'Art, to the artist, is inevitable, but the rest of us want to know: what are the whims, accidents and resolutions that shape a career? How does each artwork come to be just like that? What colour was the telegram delivery bike in South Melbourne during World War II? And what is that chimp doing over there? Like a good biography, Rachel Tonkin's retrospective steers us through her five decades in book illustration and writing, botanical art, and fine art and sculpture, and lets us make some connections' (Introduction)