The Print Council of Australia, established a little over half a century ago, was set up to battle some of the misconceptions about printmaking, to publish a quarterly journal, Imprint, to spread the word about exhibitions and latest developments in the art form, and to mount exhibitions of prints.

One of the biggest hurdles to printmaking lies with nomenclature. What is the difference between a print and a reproduction? A reproduction presupposes that something exists to be reproduced. So, while a painting or drawing exists, it can always be reproduced, usually with improved technologies, hence a reproduction has no special value. With an original print, be it an etching, a relief print - like a linocut or woodcut, a lithograph, an engraving or executed in any other medium - nothing exists until the matrix has been created and the plate, block or stone has been printed.

The other thing that confounds people is why original prints are relatively inexpensive, when compared with paintings. The short answer is simple - most prints are produced in editions, so that the printmaker egenerally prints a limited edition of original prints from the same matrix. Each print in an edition is slightly different, unique - sometimes minutely different as the ink spreads slightly differently on each sheet of paper - sometimes in a major way as an artist introduces deliberate variations.

The exhibition mounted by the Print Council of Australia and may be viewed as a cross-section of the cream of Australian printmaking over the past half century, from the 1960s through to the present. The 62 prints selected for the exhibition are displayed chronologically, by decade, and demonstrate some of the richness, diversity and spectacular depth of Australian printmaking.

Printmaking in Australia has been a mirror of our society, of our cultural aspirations and of developments in the visual arts. The exhibition includes work by some of Australia's best-known artists such as John Brack, Fred Williams, John Olsen and Barbara Hanrahan, all of whom have national and international reputations built through many different mediums. Printmaking also embraced the advent of contemporary Indigenous art with prominent Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander artists embracing printmaking. Artists including Arone Meeks and Judy Watson achieved some of their finest work in printmaking and these are included in this exhibition.

A number of artists were primarily printmakers and achieved an enormous amount in this art form. The Tasmanian artist Bea Maddock (1934-2016), who is well represented in this exhibition, was an inspirational figure, who interrogated the way we saw ourselves and modes of visual communication that surrounded us. Hers may have been a somewhat bleak and existentialist view of humanity, but I am surprised by how timely and contemporary it appears to us today.

Glenda Orr is a remarkable emerging Brisbane-based artist who, after a professional career as a research biologist and a natural resource policy analyst, has turned to a career as a full-time artist printmaker. In her art, she tackles questions of biological diversity and environmental ecosystems, especially in forests and woodlands. Her studies of axes in her Stacked against series of etchings of 2017-18 are striking, disturbing and deeply moving.

Imprint: A Survey of the Print Council of Australia is like a kaleidoscopic view of Australian art - one from which an artistic voice emerges that has remained strong, beautiful, relevant and unambiguously Australian.