohn-Gibbings’ hilarious plea to cease the practice: “from Melbourne came news of a handrail made from an old gun with bayonet attached.”⁷⁷

Figure 5. Exhibition rooms by the Society of Interior Designers document the range of styles considered “contemporary” by both professional decorators and the popular magazines that published their work. Sun Herald Colour Supplement, 1955.

House and Garden defined modernity by its lack of clutter, simple furniture, absence of old architectural ornament, open plan layout and large windows. Eclecticism was recommended as an antidote to pre-war austere modernism, colour as a means of expression of personality and the interior space as an opportunity for individual distinction.⁷⁸ By the 1960s modernity was linked with advancing technology in intercom systems, air conditioning and roof construction, compatible with pastel colours, chinoiserie coffee tables and glamorous dressing table suites.⁷⁹

Books for home decorators also published a greater variety of work by architects and interior designers. Guertner’s Australian Book of Furnishing and Decorating (1966), illustrated interiors by Leslie Walford, Reg Riddell, Jim Schwartzman, John Bown, Decor Associates and Sue and Graeme Over, including traditional and ornamental homes.⁸⁰ Kalmar’s You and Your Home, recognised as important by Anne Watson as a record of the more “adventurous (Sydney) domestic architecture and interiors,” also included disparate styles by Merle du Boulay, Barbara McKewan, Joyce Tebbutt, Dick van Leer and Walford.⁸¹

Babette Hayes’ survey volumes of contemporary interiors, Australian Style (1970) (with April Hersey) and Design for Living in Australia (1978) were highly significant. In a departure from other literature, Australian Style located interior designers as contributors to national cultural formation, rather than as models for home decorators. (Figure 6).

Figure 6. Babette Hayes’ Australian Style, 1970, one of the most overlooked resources on Australian professional interior design, with copious illustrations and a sophisticated text. The Best Style, by Michaela Richards, which coincided with the HHT exhibition I curated on Marion hall best in 1993.

Directly addressing Boyd’s critical taste narrative, Hayes contended that “as many ducks flew across the walls of houses in Scandinavia and London as Bondi” and that Australian interiors had grown from their “brash” boomtime origins “to show an unmistakable panache.” ⁸² In Design for Living in Australia, Hayes’ explicit goals were to “make the work of designers and architects better known” and to illustrate as much variety as possible in terms of style and taste, which Hayes argued was a “healthy sign.”⁸³

Australian Style could have acted as a road map for later histories, but the literature drew selectively on potential sources. Key archives exist in public collections and Design Art, Australia Online provides foundational entries, yet research on Barry Little, Neville Marsh, Leslie Walford, Reg Riddell, John Andersson, Graeme Over, Russell Whitechurch and Hayes herself is yet to be done.⁸⁴ The names in Design for Living fared no better: Cabana, Janne Faulkner, Ron Sabien, Marsh Freedman, Ray Siede and Decor Associates escaped attention. In contrast, Hayes’ featured architects — Harry Seidler, Robin Boyd, Ken Woolley and Neville Gruzman — became integral to historical narratives.

These publications, particularly Hayes’ and Carney’s under-researched writings, are rich documentary sources that offer perspectives on post-war interiors as yet unexploited by mainstream architectural and design historians. Scholars may still be affected by the same aesthetic and occupational biases that informed English design luminary Dick Russel, who baulked at Carney’s “fashionable cosmopolitan decorator’s interior, strongly traditional, softly luxurious, cluttered up with second-rate objects.”⁸⁵ In comparison to architecture, the interests of post-war design writers did not transfer to historical scholarship. A broader Australian interior design history is yet to be written: these sources are important indicators, not only of potential territory, but of the value of a local context in which writers embraced a catholic view of the modern interior.

Early Critical Perspectives on Design History

In Australia in the 1980s some art academics began writing critically about design history, a shift that implicated interiors, but also recognised inherited narratives. In 1983 Terry Smith, then a University of Sydney lecturer, described Australian art conventions’ dependence on repetitive formats and underlying assumptions about what was important. Despite the expansion of types of cultural production considered worthy of academic study, a preference for modernity had eclipsed “all other concerns.”⁸⁶ Smith called for a more enquiring approach with potential to escape dominant definitions in art criticism and history.

Tony Fry’s Design History Australia (1988), was identified by Daniel Huppatz as a key text in an empty field.⁸⁷ Like Smith a Power Institute of Fine Arts academic, Fry advocated for design history to be “posited in a larger and more complex history … .of a culture and its political economy.”⁸⁸ Models of connoisseurship, canonisation and the evolutionary progression histories of Nikolaus Pevsner’s Pioneers of Modern Design (1960) and Reyner Banham’s Theory and Design in the First Machine Age (1980), were critiqued.⁸⁹ Prefacing Fry’s Old Worlds New Visions (1989), Anne-Marie Willis indicated that despite the emergence of new agendas, “disciplinary differences rather than commonality of scholarship” had resulted.⁹⁰

Museums Strengthen the Canon

Such tensions between connoisseurship and social context have tended to confine design history.⁹¹ Literature produced by art museums came from an environment determined by traditional priorities of the decorative arts. Legitimacy defined “through the lens of production,” was criticised by Trevor Keeble for ignoring “the interior as a social and material lived reality.”⁹² Valorisation was as contentious in Australia, Fry censuring Sydney’s MAAS’ “great men, great object, great stories syndrome.”⁹³ However, Fry’s perspective from 1988 on the newly reopened museum underestimated the impact over the following decade from the MAAS social history unit (since dissolved), which brought valuable contextual histories to interpretations of design. Both the MAAS and Fry retreated from engagement with interior design history in the intervening years, where both had been influential on Australian discourse.

In the emergent Australian field conceived within state art galleries in the 1980s, however, curators’ advocacy in associating furnishings with fine art proved a fruitful strategy for inclusion. Writings by National Gallery of Australia decorative arts curator John McPhee played an important role drawing together disparate design, furniture and craft collections.⁹⁴ McPhee asserted post-war furnishings’ validity within an openly declared hierarchy in which the superior positions were occupied by painting and sculpture.⁹⁵ An extensive curatorial literature on cabinetmaker Schulim Krimper also used the language of connoisseurship to represent furniture within a privileged order.⁹⁶ In this context, Terence Lane’s National Gallery of Victoria chronological survey, Featherston Chairs (1988), was momentous in positioning the historical place of a living, post-war furniture designer. Situating Featherston’s clientele as architects and “anyone with aspiration to ‘good design,’” however, continued the selective historical framing of modern taste.⁹⁷

Museum catalogues were highly influential as the only substantial references on Australian post-war designers. Their context is central to their historical positioning, given curators working within public art galleries were obliged to argue for the value of Australian design – particularly from the 20^th century – at a time when acceptance of their collecting was recent and tenuous.

In the 1990s the Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences (MAAS) expanded scholarship as exhibitions generated new literature on post-war furnishings, if mainly contingent on international movements and qualitative value.⁹⁸ Nevertheless, there was a meaningful shift towards inclusion of interiors.⁹⁹

The major MAAS book The Australian Dream: Design of the Fifties (1993), was the first to survey the territory of post-war design by addressing the social and economic aspects of post-war housing, drawing on contemporary magazines, professional organisations and government agencies. New technologies, craft practices, architects, designers and furnishings were addressed in terms of modernism’s relationship to societal “dreams” of home ownership and prosperity. The history of the modern interior in Australia was contextualised according to the post-war housing boom, mass production, affordability, innovation and mass media.¹⁰⁰

The Australian Dream brought attention to furniture designers Fred Lowen, Douglas Snelling, Gordon Andrews, Clement Meadmore, Paul Kafka, Grant Featherston and Schulim Krimper; textile producers Claudio Alcorso, Frances Burke, Eclarte and Annan; architects Robin Boyd and Harry Seidler and decorator Marion Hall Best. The paucity of literature on the subject rendered these selections crucial in forming the historical canon.

