The book is primarily formed from various prints by Australian artists, some known and some unknown, collected by artist/dealer/arts documentarian Dazza (Darryn Hahn, Melbourne, Au.) and disrubted by Marshall Weber. Some of Weber’s prints and other Brooklyn prints have crept into the mix.

Notably: the cover is an original vintage disrupted print by Eugene von Guerard the primary caucasian visual documentarian of Australian colonial history, there is a signed (by the artist) invite for a Charles Blackburn exhibit, an original Martin Short xerox poster, a Nickers/Cruise Time magazine publicity poster, and many other choice Australian historical ephemera.

The book is number two in Weber’s Ad Astra Australia project. A series of four multi-media one-of-a-kind collaged artists books, each a unique collaboration between Marshall Weber, and three American and two Australian artists. The media is wax rubbing collage and mono-print (disrubtion), ink and natural pigment painting on found drawings, photographs, etchings, inkjet, photo-litho, silkscreen, and other print media. One book features photographer/human rights activist Tim Page (Brisbane), in another (Warra Warra Wai) the disrubtions are on vintage, used, international nautical maps from the 1980s and 90’s procured, collaged, and bound by Christopher Wilde.

The plaque matrices for the rubbings were from historical markers and memorials in Brisbane Melbourne, and Sydney, and in Los Angeles, New York, and San Francisco. The books use a visual concrete poetry collage approach with critical and emotional perspective on conventional history and memorials. Instructively, I have often heard both artists and activists in Australia say, “after they get rid of the people and then the buildings they will put up a plaque.” The Ad Astra Australia project attempts to rescue and resuscitate these memorial tombstones that are walked over and forgotten along with the communities whose obliteration they represent.  The point is to both make the public aware of the plaques and to throw the heraldic verbiage and the military aesthetics of the State and Corporate powers back into the popular discourse of recognition for those dislocated communities hidden in time.