If Kerr’s aim was to locate art objects and buildings within their place and time, her own position within the canon of Australian art history is more difficult to define. Her cross-disciplinary practice ranges across art, architectural, and social history, and resists theoretical analysis. Her strengths lay in the recording of all Australian art, and the performance of that recording, rather than in adherence to the ‘isms’ of the day. Her approach was quantitative, not qualitative. She proved her points not with theory but with what was to become a trademark amassing of examples, creating difficulties for those who would interpret her work.

The editors avoid this problem by introducing each essay with a short margin note that locates the essay in its social and historical context. Kerr described herself as a social historian, and once told a journalist that she aimed to make ‘historical figures and acquaintances, their eccentricities and achievements as vibrantly alive as if they, too, sat chatting in the comfortable chaos of a university office’.

The essays in Part One, edited by Candice Bruce, encompass a variety of themes: in particular Kerr’s ideas on museology and national identity. All except ‘The Bicentenary and the Blockbuster’ were written after the appearance of her ground-breaking Dictionary of Australian Artists: Painters, sketchers, photographers and engravers to 1870 (1992). The centenary of Federation was a major occasion for reflecting on Australian society and, like the bicentenary year, it provided opportunities for Kerr to promulgate her version of Australia’s visual heritage, which included, as Bruce observes, ‘the unusual, not the predictable … the outsider and not the mainstream’.

            In the essay ‘Somersaults in the Antipodes’, for example, Kerr evoked the perceived ‘upside-downness’ of life in Terra Australis Incognita. This playful theme of childhood acrobatics allowed her to introduce two early nineteenth-century oil paintings attributed to Australia’s first official colonial architect, Francis Greenway, who was an inmate of Bristol’s Newgate Prison in 1812 before being transported to New South Wales for forgery. Greenway’s importance as an architect has perhaps pushed his image as a felon into the background; Kerr relished the chance to reveal fascinating glimpses of the flesh-and-blood man behind the elegant architecture as a way of bringing alive the colourful and dynamic aspirations of the young colony.

In ‘Art Begins at Boulia’, Kerr privileged two works of art made in Boulia, a village in north-west Queensland. One work was by indigenous sculptor Kalboori Youngi, but the other ‘Boulia’ work of art was a small snapshot, ‘Across the Red Soil Plains’, near Lucknow, Queensland (1920), taken by Iris Rudd, who was simply passing through at the time. Kerr would have been delighted at the opportunity to include Rudd (her mother-in-law) and to represent a particular kind of woman artist-photographer, but I do not think anyone else would have had the cheeky confidence to do so.

In Part Two, editor Jo Holder showcases the eclectic range of Kerr’s interests. Not surprisingly, given her reputation as a wise and witty speaker, Kerr opened many exhibitions. One entertaining speech, ‘The Visual Art of Lying: “Monsieur Noufflard’s House”’ (concerning the work of S.T. Gill), is actually about the need to accept the truthfulness of works of art, especially early colonial Australian paintings, which are ‘often the only evidence we have of the appearance of a person, place or event before the camera took over the role of the apparently dispassionate witness’.

Kerr’s work on black-and-white cartoon art is represented by two essays: ‘Artists All!’ and ‘Savages and Blackfellas’. The material for the latter paper – the curious fashion for caricaturing white gentlemen as ‘black savages’ in the Savage Clubs of late nineteenth-century England and Australasia – was so ‘savage’ and strange, Kerr wrote, that she had no need to embellish it with her own brand of wit. Naturally she could not resist poking fun at ‘strange chants and welcome songs’, nor describing artist Frederick McCubbin as an ‘elderly artist-savage’.

            Part Three, edited by Dinah Dysart, is perhaps the most cohesive section, as it consists almost exclusively of Kerr’s work in architectural history, including two of her most popular essays, ‘Making It New: Historic Architecture and Its Recent Literature’ and ‘Why Architects Should Not Write Architectural History’. Both texts contain important and perceptive truths about Australia’s architectural heritage and how it should be preserved. Kerr’s principal credo for restoration was that ‘a building should look old when it is old’, but what she meant by this in practice is not easy to articulate. Like the scars and wrinkles acquired on the human body during a lifetime, Kerr wanted a building to carry its wear, tear, and weathering – evidence of the ‘half inch that is gone’ evoked by John Ruskin, whom Kerr quoted on several occasions.

Several motifs emerge in Kerr’s working practice: a process of two-way communication that involved sending out information to the public and expecting to receive more in return; the searching for all examples of a particular art; and the idea of a ‘Janus-faced’ quality – standing in the present, looking to the past to face the future, whether it be lighthouses, women cartoonists, or contemporary Aboriginal women artists. Kerr’s work was never complete; there was always another detail to embrace in order to bring past achievements to present attention.

The one reservation I have about the book is the image on its cover. Heritage No.2 (2004) was ‘woven’ by artist Fiona MacDonald from a press portrait of Joan Kerr (by Sandy Edwards) and a self-portrait by Mary Edwards, a mid-twentieth-century artist for whom Kerr held ‘a curious fascination’. If Edwards’s painting is ‘a curious mix of patriotism and nostalgia’, perhaps MacDonald’s blended image is meant to evoke nostalgia for Kerr’s singular brand of scholarship, but it is a curious way to portray such a vibrant, outgoing personality. The image creates a now-you- see-me-now-you-don’t impression of Kerr peeping out from behind a screen, as if hesitant about announcing herself to the world. Anyone who was at all acquainted with Joan Kerr would know that such diffidence was not in her nature.

In her obituary for Kerr, Virginia Spate wrote that ‘there was something peculiarly Australian – or Australian of an era that may be passing – in her work as writer, teacher and administrator’. This book reminds us that with Joan Kerr’s passing, Australia has indeed lost a most singular voice.