A discussion of post-war interiors in Modern Times: The Untold Story of Modernism in Australia (2008), also emphasised themes of progression, innovation, mass production and craft, repeating the by then well-established canonical names. The broader interior design profession and its clients were, however, overlooked as key contributors to designed spaces.¹⁰¹ The framing of Australian interior design in relation to modernism reflected the tenacity of the approach criticised by Fry, even in publications which consciously sought to widen the field.

The Impact of the Historic Interiors Field

In the 1980s interpretation of historic houses began to address 20^th-century furnishings as layers of occupancy, with the Historic Houses Trust of NSW (later Sydney Living Museums, rebadged Museums of History in 2023), shaping a view of interiors as environments with multiple agents.¹⁰²

Into this environment, Howard Tanner situated decorators relative to architecture at the 1983 historic interiors conference. At the same symposium, curator James Broadbent disputed qualitative aesthetic judgement as the apparatus by which to study historic interiors, arguing that climate, occupants’ social background and aspiration were essential to analysis. Broadbent asserted integrity of historical evidence and understanding the lifestyles that produced variety in interior spaces as scholarly principles.¹⁰³

At the Historic Houses Trust (HHT), the government body established in 1980 to conserve and interpret colonial houses, interiors and gardens, the donation in 1988 of the modernist Rose Seidler house by then living architect, Harry Seidler, prompted discussions about positioning of 20^th-century design history. Broadbent raised the potential for the acquisition to compromise the integrity of historical breadth in documenting the post-war Australian house, without which the Seidler house’s “spare international furnishings” had no context.¹⁰⁴

The Caroline Simpson Library and Research Collection (CSL&RC), which I curated with Broadbent, was established by the HHT in 1989, eschewing connoisseurship and notions of “good design,” to collect a broad range of furnishings from Australian houses.¹⁰⁵ It remains an important public access resource on interior design. Exhibition catalogues initially presented histories of anonymous furnishings from suburban and rural houses from the 1920s and 1930s, rather than professional interior decoration.¹⁰⁶ However, publications on post-war furnishings, Gordon Andrews, Marion Hall Best and Florence Broadhurst endorsed the newly forming canon.¹⁰⁷ HHT articles on the Rose Seidler house stressed the value of its international furniture collection as “one of the finest and purist [sic] examples” of modernism.¹⁰⁸

My exhibition catalogue for Sydney Style (1993), positioned Best as Australia’s most influential interior designer of the 20^th century. In an explicit claim for interior designers’ status in the cultural landscape, it concluded “more pervasively than any architect, Marion Best helped form a sophisticated postwar identity for Sydney.” ¹⁰⁹ Michaela Richards’ The Best Style (1993) is significant as the most extensive study yet published on an Australian decorator. (Figure 6). Best’s legitimacy as a cultural producer, contingent on recognition as a “colour artist” reflected the constraints of Richards’ art historical approach.¹¹⁰ Analysis asserting Best’s modernity as unique amongst her peers reduced her fellow decorators to purveyors of “period styles,” misrepresented the modern interior’s real scope.¹¹¹ Without a comparative historical survey of the profession, Best’s elevation via these two key publications and major exhibition, lacked context and the variety of modern interiors in Australia was left uncanvassed.

HHT curator Michael Bogle became a leading scholar beginning with Design in Australia, 1880–1970 (1998), and Designing Australia: Readings in Australian Design (2002). These key publications drew scholarship away from “decorative arts, industrial arts and the applied arts” as Bogle situated interior decoration in discussions of social change, consumption, mass media, fashionability, artistic networks and professional development.¹¹² Both books featured the inductees of the post-war design canon, but McNeil’s essay in the 2002 reader pointed to areas of potential to expand the field.¹¹³

Recent literature has cemented the priorities established in the 1980s. Kirsty Grant’s NGA catalogue Mid-century Modern (2014), 21 years on from The Australian Dream, offered an opportunity to publish new research.¹¹⁴ A focus on canonical furniture designers, however, limited exposition of the wider interior design field. “Design hero” histories continued to be characteristic in the 21^st-century, with publications on Grant Featherston, Fred Ward, Douglas Snelling, Clement Meadmore and Frances Burke each positioning aspects of modernist interiors in relation to architectural or industrial design practice.¹¹⁵

The CSL&RC, has, however, continued to explore variety in Australian interior design. The online series Recorded for the Future: Documenting NSW Homes has analysed 44 domestic interiors, many of which included post-war layers, challenging the idea of a single author and date of creation.¹¹⁶ My three essays on SIDA published online by the HHT were the first attempt at a history of interior decorators’ post-war professionalisation.¹¹⁷

However, Museums of History NSW, once a notable publisher on interiors, has for the last decade engaged with a variety of digital and installation outputs and, as its exhibition programmes have shrunk, so have its important documentary and discursive catalogues. Museums like this, previously opening new territory via exhibitions have cemented greater affiliation with contemporary practice, and their contribution to an ongoing interior design history literature has slowed. Broadbent’s alarm bell for the power of a single architectural agenda to govern interior design narratives remains salutary as modernism has dominated historical positioning of Australian post-war interiors. With the Museums of History’s second iteration of touring exhibitions and recurrent references in art history volumes concerned with design, Marion Hall Best now acts as a default point of reference for the entire post-war interior design field.¹¹⁸ Understanding the complexities of the resultant research gaps should be central to any scholarship that aims to challenge canonical histories.

Recent Australian Scholarship

Investigations into the impact and significance of post-war diaspora have been notable in expanding Australian interior design histories into new territory. Rebecca Hawcroft’s The Other Moderns: Sydney’s Forgotten European Design Legacy (2017), was identified as “important” in extending research with comparative value for international scholarship.¹¹⁹ The book and exhibition documented once-prominent designers eclipsed by selective post-war histories because their work, Hawcroft argued, did not fit the “purity” of International Style modernism. This had led to the “forgetting” of large numbers of European designers in favour of Seidler and Romberg, beginning with Boyd and continuing in key architectural and design histories.¹²⁰ McNeil later attributed this selectivity to Boyd’s “cultural-nationalist position on Australian taste.”¹²¹

The Other Moderns assumed a more complex understanding of the aesthetics of the modern interior than conventionally allowed, departing from previous emphasis on the Bauhaus and the “legitimate” arts.¹²² In my chapter on Gerstl Furniture, a Sydney custom cabinetry firm run by Viennese refugees, the idea that the canon’s limits are naturally confined by lack of evidence was contested through archival research and client and designer testimonies. (Figure 7).¹²³

Figure 7. Sydney Living Museums exhibition “The Moderns” curated by Rebecca Hawcroft, 2017. My chapter in the accompanying book provided the research for this setting of furnishings from the Schwartz house, Rose Bay, NSW, designed by Georges Reves and made by M.Gerstl furniture in 1957. Portrait of Magda Schwartz by Judy Cassab.

Under Harriet Edquist’s direction, the RMIT Design Archive Journal also published on the impact of European migrant architects engaged in interior and furniture design.¹²⁴ My 2015 analysis of the clientele of Schulim Krimper challenged oversimplified views of design consumption.¹²⁵ HHT librarian Megan Martin brought to light Hungarian designer Emeric Revesz’s “Viennese easy living” interior at a garden pavilion outside Sydney in 1957.¹²⁶ Émigré patrons were mapped in Alan Pert’s Ernest Fooks: the House Talks Back (2016), even if reaffirming an orthodox assumption that migrant clients’ had a culturally natural affinity with European modernism.¹²⁷ In Bauhaus Diaspora and Beyond (2019), Harriet Edquist acknowledged interior design courses taught by Phyllis Shillito and Mary White in Sydney and Frederick Sterne and George Kral in Melbourne.¹²⁸ Perth interior designer David Foulkes Taylor’s inclusion for a brief schoolboy contact with Ludwig Hirschfeld-Mack illustrated the ways architectural histories legitimise other design practices.¹²⁹ His mention also reminds us of the potential for research into professionals and commissions beyond the Sydney/Melbourne networks. As recent research by Georgina Downey and James Curry on Adelaide houses has shown, de-centralising design is fundamental to uncover practices in minimally studied arenas.¹³⁰ In New Zealand’s meagre literature on interior design history, Douglas Lloyd Jenkins’ At Home: A Century of New Zealand Design (2005), aimed for an overview of domestic design as yet unpublished in Australia.¹³¹ The volume nevertheless highlights the impact of systematic historiographical invisibility: in foregrounding furniture manufacture, retail and architects’ authority over the modern interior, professional decorators are all but omitted.

