Roar! And Quieter Moments from a Group of Melbourne Artists 1980-1993

In 1982 a group of art students, still in their teens and early twenties, decided to take matters into their own hands. Rather than pit themselves against the conventions of an established system and lose, they challenged it by rejecting its means and methods. Losing to them meant waiting for the appropriate twenty years or so until their work was sufficiently 'mature' to be taken up by the art market. The group's rationale was to establish its own artist-run gallery in Brunswick Street, Fitzroy. Membership was called for to provide funds for basic costs and shows were open to almost all comers, especially young artists and children, women and Aborigines who were generally regarded as marginal to the mainstream system. Relatively quickly, gallery directors approached Roar members, who one-by-one were recruited into their stables. The original Roar group had consisted of about twenty would-be artists among whom Mark Schaller, Sarah Faulkner, Peter Ferguson, David Larwill, Jill Noble, Judi Singleton, Stephen McCarthy, Andrew Ferguson, Wayne Eager, Pasquale Giardino, Mark Howson, Karan Hayman, Ann Howie, Mike Nicholls and Richard Birmingham have become best known. The Roar name, coined to make the system stop and take notice, involved a stylistic pun. The work produced was raw with youth and energy. It was generally figurative, linking it less with its time than with other, earlier Australian groups and European movements.Allen, Traudi is the author of 'Roar! And Quieter Moments from a Group of Melbourne Artists 1980-1993' with ISBN 9789768097828 and ISBN 9768097825.