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Charles Conder was one of the youngest, most original and most talented members of the Heidelberg School of impressionist painters, and one of the few to achieve a lasting reputation outside Australia. His work hangs in many major collections, including the Tate Britain, the Victoria and Albert Museum and the National Portrait Gallery in London and the Metropolitan Museum in New York.
Paris beckoned early, and he soon fell in with the fin de si?cle generation led by Oscar Wilde, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and Aubrey Beardsley. He embraced Bohemia, was forever in debt, worked erratically but unceasingly and lived as if there were no tomorrow.
Ann Galbally is Associate Professor in the Department of Fine Arts at the University of Melbourne. Her many books include Charles Conder: The Last Bohemian (2002), Redmond Barry: An Anglo-Irish Australian (1995), The Collections of the National Gallery of Victoria (1989) and The Art of John Peter Russell (1977).
Robin Boyd, gifted architect, writer, teacher and social commentator, was the leading Australian propagandist for the International Modern Movement in architecture. In partnership with Roy Grounds and Frederick Romberg, he was noted for his innovative domestic buildings. Indeed the suburban home was often a focus of Boyd's thinking, writing and criticism, and in Australia's Home (1952) he provided the first substantial interpretation of Australia's architectural history.
But the most popular and controversial of Boyd's nine books was The Australian Ugliness (1960) in which he scourged prevailing tastes in both architecture and popular culture.
Geoffrey Serle was one of Australia's most distinguished historians. He was general editor of the Australian Dictionary of Biography between 1975 and 1988. He is also a well-known author and his work has won several prestigious awards including the Ernest Scott prize, the National Book Council Banjo award and the AgeBook of the Year. His published books include: The Melbourne Scene 1803-1956, The Golden Age, The Rush to be Rich, From Deserts the Prophets Come, John Monash: A Biography, Sir John Medley, For Australia and Labor: Prime Minister John Curtin.
Biography of an extraordinarily diverse Australian industrialist, the founder of the bequest which endows the Miegunyah imprint.
In his private interests no less than in his public life, Russell Grimwade was a man of extraordinary diversity. Active in some of the largest and most enterprising business concerns in Australia, prominent in such bodies as the National Museum and the University of Melbourne, he yet found time to pursue hobbies such as wood working and produced with his own hands cabinet work of exquisite perfection. He designed golf clubs, did research into the Australian eucalypts and pioneered motoring in a country whose roads hitherto had known only horses and bullocks.
John Poynter is an Honorary Professorial Fellow in the School of Philosophical and Historical Studies at the University of Melbourne, and was formerly Ernest Scott Professor of History and a Deputy Vice-Chancellor of the University. He spends his time in retirement writing history, biography and sardonic verse. His recent works include a history of the Rhodes Scholarships in Australia, included in the centenary History of the Rhodes Trust, published in Oxford in 2001; and Miegunyah co-authored with Ben Thomas in 2015.