Interdisciplinary frameworks also modelled new directions, reflecting the international design history field, where leading scholars “blur” the divisions between architectural and design history.¹³² Lewi and Goad’s Australia Modern (2019), expressed a broader mandate towards interiors and furniture. O’Callaghan’s essay on Australian interior design, responding in part to my 2014 article on Noel Coulson, was the first in a major architectural survey to call architectural historians’ attention to a modernity whose diverse expressions “resist easy categorisation.”¹³³ (Figure 8).

Figure 8. Living room of 21-year-old newlywed Aviva and husband Leon Korman, Stanhill Flats, Melbourne, 1955. Interior design by Noel Coulson, then the biggest client of Clive Carney, who published the image in International Interiors, 1959. Photograph by Athol Shmith.

Scholars researching beyond the orthodoxies of a prescriptive modernism are broadly concerned with “multiple modernities” — the reversal of the idea of a homogenous globalisation of Western European modernity.¹³⁴ Hawcroft’s “other moderns” expressed the outsider status of mid-century European refugees, but the term additionally denoted interior design beyond the privileged historical mainstream. Kirkham and Weber viewed “other modernisms” as the humanistic, organic and whimsical expressions of designers who found “capital M” modernism too “aesthetically prescriptive.”¹³⁵ Few scholars have reached into Australian expressions of this “other,” represented by increasingly casual mid-century North American interiors involving a personal “juxtaposing of disparate objects” representing diverse historical, ethnographical and geographical associations.¹³⁶ This related to, but did not resemble, the “fashionable cultural pluralism” exemplified by the Eames’ democratic mix of old and new, in which found objects humanised modernist living spaces.¹³⁷

O’Callaghan has declared that interior designers like George Surtees warranted attention despite falling “outside a conventional understanding of ‘the modern’ or ‘contemporary.’”¹³⁸ But despite questioning of the modernist architectural agenda elsewhere, in the context of Australian interiors, my research on Coulson or by Simon Reeves on Holgar and Holgar represent rare publications.¹³⁹ The recently emerging body of Australian literature on émigré designers (the term itself a romanticising and legitimising label) has arguably dealt in the main with recovering the histories of practitioners fitting a congenial narrative of modern design with established connections to canonical European design centres. But the kind of eclecticism defiant of O’Callaghan’s “easy categorisation” has seldom been considered in its post-war iteration of highly glamorous, cosmopolitan interiors that, for many clients of Australian interior designers, came to define an American touchstone for the modern interior.¹⁴⁰

In 2022 a special issue of Fabrications titled “Looking Inside Design,” aimed to “unearth” richer and more complex histories of the built environment by inviting research that embraced a cross-disciplinary relevance.¹⁴¹ A study of Loti and Victor Smorgon’s commissioning of Melbourne architect and decorator, Noel Coulson, demonstrated how histories of migrant taste and consumption reveal new meanings about previously dismissed decorative aesthetics, documenting the complex mediatory and productive characteristics of interior design practices.¹⁴² This article was developed from research from my 2021 PhD thesis, the first since Morrow to address professionally designed Australian interiors in the post-war decades.¹⁴³. Looking beyond the “geographic universality” of Seidler’s internationalist aesthetic, and Boyd’s definition of a preferred American architecture “far removed from the satin-smooth modernism of Hollywood,” to the experiences and aspirations of clients of interior design, a re-evaluation of aesthetics which fall outside conventional histories’ narrow definition of the modern is explained. (Figures 9 and Figures 10).¹⁴⁴ This research not only adds fundamental documentation about decorators to a scant existing literature, but also engages with client-centred methodologies well established in international studies, such as by Alice T. Friedman, but rarely seen in Australian design history writing.¹⁴⁵

Figure 9. Sir Warwick and Lady (Mary) Fairfax at their Bondi beach house, interiors by Decor Associates, 1967. Photograph by Kerry Dundas for Vogue Australia.

Figure 10. Interior by Decor Associates for Darby and Kate Munro, with strategically fanned copies of Architectural Digest. Photograph by David Beal, 1970. National Library of Australia.

That international surveys have taken so little account of Australian interior design history shows that the slight nature of this seam of history writing has hampered visibility of compelling post-war narratives with potential to enrich discourse on interiors. Kirkham and Weber’s History of Design (2013), which explicitly aimed to address “broad geo-cultural introductions,” conceded the absence of Australia/Oceania.¹⁴⁶ In World History of Design (2015), Victor Margolin’s inclusion of Australia interwar decorators grouped them with New Zealand and Canada in an uneasy Commonwealth framework, in research entirely drawn from secondary sources.¹⁴⁷ Daniel Huppatz, in the Bloomsbury Encyclopedia of Design (2016), highlighted Marion Hall Best and Margaret Lord, but his summary was dominated by canonical furniture designers. Nevertheless, Huppatz argued that Australian histories, though little known, had much to offer debates on the colonial, national and global contexts of design production and consumption.¹⁴⁸ In a necessarily condensed chronological overview of Australian design and design history in 2022, Huppatz drew attention to the need to challenge the modernist ideal of value and object-based histories of designers, via methodologies that address issues of colonial legacy and design’s problematic relationship with Indigenous culture.¹⁴⁹

Amongst negligible international scholarship, new research on Australian interiors periodically surfaced: McNeil’s influential 1997 article in Art History on interwar women decorators, O’Callaghan’s Interiors article on staged 1960s and 1970s display homes and Charles Rice’s complex analysis of the Rose Seidler house, all stitched Australian post-war interiors into global debates.¹⁵⁰ Adding to an extensive literature on Nordic design, the relatively unstudied Australian retail interiors context, with its potential to enrich discussions of post-war transnational exchange, is addressed in a forthcoming book chapter by Mark Ian Jones. ¹⁵¹ Jones foregrounds interior designers Margaret Lord and Joyce Brown in a discussion of consumer mediation of Scandinavian products, albeit the decorators’ role is confined to their writings rather than practice. These are, nevertheless, rare instances where Australian content has gained traction within academic publications on global themes.

This is not to say that Australian interior design historians, though small in number, are not active or influential on international scholarship. Huppatz, Rice, Downey and Mark Taylor, who are all based in Australia but professionally enmeshed with global academia, have made important contributions that are theoretically innovative and help connect architectural discourse to interiority.¹⁵² Taylor and Downey’s recent publications alone represent the most substantial Australian incursion into international scholarship on domestic interior design history to date.¹⁵³ However, Downey’s valuable Adelaide exhibition publications notwithstanding, the potential for their insight and analysis to expand or subvert the literature of Australia interior design history has not yet been brought to bear. That leading interior design scholars write so sparingly on Australian interiors is an institutional problem that warrants contemplation, not only by our academy, with its poor record of funding of Australian design history, but also by the international field, which routinely expects a measure of justification for writings on so-called “peripheries” arguably incommensurate with expectations of the implicit value of research on its own Eurocentric “centres.”

Conclusion

The knowledge gap in Australian interior design history, it must be acknowledged, extends to almost the entire field of practice. At issue is paucity of research, but also conformity to a value-informed pattern shaped by intellectual and institutional limitations: that what warrants study in design history should ascribe to a specific and narrow visual idiom. Literature emphasising valorised modernist designers is predicated on preferential hierarchies excluding practitioners by virtue of their occupational method – interior designers and decorators chief amongst them.

