ART for PEACE – The story of the Graham F Smith Peace Foundation
by Mark Street and Terry Cantwell
Published by Wakefield Press, Adelaide, South Australia, 2024
Art for Peace surveys the remarkable story of the Graham F. Smith Peace Foundation, from its inception in 1989 through thirty-five years to the present day.
As a physical tome, the book is a delight to hold, to read, and to dip in and out of. The principal designer, Alison Fort has much to be proud of. It is no easy task to produce a glossy book of some 220 pages, where every page is attractive, where so many differently authored texts, some brief, some lengthy, some old, and some freshly written come together as a vibrant historical record.
In a sense, this book is a compilation of stories—a difficult literary genre to produce at the best of times. The principal authors and compilers, Terry Cantwell and Mark Street are also to be congratulated for the care and skill that has gone into the making of Art for Peace. It will age well. The collecting of each decade’s events, stories, exhibitions, and more achieves what I suspect its commissioners hoped for, a comprehensive, accurate and joyful celebration of the work of the foundation.
Peace movements have a long history in Australia, through the events of the first and second world wars, the hopes and disappointments associated with the League of Nations, then United Nations organisations. Then there was the Cold War, in some respects not completely over through to the present day when the fates of Hiroshima and Nagasaki presumed a terrifying future for all life on this planet.
Graham Smith was a peace activist for good reason for much of his adult life. His partner, Leonie Ebert took an interest in what the arts, embedded in communities, and encouraging innovative projects might contribute to a more peaceful world. The broad community of artists, activists and good citizens committed to the making of a peaceful and sustainable future who worked with the Foundation are justly celebrated in this wonderful book.
CRAIG CAMPBELL is a former associate professor in the history of education at the University of Sydney and before then, a South Australian school teacher in the 1970s and 1980s. He is the author of many books including Jean Blackburn: Education, feminism and social justice (2019), A History of Australian Schooling (2014), School Choice: How parents negotiate the new school market in Australia (2009) and Unley High School: One hundred years of public education, 1910-2010 (2009).