It took me around 25 years to complete my first book, Merric Boyd and Murrumbeena: The Life of an artist in a Time and a Place. It took my father, Philip Smith, about the same number of years to research and write his family history, The Blacksmith’s Family. I really can’t remember when he started it, but it became his major focus and passion in the last decades of his life.

My mother, Helen Smith was an artist prior to becoming a gallery guide at the National Gallery of Victoria in 1970. Helen drew and painted for 20 odd years (and perhaps longer). The earliest of her artworks in my family’s possession are from the early 1950s. The last are from the late 1960s when she gave it away to become a gallery guide. Her art consists mainly of still-life works, and landscapes. Her early still-lives are mainly drawings, and the later ones, oil-paintings. Her landscapes are predominately oil-paintings.