In Australia, the early restrictive narratives that shaped the field meant that no historical critical analysis of the full range of practices developed. Survey histories and encyclopaedias are yet to be researched let alone published. The absence of context for the stars of Australian design undermines the strength of these narratives, in meagre contrast to art or architectural histories. Redressing histories of women practitioners as “pioneer” and exceptional has acted as a form of recalibrating the heroic; the investigative paradigms themselves require change to understand interiors as collaborative spaces made by multiple contributors. Huppatz and O’Callaghan may have called for other viewpoints and other methods, but this literature review demonstrates this has not come to fruition in Australia. Diasporic and client histories have produced fresh knowledge and perspectives, but many other ways of conceptualising interior design, such as the relationship between queer identity and professional practice, or the labour history of furnishing production are untapped, but potentially fruitful in the Australian context.

The implication of this review is that behind the intellectual frameworks that have restricted its development, the social apparatus must be accountable for the pattern of incremental gnawing, rather than the cleaving exposition of vast historical territory concerned with home, identity, design and industry. Arguably, interior design as an industry and profession should be more actively invested in historical documentation; universities must address a paltry record of higher degree research; museums need to consider their earlier impactful publications and the implications of the decline in published, historically contextualised research and interpretation of interior design. There is capacity via alternative methodologies and more inclusive themes, not only to broaden, deepen and internationalise, but to change the parameters of Australian histories of interior design.

Acknowledgments

This paper is drawn from the author’s PhD thesis at UNSW Sydney, which was funded by a Commonwealth Research Training Scholarship. My thanks to my supervisors Dr Paul Hogben and Dr Judith O’Callaghan.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Howard Tanner, “Interior Design of the 20th Century,” in Historic Interiors: A Collection of Papers, ed. Maisy Stapleton (Glebe, NSW: Sydney College of the Arts Press, 1983), 64.

2. Catriona Quinn, “Margo’s Interior Design Practice,” in Margo Lewers: No Limits (Mosman, NSW: Grasstree Press, 2022), 83–121.

3. Sing D’Arcy, “Sky-High Ambitions: Sydney’s Restaurants,” in Leisure Space: The Transformation of Sydney 1945–1970, ed. Paul Hogben and Judith O’Callaghan (Sydney: NewSouth Publishing, 2014), 105–107; Peter O’Brien, Ralph Rembel, Sam Marshall, Davina Jackson and Billi Hayes, “George Freedman: Interior Architect 1936–2016.” accessed April 26, 2023, https://georgefreedman.com

4. Michaela Richards, The Best Style: Marion Hall Best and Australian Interior Design, 1935–1975 (East Roseville, NSW: Craftsman House, 1993).

5. Penny Sparke, “The Modern Interior: A Place, a Space or a Matter of Taste?,” Interiors 1, no. 1 (2010): 8. https://doi.org/10.2752/204191210791602276.

6. Penny Sparke, “Introduction,” in Interior Design and Identity, ed. Susie McKellar and Penny Sparke (Manchester, New York: Manchester University Press, 2004), 4; John Potvin, “The Velvet Masquerade: Fashion, Interior Design and the Furnished Body,” in Fashion, Interior Design and the Contours of Modern Identity, ed. Alla Myzelev and John Potvin (Abingdon, Oxon, New York: Routledge, 2016), 1; Anne Massey, “Ephemeral,” in Interior Wor(l)ds, ed. Chiara Rubessi et al. (Torino: U. Allemandi, 2010), 161.

7. Daniel Huppatz, “Reframing Australian Design History,” 216; Daniel Huppatz, “Theses on Australian Design,” The Design History Australia Research Network, accessed October 10, 2017, http://dharn.org.au/theses-on-australian-design/showed the few dissertations to address interior design did so from the margins of architectural history, craft or through gender as the primary perspective.

8. The terms interior designer and interior decorator are understood according to post-war Australian usage, concurrently and interchangeably denoting the same service, captured by the Society of Interior Designers of Australia (SIDA) as “the planning and advisory for whole interiors.” Catriona Quinn, “SIDA: Advocate and Caretaker for a New Profession: The Society of Interior Designers of Australia (SIDA) And Its Role as a Professional Body.” accessed May 8, 2023. https://mhnsw.au/stories/general/sida-advocate-and-caretaker-new-profession/.

9. Penny Sparke, As Long as it’s Pink: The Sexual Politics of Taste (London: Pandora, 1995), 2–3.

10. Massey, “Ephemeral,” 161.

11. See, for example, John Potvin, Bachelors of a Different Sort - Queer Aesthetics, Material Culture and the: Queer Aesthetics, Material Culture and the Modern Interior in Britain (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015); John Potvin, “The Pink Elephant in the Room: What Ever Happened to Queer Theory in the Study of Interior Design 25 Years on?” Journal of Interior Design 41, no. 1 (2016): 5–12. https://doi.org/10.1111/joid.12068.

12. Peter McNeil, “Designing Women: Gender, Sexuality and the Interior Decorator, c 1890–1940.” Art History 17, no 4 (1997): 101. https://doi.org/10.111/j1467–8365.1994.tb00599.x.

13. Karen Burns, Karen and Lori Brown, “Telling Transnational Histories of Women in Architecture, 1960–2015,” Architectural Histories 8, no.1, Article 15 (2020): 1,6.

14. Paul Hogben and Judith O’Callaghan, “Leisure in Sydney During ‘The Long Boom,’” in Leisure Space: The Transformation of Sydney 1945–1970, eds. Paul Hogben and Judith O’Callaghan (Sydney: NewSouth Publishing, 2014), 25.

15. Catriona Quinn, “The Society of Interior Designers of Australia (SIDA): An Introduction to the Founding, Role and Objectives of SIDA.” accessed May 8, 2023, https://mhnsw.au/stories/general/society-interior-designers-australia-sida.

16. Peter McNeil, “Designing Women: Gender, Sexuality and the Interior Decorator, c 1890–1940.” Art History 17, no. 4 (December 1994): 631.

17. Peter McNeil, “Designing Women: Gender, Modernism and Interior Decoration in Sydney, c1920–1940” (Master’s diss., Australian National University, 1993). https://openresearch-repository.anu.edu.au/bitstream/1885/11028/4/McNeil_P_1993.pdf.

18. Peter McNeil, “Rarely Looking in: The Writing of Australian Design History, C. 1900–1990,” Journal of Australian Studies 19, no. 44 (1995): 48. https://doi.org/10.1080/14443059509387217.

19. Peter McNeil, “What’s the Matter? The Object in Australian Art History.” Journal of Art Historiography 1, no. 4: 2.

20. McNeil, “Designing Women” 101.

21. Ibid., 28.

22. For example, Gitte Weise, “En Garde: Hera Roberts and the Burdekin House Exhibition,” in Sydney Moderns: Art for a New World, eds. Deborah Edwards and Denise Mimmocchi (Sydney: Art Gallery of New South Wales, 2013), 126.

23. Nanette Carter, Savage Luxury: Modernist Design in Melbourne 1930–1939 (Bulleen, Vic: Heide Museum of Modern Art, 2007); John McPhee, “Modern Melbourne Interiors: Fred Ward and Sam Atyeo,” in Brave New World: Australia 1930s, eds. Isobel Crombie and Elena Taylor (Melbourne, Victoria: National Gallery of Victoria, 2017); Bryan Fitzgerald, Peter McNeil, and Allan Walpole, eds., Women of Influence: Marion Hall Best, Margaret Jaye and Margo Lewers (Paddington, NSW: Ivan Dougherty Gallery, College of the Arts, University of New South Wales, 2005).

24. Harriet Elvin, Sarah Schmidt, Margaret Betteridge and Jennifer Sanders, Ruth Lane Poole: A Woman of Influence 10 July − 02 October 2021 (Canberra: Canberra Museum and Gallery, 2021).

25. Carol Morrow, “Women and Modernity in Interior Design: A Legacy of Design in Sydney, Australia from the 1920s to the 1960s” (PhD diss., University of New South Wales, 2005). https://doi.org/10.26190/unsworks/23108.

26. Penny Sparke, “Introduction,” in Flow: Interior, Landscape and Architecture in the Era of Liquid Modernity, ed. Penny Sparke et al. (London: Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2018), xvi.

