About Civil Press

There was a time when Australia's ambition was quietly everywhere. It showed up in what the country chose to celebrate. New industries. Volunteering. Architecture. Transport. Small achievements and large ones, marked the same way…..with a stamp.

The artists commissioned by the government to make those stamps were among the best of their generation. They produced modernist compositions, bold graphic statements about a country becoming itself.

The work was beautiful. It was also ordinary. Pressed onto envelopes, passed through a million hands, overlooked.

There is something in that modesty worth holding onto. The idea that ambition doesn't require an audience. That a country reveals itself not in its loudest moments but in its smallest ones. In what it thought worthy of a stamp, in the care taken over something most people would never notice.

Civil Press noticed.

We enlarged these stamps because the art deserves to be seen. And because the story they tell of a country at its most quietly assured. It deserves to be on your wall.