Australia's architectural history has been poorly served by synthesizing narratives. J. M. Freeland's Architecture in Australia appeared more than half a century ago; Jennifer Taylor's Australian Architecture since 1960 was published in 1986. Even the individual states, all with their own distinct colonial histories and formidable layers of indigenous past, have largely missed out on those books that attempt to work beyond specific periods of time. Robin Boyd's Victorian Modern (1947) offers a model that has not been taken up later, or elsewhere. The Encyclopedia of Australian Architecture, edited by Philip Goad and Julie Willis (2012), sows the seeds for all this unrealized work but is itself necessarily limited by its own typological constraints.1 Funding has rewarded penetrating paper-length studies over the books that would attempt to make sense of it all, and we here are largely out of the habit of writing longer narratives about the architectural...

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