27. Philip Goad, “Robin Boyd and the Art of Writing Architecture,” in Semi-Detached: Writing, Representation and Criticism in Architecture, ed. Naomi Stead (Melbourne: Uro Media, 2012), 186.

28. Ibid.

29. Robin Boyd, “Victorian Scene,” Architecture 37, no. 4 (1949): 52.

30. Julie Willis and Philip Goad, “A Bigger Picture: Reframing Australian Architectural History,” Fabrications 18, no. 1 (2008): 17.

31. Robin Boyd, Victorian Modern: One Hundred and Eleven Years of Modern Architecture in Victoria, Australia (Melbourne: Architectural Students’ Society of the Royal Victorian Institute of Architects, 1947), 12.

32. Goad, “Robin Boyd and the Art of Writing Architecture,” 185.

33. Robin Boyd, Australia’s Home: Its Origins, Builders and Occupiers (Carlton, Vic.: Melbourne University Press, 1961), 85, 176–183.

34. Goad, “Robin Boyd and the Art of Writing Architecture,” 186.

35. Robin Boyd, The Australian Ugliness (Melbourne: Cheshire, 1960).

36. Conrad Hamann and Chris Hamann, “Anger and the New Order: Some Aspects of Robin Boyd’s Career,” Transition, no. 38 (1992): 27.

37. Ibid., 27, 32.

38. Boyd, Australia’s Home, 85, 176–183.

39. Neil Clerehan, “Victorian Scene,” Architecture 39, no. 1 (1951): 31; Robin Boyd, “Victorian Scene,” Architecture 39, no. 3 (1951): 89; Robin Boyd, “The Look of Australia,” in Australian Civilisation: A Symposium, ed. Peter Coleman (Melbourne, Vic.: FW Cheshire, 1962), 76.

40. Peter McNeil, “From Oatmeal Sweaters to Rainbow Blouses: Robin Boyd and Australian Fashion,” in After the Australian Ugliness, ed. Naomi Stead, Tom Lee, Ewan McEoin and Megan Patty (Melbourne: NGV, Thames and Hudson, 2021), 231.

41. Boyd’s relationship with the term was complex, “good taste” initially standing for “good design,” later a critical representation of a preference for nice, polite architecture. Hamann and Hamann, “Anger and the New Order,” 24.

42. Rebecca Hawcroft, “Introduction,” in The Other Moderns: Sydney’s Forgotten European Design Legacy, ed. Rebecca Hawcroft (Sydney: NewSouth, 2017), 15.

43. Harry Seidler, Houses, Interiors, and Projects (Sydney: Associated General Publications, 1954).

44. An extensive literature on the work of Harry Seidler positioned the architect as pre-eminent author of the interiors and International Style modernism as the preferred idiom for historical study. See Harry Seidler, Harry Seidler: Selected and Current Works (Mulgrave, Vic., North Ryde, NSW: Images Publishing; Craftsman House, 1997); Vladimir Belogolovskiĭ, Harry Seidler: Lifework (New York: Rizzoli International Publications, Inc, 2014); Peter Blake, Architecture for the New World: The Work of Harry Seidler (Sydney New York Stuttgart: Horwitz; Wittenborn & Co; Karl Kraemer, 1973); “Heroic Architecture,” Historic Houses Trust of New South Wales Newsletter, no. 15 (1988), 1; “A Sydney Showpiece,” Historic Houses Trust of New South Wales Newsletter, no. 27 (1991), 1; Michael Bogle, “Modernism and the Media: the Rose Seidler House 1948–52,” in Nuts or Bolts or Berries: SAHANZ Conference Proceedings, ed. Ian P. Kelly (Perth: Society of Architectural Historians Australia & New Zealand, 1993), 30–38.

45. Walter Bunning, Homes in the Sun: The Past, Present and Future of Australian Housing (Sydney: W.J. Nesbit, 1945), 32.

46. Ibid., 68–69.

47. Kenneth McConnel, Planning the Australian Homestead (Sydney: Ure Smith, 1947), 3–7.

48. George Beiers, Houses of Australia: A Survey of Domestic Architecture (Sydney: Ure Smith, 1948), 83.

49. Robert Irving, “Freeland, Max,” in The Encyclopedia of Australian Architecture, ed. Philip Goad and Julie Willis (Port Melbourne, Vic.: Cambridge University Press 2012), 263.

50. JM Freeland, Architecture in Australia: A History (Ringwood, Vic: Penguin Books Australia, 1972), 285–286.

51. Architecture and Arts (later Architecture and Arts and the Modern Home, later the Journal of Architecture and Arts) surveyed here from 1952 to 1967.

52. For example, mention of Marion Hall Best with Moore, Walker and Croker, W.E. Lucas in “Elizabeth Arden Salon,” Architecture 45, no. 1 (1956): 14–16 was exceptional. Decorator Mary White was listed amongst trade suppliers in “House of the Year: Douglas Snelling Architect,” Architecture and Arts, no. 46 (June 1956): 34–39. Architects Robin Boyd, Harry Seidler, Hugh Buhrich, Sydney Ancher, Arthur Baldwinson, Mockridge, Stahle and Mitchell, Grounds, Romberg and Boyd, Neil Clerehan, Yuncken Freeman Bros, Griffiths and Simpson, Peter Muller, Kenneth McDonald and Ancher Mortlock and Murray were regularly credited for interiors.

53. Margaret Lord, “Problems of Interior Decoration,” Architecture 38, no. 4 (1950): 56–58.

54. For example, “Architecture Today and Tomorrow,” Architecture 40, no. 2 (1952): 54. For a discussion see Paul Hogben, “Architecture and Arts and the Mediation of American Architecture in Post-war Australia,” Fabrications 22, no. 1 (2012): 30–57, https://doi.org/10.1080/10331867.2012.685634.

55. Caroline Butler-Bowdon and Charles Pickett, Homes in the Sky: Apartment Living in Australia (Carlton, Vic., Sydney: Miegunyah Press in association with Historic Houses Trust, 2007), 79.

56. Photographs by Wolfgang Sievers in public collections, incorrectly catalogued as interiors of Stanhill, were taken in Stanley and Sylvia Korman’s flat in “Rameta” 67 Queens Rd, Albert Park. Leon Korman stated his parents never had a flat in Stanhill and never lived in the building. Leon Korman, Sheryl Kauffman and Tina Korman, interview by Catriona Quinn, 26 April 2018, Melbourne, Vic.

57. Advertisement for Riddell Interiors from Beiers, Houses of Australia.

58. See Margaret Maile Petty, “Curtaining the Curtain Wall: Traversing the Boundaries of the American Postwar Domestic Environment,” in Flow: Interior, Landscape and Architecture in the Era of Liquid Modernity, ed. Penny Sparke et al. (London: Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2018), 252–61.

59. See for example, Grace Lees‐Maffei, “Accommodating ‘Mrs. Three‐in‐One:’ Homemaking, Home Entertaining and Domestic Advice Literature in Post‐War Britain,” Women’s History Review 16, no. 5 (2007): 723–54. https://doi.org/10.1080/09612020701447772; Grace Lees-Maffei, Design at Home: Domestic Advice Books in Britain and the USA Since 1945 (New York: Routledge, 2014). https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/9781135075835; Ben Highmore, Lifestyle Revolution: How Taste Changed Class in Late-20th Century Britain (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2022).

60. As a result of agencies with American publishers established during World War II several key design and architecture magazines circulated in Australia in book shops and public libraries. These magazines themselves are under researched by design historians, with Architectural Digest rarely referenced by scholars of the modern interior. For The House Beautiful, see Monica Penick, Tastemaker: Elizabeth Gordon, House Beautiful, and the Postwar American Home (New Haven Conn.: Yale University Press, 2017).

61. Grace Lees-Maffei, Design at Home, 13.

62. For example, scrapbooks compiled in the firms of Marion Hall Best, Leslie Walford, Decor Associates and Mary White held at the Caroline Simpson Library & Research Collection, Museums of History and the MAAS.

