In recent years picture frames and picture framing have received much scholarly attention, particularly in this Journal. Museum professionals in Australia share this interest, as the rich artistic holdings of the country’s public institutions include many fine, historically important European frames. However, with the exception of incomplete Polaroid records, very few of these frames have been adequately documented or catalogued. There is also a need in Australian museums for research into locally made frames and frame-makers, particularly from the period marking the development of an Australian school of painting in the 19th century. Like many museums worldwide, Australian institutions now seek to display their paintings in original frames or frames appropriate for the works. This involves matching a painting with a long-discarded original or analogous contemporary frame lying in a museum storeroom, the victim of a past reframing policy, or reframing it in a stylistically suitable reproduction frame. Either method requires some knowledge on the part of both the conservator and the curator of the history of framing styles and manufacture. Although there is considerable literature on the history of European and American frames, very little exists on the short history of Australian-made frames.’ While lack of funding has inhibited research of this nature within museums, a project on 19th-century Australian framing has been undertaken at the Ian Potter Art Conservation Centre at the University of Melbourne. A guide is being produced, for the use of curators and conservators, which outlines stylistic developments in ISth-century local frames and provides a list of frame-makers’ business addresses in order to facilitate dating of frames through makers’ labels. The study has been confined to Melbourne framers in part because the city was the home of the important artistic movement of the 1880s and 1890s generated by the experimental group known as the Heidelberg School. These artists, including Tom Roberts, Frederick McCubbin, Arthur Streeton, Charles Conder and John Mather, were responsible for stylistic innovations influenced by European Impressionism. They also introduced new themes into Australian art based on nationalistic mythologies of white settlement and on the experience of the middle classes: atmospheric bush landscapes and genre scenes found their way into a repertoire previously dominated by posed studio pieces. In the late 19th century Melbourne was a thriving city made rich by the vast deposits of gold mined in central Victoria. During the boom period of the 1880s the population of the city soared from 268,000 in 1881 to 473,000 ten years later, making it the largest Australian metropolis. The number of carvers and gilders registered in the city increased accordingly: 52 are listed in the 1860s rising to over 150 in the 1880s. Most of these carvers and gilders were also involved in frame-making as part of their business.