Susan Steggall negotiates this ‘quirky’, ‘painstakingly meticulous’, and combative woman’s life and career. She wants to write a ‘dispassionate appreciation of [Kerr’s] personality framed by a broad appreciation of her considerable achievements’. It is intended to sit between Jim Kerr’s subjective homage to his wife, and the fine A Singular Voice: Essays on Australian Art and Architecture (2009), a compilation of Kerr’s best lectures and papers. But Steggall also admits that her book is a ‘gift’ to her teacher. Thus it is hemmed throughout in a form of sororal hagiography, often developed through a shared, chatty nostalgia for times and events that both women witnessed or experienced. Nevertheless, this is a well-balanced account of a larrikin crusader’s stoic and provocative resistance to bureaucratic institutions and individuals.

After a pedestrian beginning, the pacy narrative settles comfortably and Steggall takes us through Kerr’s unspectacular middle-class upbringing to the simmering tensions of parochial Brisbane and Sydney in the early 1960s; her brief apprenticeship in journalism; motherhood in ‘swinging London’, which ‘swung around her’; her return to Australia as feminist liberation and political revolutions of the late 1960s reached full throttle; her teaching and research at the Power Institute of Contemporary Art after gaining a doctorate from the University of York in 1972; to her career as a respected and passionate art and architectural historian. Kerr’s professional transformation began in 1966 when she and Jim – a partnership of parallel interests – enrolled at the Courtauld Institute in London, where they took classes under the authoritative architectural historian Nikolaus Pevsner. Pevsner’s influence was profound and set Kerr on her path. Back in Sydney, she embarked on an MA at the Power Institute of Fine Arts under Bernard Smith. Her thesis, on the influence of Gothic taste on Australian architecture, employed a pluralist methodology. In this respect Smith, a master of contextual interdisciplinarity, was a perfect supervisor. Moreover, he had studied under the renowned architectural historian Rudi Wittkower at the Warburg Institute in 1949 and 1950, where he compared the beginnings of Australian architecture with similar buildings in England, tracing stylistic derivations and changes as a result of different climates, social conditions, population, and class factors. But Kerr’s feisty feminism, irreverence for authority, and her ‘way of doing history’ antagonised Smith, and inevitably, they clashed. While both were respectful of each other’s scholarship and Kerr’s rehabilitation of architects like Edmund Blacket was ingenious, Smith once dismissed her work as ‘just a lot of wombat grubbings’. One examiner similarly felt her diligence in gathering copious quantities of minor material had a certain ‘mole-like quality’.

Kerr’s traits are established early in the biography; confident, enormously funny and likeable, voluble, unflinching, and prone to engage in various activities simultaneously – a woman of eclectic energy or, as Donald Horne, Kerr’s editorial boss at the Weekend suggested, someone with an ‘enthusiasm problem’. That enthusiasm produced major projects that established her mature reputation, namely the Dictionary of Australian Artists: Painters, Sketchers, Photographers and Engravers to 1870 (1992) and Heritage: The National Women’s Art Book (1995). Her determination to unearth the colonial records of a fledgling nation in ‘the process of becoming’ was the backbone of her scholarship, but she also ventured into the contemporary, often cleverly marrying both periods. Her essay ‘Past Present: The Local Art of Colonial Quotation’ is exemplary. But Kerr could also be ‘a thorn in the side’ of the postmodernists as well as traditionalists. She would not tolerate anyone vandalising an artist’s original intention or the sacred human residue of history’s handprint.

Kerr’s ‘ability to look beyond the received wisdom of Australian art history’ may have pushed boundaries, but it was not necessarily pioneering. Her belief in art being ‘an activity within society, an integral part of everyday life, not a rarefied activity separated from it’ promulgated what William Morris believed. It also reflected Bernard Smith’s historiography, which elevated minor artists into the grand schema of art history. Kerr did, however, rehabilitate hundreds of subordinated female artists and craftswomen in her relentless crusade to rectify the ‘cultural amnesia that had so often clogged women’s intellectual and creative achievements’. Where she saw discrimination against the forgotten, whether artists or objects of historical worth, her quest for equalising the art-historical imbalance was incalculably important; she also inspired a new generation of feminist historians.

As the database doyenne of Australian colonial culture, Joan Kerr – with her depth of research, obsessive curiosity, and exhausting work ethic, which deconstructed the obvious in order to rebuild the picture – was admirable for her inclusivity. Her opening speech at the S.H. Ervin Gallery’s exhibition, ‘Completing the Picture – Women Artists of the Heidelberg Era’, in 1992 was a case in point. Kerr lifted the lid on women who lived and worked in the bush but ‘who had been left out of the narrative’. Furthermore, she rehabilitated early Australian photography and the genre of black-and-white art. Others had previously dug into the colonial archives, sourcing cultural humour in cartoons and locating women artists blanketed by domesticity or obscured by war. During the 1960s and 1970s these included the art dealer Jim Alexander, curators John McPhee, Nicky Draffin, Ursula Hoff, Margaret McKean, Ron Radford, and Eve Buscombe, while Peter Quartermaine bemoaned the fact that Australia’s nineteenth-century photography was ‘neglected, uncatalogued, unresearched … and unknown’.

Kerr’s omission from Australia’s canon of art history baffled many (though this was rectified in her final years). Why was this so? Kerr had held important academic positions and produced exceptional scholarship. Her confrontational style and ‘pig-headed determination’ gave her the reputation of being ‘difficult’, while her ‘unstoppable’ momentum, particularly when she took over the ‘Dictionary Project’ in 1981, tended to swamp other projects. Steggall handles with cautionary grace the hothouse atmosphere at the University of Sydney when it was developing plans for the Museum of Contemporary Art at Circular Quay, and Kerr’s controversial role in this; and later at the Centre for Cross-Cultural Research in Canberra, where she was also embroiled in conflict with colleagues. Fortunately, Kerr could always retreat to the steadying buffer of her husband.

It is not easy to judge fairly such a provocative, flamboyant ‘bricks and mortar’ scholar, who chose divisiveness to make obvious the faults of the ‘man-made’ world. Prepared to put herself on the front line and critically assault the architectural profession, Melbourne University Press, or John McDonald’s appointment at the National Gallery of Australia under Brian Kennedy’s idiosyncratic directorship, Kerr refused to be straitjacketed by political correctness, tight inventories, or bureaucratic bullies. One can’t help thinking that Kerr would be a welcome voice in today’s grim academic climate. Certainly, had it not been for Joan Kerr’s scholarship, Australia’s cultural history would not have the rich texture that it does today. As Steggall says, ‘she wanted to unearth every possible fact about a particular artwork. Amateurs and professionals, men and women, high society and convict low life, all had their rightful place in Joan Kerr’s grand narrative.’