63. Morrow, “Women and Modernity in Interior Design,” 178; Howard Tanner, “Guertner, Beryl,” National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, accessed June 27, 2018, http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/guertner-beryl-annie-blanche-12573/text22639; Steven Kalmar, You and Your Home (Sydney: Shakespeare Head Press, 1964); Margaret Lord, Interior Decoration: A Guide to Furnishing the Australian Home (Sydney, Australia: Ure Smith, 1944); Margaret Lord, An Interior Decorator’s World (Sydney, London: Ure Smith, 1969).

64. Clive Carney, Furnishing Art and Practice (London, Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1950).

65. Ed. Clive Carney, International Interiors and Design. Outstanding Achievements by Leading Architects, Interior Designers and Decorators of the World (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1959); Clive Carney, Impact of Design (Sydney: Lawson Press, 1959).

66. Morrow, “Women and Modernity in Interior Design,” 167.

67. Denise Whitehouse, “A Decorator’s World: Margaret Lord (1909–1972) Case Study,” DHARN, accessed December 11, 2020, http://dharn.org.au/a-decorators-world-margaret-lord-1909–1972-case-study/.

68. Sydney Living Museums, “Kalmar Interiors,” Sydney Living Museums, accessed December 11, 2020, https://sydneylivingmuseums.com.au/exhibitions/kalmar-interiors.

69. Michael Bogle, “White, Mary,” Design & Art Australia Online, accessed December 11, 2020, https://www.daao.org.au/bio/mary-white/biography/.

70. Michael Bogle and Davina Jackson, “Hayes, Babette,” Design & Art Australia Online, accessed December 11, 2020, https://www.daao.org.au/bio/babette-hayes/biography/.

71. Morrow, “Women and Modernity in Interior Design,” 202.

72. Dawn N. Burns, “Your Job as Family Decorator,” Australian House and Garden, (August 1964): 16.

73. Anne Watson, “Kafka and Kalmar,” The Furniture History Society Australasia Journal, no. 2 (2004): 13.

74. Carney, Furnishing Art and Practice, 1–2.

75. Judith O’Callaghan, “The Australian Interior: The Importance of Being Contemporary,” in The Australian Dream: Design of the Fifties, ed. Judith O’Callaghan (Haymarket NSW: Powerhouse Publishing, 1993), 160–161.

76. Noelle Brennan, “The Trend in Artistic Furnishing,” Australian House and Garden, (December 1949): 60; Edmund Dykes, “Minimum scale Maximum Living,” Australian House and Garden, (July 1949): 28–29.

77. TH Robsjohn-Gibbings, “Kiss the Junk Goodbye,” Australian House and Garden, (April 1949): 40.

78. “Smart Solutions for Small Home Decorators,” Australian House and Garden, (June 1960): 18; Dawn N. Burns, “Barbara McKewan Introduces Decorating with Elegance,” Australian House and Garden, (June 1960): 16–17; Mary Somers, “Melbourne Modern with Traditional Charm,” Australian House and Garden, (December 1949): 20–21; Beryl Guertner, “Color is the Keynote,” Australian House and Garden, (August 1949): 20–21, 33; Ruth Quigley, “How to Succeed in Being Different,” Australian House and Garden (July 1964): 24–25.

79. Alma Somers, “Melbourne House is Ultimate in Privacy-planning,” Australian House and Garden (October 1961): 40–42.

80. Guertner, Australian Book of Furnishing and Decorating.

81. Watson, “Kafka and Kalmar,” 13.

82. Babette Hayes and April Hersey, Australian Style (Sydney, New York: Hamlyn, 1970), 11–12.

83. Babette Hayes, Design for Living in Australia, with April Hersey (Sydney: Hodder and Stoughton (Australia), 1978), 7.

84. Interiors by Merlin Cunliffe, Ray Siede, Dennis Bellotte, Tom Gillies Joyce Tebbutt, Decor Associates, Joan Devey, Cabana, Barbara McKewan, John Lock, Robin Duleiu, Deric Deane, John Amory, Gail English and Margaret Panton were also illustrated. Archives for Little and Walford are in CSL&RC, White’s and Lord’s at MAAS and Freedman’s at the SLNSW; “Design and Art Australia Online: Database and E-Research Tool for Art and Design Researchers,” accessed July 7, 2020, https://www.daao.org.au/.

85. RD Russell, “Book Review. Clive Carney,” Journal of the Royal Society of Arts 109, no. 5056 (1961): 311–12.

86. Terry Smith, “Writing the History of Australian Art: Its Past, Present and Possible Future,” Australian Journal of Art 3 (1983): 20.

87. Daniel Huppatz, “Reframing Australian Design History,” Journal of Design History 27, no. 2 (2014): 207.

88. Tony Fry, Design History Australia: A Source Text in Methods and Resources (Sydney: Hale & Iremonger, 1988),13.

89. Nikolaus Pevsner, Pioneers of Modern Design: From William Morris to Walter Gropius (Penguin, 1960); Reyner Banham, Theory and Design in the First Machine Age (Cambridge Mass.: MIT Press, 1980).

90. Anne-Marie Willis, “Preface” in Tony Fry, Old Worlds, New Visions (Sydney: Hale & Iremonger, 1989).

91. See Jeffrey Trask, Things American: Art Museums and Civic Culture in the Progressive Era (Philadelphia, Penn.: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012); Hal Opperman, “The Thinking Eye, the Mind that Sees: The Art Historian as Connoisseur,” Artibus et Historiae 11, no. 21 (1990): 9–13, https://doi.org/10.2307/1483380. Opperman’s list of the presumed qualities of connoisseurship included exclusivist purity, aestheticism over function, judgement as a form of taste (therefore superficial and socially contingent), anti-historicism discredited by modernism, subjective and therefore invalid, contaminated by market forces and unscientific and intuitive.

92. Trevor Keeble, Brenda Martin and Penny Sparke, The Modern Period Room: The Construction of the Exhibited Interior, 1870 to 1950 (London: Routledge, 2006).

93. Fry, Design History Australia, 43.

94. For example, John McPhee, Australian Decorative Arts in the Australian National Gallery (Canberra: Australian National Gallery, 1982); John McPhee, Helen Maxwell and Christopher Menz, Australian Decorative Arts Checklist (Canberra: Australian National Gallery, 1985); Australian National Gallery and John McPhee, Australian Art in the Collection of the Australian National Gallery (Canberra: Australian National Gallery, 1988); John McPhee, Australian Folk and Popular Art in the Australian National Gallery (Canberra: Australian National Gallery, 1988); John McPhee and Christopher Menz, Australian Decorative Arts, 1900–1985 (Canberra: Australian National Gallery, 1988).

95. Robert S. Bell, “Collection: Decorative Arts and Design,” National Gallery of Australia, accessed November 27, 2017, https://nga.gov.au/decorativearts/essay.cfm; Robert S. Bell, “Material Culture,” National Gallery of Australia, https://nga.gov.au/Material/Index.cfm.

96. RI Downing, Krimper: A Memorial Exhibition of the Furniture and Woodworks of Schulim Krimper (1893–1971) (Melbourne: National Gallery of Victoria, 1975); Terence Lane, Mark Strizic and Schulim Krimper, Schulim Krimper Cabinet-maker: a Tribute (South Yarra, Vic.: Gryphon Books, 1987); Terence Lane, “Schulim Krimper and Fred Lowen: Two Melbourne furniture makers,” in The Europeans: Emigre Artists in Australia, 1930–1960, ed. Roger Butler (Canberra: National Gallery of Australia, 1997); Anne Watson, “Sideboard by Schulim Krimper,” in Decorative Arts and Design from the Powerhouse Museum, 127; Christopher Menz, Australian Decorative Arts 1820s − 1990s: Art Gallery of South Australia (Adelaide: Art Gallery of South Australia, 1996).

97. Terence Lane, Grant Featherston and Mary Featherston, Featherston Chairs (Melbourne: The Gallery, 1988); Terence Lane, “Grant Featherston Furniture,” in Bogle, Designing Australia, 161–165.

