ABSTRACT
Australia has no cohesive, reliable overview of its history of interior design. This statement echoes earlier declarations by scholars Tony Fry (1988): ‘Australia has such a modest body of writing on design history’ and Peter McNeil (1995): ‘To date no survey exists of the writing of Australian design history’.1 To understand how twentieth-century furnishing practices evolved, researchers must compile primary records of notable projects and protagonists, then trace and cross-review contemporaneous articles in newspapers and specialist magazines, and seek context from occasional curatorial essays in vintage guidebooks and exhibition catalogues. A posteriori (retrospective survey) scholarship on Australian modern interiors seems especially sparse for the twenty years from 1935 to 1955,2 overlapping the century’s darkest decades of austerity and war. These twenty years were the context for Snelling’s early design career, spanning several fields of creativity in New Zealand, Australia and the United States (biographically explained in Chapters 1-3).
