Art Mania Launch

Join acclaimed author and scholar Kitty Hauser as she discusses her innovative biography Art Mania: Geoffrey Bardon and the Painting Men of Papunya. Based on unprecedented access to the Bardon archive, Art Mania sheds new light on the pivotal story in Australian art history. It stands at the same time as an important account of an Australian life – a portrait of mental illness, and of the conflicted psychology of white Australia. Written as a dialogue between text and images, Kitty Hauser’s powerful work explores the limits of the biographical form. Kitty Hauser is a British-born writer and historian based in Sydney, interested in innovative ways of doing history and writing lives using text, images and archives. Her books include Shadow Sites; Bloody Old Britain: O.G.S. Crawford and the Archaeology of Modern Life; and This Is Bacon. Her writing has been published in the London Review of Books, ArtForum, New Left Review and Granta. Her biography Art Mania: Geoffrey Bardon and the Painting Men of Papunya will be published by Giramondo in November 2026. Drinks and nibblies provided.