98. See Powerhouse Museum, “Style and the Decorative Arts,” Powerline, no. 2 (1988): 8; Powerhouse Museum, “Why Chairs,” Powerline, no. 8 (1989): 3; Powerhouse Museum, A Material World: Fibre, Colour & Pattern (Haymarket, NSW: Powerhouse Publishing, 1990), 35; Decorative Arts and Design from the Powerhouse Museum (Haymarket: Powerhouse Publishing, 1991).

99. Judith O’Callaghan, “A New Direction: 1940–1980,” in Decorative Arts and Design from the Powerhouse Museum, 112–143.

100. O’Callaghan, “The Australian Interior,” 160–161.

101. Ann Stephen, Philip Goad and Andrew McNamara, eds., Modern Times: The Untold Story of Modernism in Australia (Carlton Vic.: Miegunyah Press, 2008).

102. Scott Hill, “Talk of the Town: Living Layers,” Sydney Living Museums, accessed July 3, 2020, https://sydneylivingmuseums.com.au/stories/talk-of-the-town.

103. James Broadbent, “Colonial Interiors,” in Stapleton, Historic Interiors, 17–18.

104. James Broadbent, “What Is Feltex?” in For the Public Good: Crimes, Follies and Misfortunes, Demolished Houses of New South Wales, ed. James Broadbent and Joy Hughes (Glebe, NSW: Historic Houses Trust, New South Wales, 1989), 30–31.

105. Sydney Living Museums. “Caroline Simpson Library and Research Collection.” accessed June 3, 2020, https://sydneylivingmuseums.com.au/research-collections/library; James Broadbent and Catriona Quinn, The Craft of Home Furnishing 1830–1930 (Sydney: Historic Houses Trust of New South Wales, 1994); Lyndhurst Conservation Resource Centre Brochure. CSL&RC articles arch file, Caroline Simpson Library & Research Collection, Museums of History.

106. For example, Broadbent and Quinn, The Craft of Home Furnishing 1830–1930; Louise Mitchell and Catriona Quinn, Federation to Bungalow: An Exhibition of Early 20th Century House Furnishings (Sydney: Historic Houses Trust of NSW, 1990); Sally Webster, Underfoot: Floorcoverings in Australia 1800–1950 (Sydney: Historic Houses Trust of New South Wales, 1994); Robert Griffin and Roanna Ovenden, The Making of the Australian Home 1800–1930 (Glebe, NSW: Historic Houses Trust of New South Wales, 1993).

107. Catriona Quinn, “Rawhide,” Historic Houses Trust of New South Wales Newsletter, no. 25 (1990): 1; Catriona Quinn, “Sydney Style,” Insites. The Newsletter of the Historic Houses Trust of NSW, no. 8 (1993): 1; James Broadbent, “Marimekko at Lyndhurst,” Historic Houses Trust of New South Wales Newsletter, no. 20 (1989): 1; Catriona Quinn, “Living in the Seventies,” Historic Houses Trust of New South Wales Newsletter, no. 27 (1991): 1.

108. “A Sydney Showpiece,” 1; “Heroic Architecture,” 1.

109. Quinn, Sydney Style, 19.

110. Richards, The Best Style,13; Best’s training was framed as “The Education of an Artist,”17; the development of the professional body SIDA was a “struggle for artistic acceptance,” 53.

111. Ibid., 61.

112. Michael Bogle, Design in Australia, 1880–1970 (Sydney: Craftsman House G+B Arts International, 1998), 79.

113. Peter McNeil, “Rarely Looking In: The Writing of Australian Design History c1900–1990,” in Bogle, Designing Australia, 14–23.

114. Kirsty Grant, ed., Mid-century Modern: Australian Furniture Design (Melbourne: National Gallery of Victoria, 2014).

115. Geoff Isaac, Featherston (Port Melbourne, Vic.: Thames & Hudson Australia, 2017), Denise Whitehouse, Design for Life: Grant & Mary Featherston (Bulleen, Vic.: Heide Museum of Modern Art, 2018). Derek F. Wrigley, Fred Ward: Australian Pioneer Designer, 1900–1990 (Canberra: Derek F. Wrigley, 2013); Davina Jackson, Douglas Snelling: Pan-Pacific Modern Design and Architecture (Abingdon, Oxon, New York, N.Y.: Routledge, 201).; Simon Reeves, “Meadmore Originals,” RMIT Design Archives Journal 5, no. 2 (2015): 4–25; Nanette Carter and Robyn Oswald-Jacobs, Frances Burke: Designer of Modern Textiles (Carlton, Victoria, Australia: The Miegunyah Press, 2021).

116. Sydney Living Museums, “Recorded for the Future: Documenting NSW Homes,” Caroline Simpson Library & Research Collection, accessed October 25, 2017, https://sydneylivingmuseums.com.au/documenting-nsw-homes.

117. Quinn, “SIDA: Advocate and Caretaker for a New Profession”; Quinn, “The Society of Interior Designers of Australia”; Catriona Quinn, “Rooms on View: S.I.D.A.‘s Exhibitions, 1953–1986,” Caroline Simpson Library & Research Collection, Sydney Living Museums, accessed March 10, 2020, https://sydneylivingmuseums.com.au/stories/rooms-view-S.I.D.A.s-exhibitions-1953–1986.

118. Fitzgerald et al., Women of Influence; Sydney Living Museums, “Marion Hall Best Interiors,” Caroline Simpson Library & Research Collection, accessed November 6, 2017, https://sydneylivingmuseums.com.au/exhibitions/marion-hall-best-interiors.

119. Noni Boyd, “Book Review: The Other Moderns, Sydney’s Forgotten European Design Legacy,” Historic Environment 30, no. 1 (2018): 95.

120. Hawcroft, “Introduction,” 14–15.

121. Peter McNeil, “From Oatmeal Sweaters to Rainbow Blouses,” 231.

122. See Rebecca Hawcroft, “From the Margins to the Mainstream,” in Hawcroft, The Other Moderns, 165–190; Michael Bogle, “Lessons from Things,” in Hawcroft, The Other Moderns, 25–46.

123. Catriona Quinn, “Custom-made for European Tastes: The Gerstl Furniture story,” in Hawcroft, The Other Moderns, 89–120.

124. Harriet Edquist, “Vienna Abroad: Viennese Interior Design in Australia,” RMIT Design Archives Journal 9, no. 1 (2019): 9–37; Philip Goad, “NUCLEUS Meets the Minimum: Ernest Fooks, the Small House and the Flat in Post-war Melbourne,” RMIT Design Archives Journal 9, no. 1 (2019): 39–59; Harriet Edquist, “George Kral (1928–1978). Graphic Designer and Interior Designer,” RMIT Design Archives Journal 3, no. 3 (2013): 12–23.

125. Catriona Quinn, “Krimper in Context: The Place of Provenance in Design Research,” RMIT Design Archives Journal 5, no. 2 (2015): 28–43.

126. Megan Martin, “Harrington Park: A Scholar’s Garden Pavilion,” Unlocked: The Sydney Living Museums Gazette, no. 25 (2020): 25–27.

127. Alan Pert, ed., Ernest Fooks: the House Talks Back (Melbourne: Melbourne School of Design, University of Melbourne, 2016), 11. For the continuity of Lane’s narrative on Krimper’s clients, see Lane, “Schulim Krimper and Fred Lowen” and Lane, Strizic and Krimper, Schulim Krimper Cabinet-<aker.

128. Harriet Edquist, “The Shaping of Design,” in Goad et al., Bauhaus Diaspora and Beyond, 197–199. See also Zena O’Connor, “The Shillito Design School: Australia’s link with the Bauhaus,” International Journal of Design and Nature 6, no. 3 (2013): 149–159. https://doi.org/10.18848/2325–1328/CGP/v06i03/38512.

