Geraldine Rede

Geraldine Rede worked across Australian art and writing, and her collaboration with Violet Teague produced an early landmark of local printmaking. Night Fall in the Ti-Tree is a sixteen-page artist's book combining verse, colour woodcuts, letterpress, a printed-paper cover, and silk-ribbon binding. Rede and Teague made the work in Melbourne in 1905 and printed it by hand under the Sign of the Rabbit. Its images of rabbits beneath native trees draw on Japanese woodblock methods while remaining attentive to Australian plants and animals. The National Gallery of Victoria identifies the volume as the first example of colour relief printing in Australia and records that it later received an award at the 1907 First Australian Exhibition of Women's Work. Rede also collaborated with Teague and Ina Gregory on Birds in the Sunny South. Night Fall in the Ti-Tree joins Rede's concise poems to a carefully unified sequence of images, typography, paper, and binding, making authorship and physical design inseparable parts of the work.