This has resulted in a two-speed arts scene - that of the national collecting institutions, such as the National Gallery of Australia, National Museum of Australia, National Library, National Archives, National Portrait Gallery, National Film and Sound Archive and the Australian War Memorial; and the local scene - Canberra Museum and Gallery, Canberra Contemporary Art Space, Megalo, Canberra Glassworks, ANCA and M-16, the myriad of regional art centres and university galleries and the small group of commercial art galleries.

Leaving COVID-19 to one side, as it is a dampener on all arts activities, in recent years the federal Coalition government has applied the thumbscrews to the national institutions (with the exception of the Australian War Memorial), while the local Labor government has been investing fairly generously in the local arts infrastructure.

How local art made Australia's national capital by Anni Doyle Wawrzyczak sets out to chart the history of two contemporary art galleries, the Bitumen River Gallery that was established in 1981 and the Canberra Contemporary Art Space into which it merged in 1987. All of this is set within a broader discussion of the arts scene in Canberra from the 1920s through to the 2000s. The author assembles a huge amount of data and appears in many places overwhelmed by the sheer scale of the task. We have reports, critiques of these reports, discussions of funding and exhibition programs, art politics and political intrigues, clashing personalities and petty rivalries. As this art scene has been my backyard for a number of decades, I am very sympathetic to the competing needs and the complexity of the various organisations.

The other major problem with the book is that it was originally researched as a PhD thesis and much of the heavy documentation that is appropriate for such an exercise has inappropriately been retained within the book. I remember once reading a book stemming from a PhD thesis written by my tutor in Oxford, who reassured the reader that scarcely a sentence from his thesis that warranted a readership of three examiners has survived into the book intended for a much broader audience. Sadly, this procedure has not been followed in this case and the book on many occasions has the readability of an institutional annual report that is full of raw figures and statistics, rather than the presentation of a considered and digested assessment.

I find the nomenclature itself fascinating, Bitumen River Gallery (a converted bus shelter that was frequently used as a toilet) in its name suggests something romantic, lyrical and juvenile and their exhibition program was chaotic, provocative and at times brilliant. Renamed as Canberra Contemporary Art Space 3, it suggests something bureaucratic, orderly and contrived. This transformation clearly emerges in great detail throughout this book.

Invariably in a study such as this, at times it is difficult to see the wood for the trees, but the study does highlight the paucity of publications in this area. At times, the over-reliance on ephemera as the main source of information is at the expense of some of the more established studies, for example, P. Green's (ed.) Building the Collection: National Gallery of Australia (2003) is an excellent resource for untangling the complex histories of that institution.

While a number of artists including Julia Church, Vivienne Binns and Cherylynn Holmes have been interviewed for this study, many, including Robin Wallace-Crabbe, Michael Taylor, Jan Brown and Pat Harry, all mentioned as key players and who are still with us, have not. There are also numerous small but annoying factual errors, such as stating that Joy Warren, Ruth Prowse and Judy Behan on establishing their commercial art galleries in Canberra, promptly enrolled in art history courses at the Australian National University under Sasha Grishin. This they did not do.

This book opens up a very important but neglected field of research and one can only hope that others will follow in an area in which Anni Doyle Wawrzyczak's book is a trailblazer.