The former notes in his preface that the posters themselves range from ‘the beautiful to the bland – but no matter the quality or the artistic integrity of the poster, each one has a story to tell’. Indeed, it is this reliance on the anecdotal that lends the book its strength.

Plastered often reads as a romanticised narrative and continually asserts its content as uniquely Australian (the words ‘crikey’, ‘arvo’ and ‘flicks’ appear in the first two pages). This causes some difficulty when considering the posters, which were heavily influenced by music and art being made elsewhere. One of the most uniquely Australian aspects of the poster designs is the cost limitation imposed by a music industry not large enough to support more than two colours per poster. Poster artists striving to overcome this limitation often produced the most interesting results.

What Plastered does well is offer a taste of the work of some very good Australian graphic designers: Ian McCausland, Chris Grosz, Reg Mombassa, Philip Brophy and Phil Pinder, to name just a few. If it fails somewhat to live up to its claim for poster art as a measure of the socio-political climate, there is some acknowledgment of this with a late overview of the genre as ‘an ancient form of advertising that has promoted everything from radical change in government to Kylie’. Plastered does tend towards the Kylie neck of the poster woods, but it does so in an entertaining and visually pleasing manner.