129. Julian Goddard, “David Foulkes Taylor (1929–1966),” in Goad et al., Bauhaus Diaspora and Beyond, 202.

130. See Georgina Downey, “’In Quiet Pursuit of a New Language: Interdisciplinary Collaborations in Modern Adelaide Domestic Interiors in the 1950s,” in Adelaide Art Scene, ed. Margot Osborne, (Adelaide: Wakefield Press, forthcoming) and Paul Hogben, “‘Lust for Lifestyle: Modern Adelaide Homes 1950–1965,’ at the State Library of South Australia, 3 December 2021–24 July 2022.” Fabrications, 32, no. 2 (2022): 317–21. https://doi.org/10.1080/10331867.2022.2093453.

131. Douglas Lloyd-Jenkins, At Home: A Century of New Zealand Design (Auckland: Godwit, 2006).

132. Jessica Kelly and Claire Jamieson, “Practice, Discourse and Experience: The Relationship Between Design History and Architectural History” Journal of Design History 33, no.1 (2020) 1–15. https://doi.org/10.1093/jdh/epz045,1.

133. Judith O’Callaghan, “Interiors,” in Australia Modern: Architecture, Landscape & Design, ed. Hannah Lewi and Philip Goad (Port Melbourne, Vic.: Thames & Hudson, 2019), 122.

134. Discussed in S. N. Eisenstadt, “Multiple Modernities,” Daedalus 129, no. 1 (2000): 1–29. The expression was the theme of a dedicated issue of Daedalus, in which the editor stated it was then “not in common usage.” Stephen R. Graubard, “Preface,” Daedalus 129, no. 1 (2000): v.

135. Pat Kirkham and Susan Weber, History of Design: Decorative Arts and Material Culture, 1400–2000 (New York: Bard Graduate Center: Decorative Arts, 2013), 629.

136. Peter Smithson named such groupings “extra-cultural surprise.” Kirkham and Weber, History of Design, 633.

137. Ibid., 633.

138. Judith O’Callaghan, “Modern Baroque: The Designs of George Surtees,” MAAS, accessed October 24, 2017, https://www.dhub.org/modern-baroque-the-designs-of-george-surtees/.

139. Simon Reeves, “Gold Plated Doors if You Want Them: Holgar and Holgar and the Architecture of Opulence,” in Gold: SAHANZ Conference Proceedings 33, ed. Annmarie Brennan and Philip Goad (Melbourne: SAHANZ, 2016), 569–577. Simon Reeves, “Gold Plated Doors if You Want Them: Holgar and Holgar and the Architecture of Opulence,” in Gold: SAHANZ Conference Proceedings 33, ed. Annmarie Brennan and Philip Goad (Melbourne: SAHANZ, 2016), 569–577. Georgina Downey, “Hayward Hollywood,” in Carrick Hill: A Portrait, ed. Richard Heathcote, (Kent Town, S. Aust.: Wakefield Press, 2023), 24–38.

140. Catriona Quinn, “Noel Coulson and Decor Associates (1950–1970): The Role of the Client in an Alternative Framework for Understanding Modernity in Australian Interior Design” (PhD diss., UNSW Sydney, 2021), 369. http://hdl.handle.net/1959.4/100061.

141. Catherine Townsend and Philip Goad, “Looking inside Design: Crossing and Connecting the Disciplinary Boundaries of Architecture, Design, and Exhibition,” Fabrications: The Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand 32, no.1 (2022):1–5. https://doi.org/10.1080/10331867.2022.2061647.

142. Catriona Quinn, “Re-Evaluating Post-War Interior Design Practices Through Client Histories: Loti Smorgon and Her Architect/Decorator Noel Coulson.” Fabrications: The Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand 32, no. 1 (2022): 54–81. https://doi.org/10.1080/10331867.2022.2087271.

143. Catriona Quinn, “Noel Coulson and Decor Associates (1950–1970).”

144. Philip Goad, “Designed Diplomacy: Furniture, Furnishings and Art in Australian Embassies for Washington, DC and Paris,” in The Politics of Furniture: Identity, Diplomacy and Persuasion in Post-War Interiors, ed. Fredie Floré and Cammie D. McAtee (Abingdon, Oxon, New York: Routledge, 2017), 182.

145. See, for example, Alice T. Friedman, Women and the Making of the Modern House: A Social and Architectural History (New York: Abrams, 1998); and “Home on the Avocado-Green Range: Notes on Suburban Decor in the 1950s.” Interiors 1, no. 1 (2010): 45–60. https://doi.org/10.2752/204191210791602320.

146. Kirkham and Weber, History of Design, xii.

147. Victor Margolin, World History of Design (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015), 581–585.

148. Daniel Huppatz, “Australian Design” in The Bloomsbury Encyclopedia of Design, ed. Clive Edwards (London, New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016), 98, 101.

149. DJ Huppatz, “A Chronological History of Australian Design,” in History of Design and Design Law: An International and Interdisciplinary Perspective, ed. Tsukasa Aso, (Singapore, Springer, 2022), 487–503.

150. Peter McNeil, “Designing Women: Gender, Sexuality and the Interior Decorator, C. 1890–1940,” Art History 17, no. 4 (1994): 631–57, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467–8365.1994.tb00599.x; Judith O’Callaghan, “‘Individuality’ and the Standardised House: The Display Home Interiors of Australian Builder Pettit & Sevitt, 1961–1978.” Interiors 8, no. 3 (2017): 141–58, https://doi.org/10.1080/20419112.2017.1400815.; Charles Rice, “The geography of the diagram: The Rose Seidler House” in Designing the Modern Interior. From the Victorians to Today, ed. Penny Sparke (Oxford, New York: Berg, 2009).

151. Mark Ian Jones MI, “Nordic Design Down Under. Swedish Modern and Scandinavian design in Australia” in Nordic Design in Translation: The Circulation of Objects, Ideas and Practices, ed. Shona Kallestrup and Charlotte Ashby (Bern: Peter Lang, 2023). Important precursors that investigated the broader topic include Robert Bell’s PhD thesis “Nordic Wave: A Study of the Reception and Influence of Scandinavian Design in Australia.” Australian National University, College of Arts and Social Sciences, 2007 and Eugenie Keefer Bell, “Messengers of Modernism: Japan and Scandinavia in Post-WWII Australia.” in Panorama to Paradise: Scopic Regimes in Architectural and Urban History and Theory, ed. Stephen Loo and Katharine Bartsch (Adelaide: Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand, 2007), 1–10.

152. DJ Huppatz, Modern Asian Design (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020). https://doi.org/10.5040/9781474296854?locatt=label:secondary_bloomsburyCollections; Charles Rice, “Rethinking Histories of the Interior.” The Journal of Architecture 9, no. 3 (2004): 275–87. https://doi.org/10.1080/13602360412331296107; Charles Rice, The Emergence of the Interior: Architecture, Modernity, Domesticity. Abingdon, (Oxon: Routledge, 2007); Barbara Penner and Charles Rice, “The Many Lives of Red House,” in Biography, Identity and the Modern Interior, ed. Penny Sparke and Anne Massey (Burlington VT: Ashgate, 2013).

153. Georgina Downey and Mark Taylor, “The Emotional Power of Space: What the Interior Meant to Bonnard,” in Pierre Bonnard, 196–183 (Melbourne: National Gallery of Victoria, 2023); Mark Taylor, Georgina Downey and Terry Meade, Domesticity Under Siege: Threatened Spaces of the Modern Home (London: Bloomsbury Publishing USA 2023) https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/kxp/detail.action?docID=7129762; Penny Sparke, Patricia Brown, Patricia Lara-Betancourt, Gini Lee and Mark Taylor, eds., Flow: Interior, Landscape and Architecture in the Era of Liquid Modernity (London: Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2018); Anca Lasc, Georgina Downey and Mark Taylor, eds. Designing the French Interior: The Modern Home and Mass Media, (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015); Mark Taylor, “Hidden Spaces: Cavities, attics and cellars: Morbid secrets and threatening discoveries,” in Domestic Interiors: Representing Homes from the Victorians to the Moderns, ed. Georgina Downey (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 147–158.