The history of The Perfect Diary

The Perfect Diary has been published every year for seven years. It was started by Matthew Beer and Eddy Jokovich (from Australia Region Media) with art and textworks from a dozen or so people from Sydney and Melbourne. It had a print run of three hundred copies which were sold in approximately twenty shops in the capital cities. It soon sold out.

People loved the diary, they liked the pictures, poems and stories, they liked the useful size, big enough for detailed appointments and notes but still small enough to carry around. They liked the weekly quotes and daily festival, holiday and event information. But they wanted more, where’s the menstrual chart? they chimed, what about school holiday information? they wailed, we want more space for notes and sketches they... you get the picture.

So improvements were made, standards were raised and The 1997 Perfect Diary was made, six hundred copies were printed and cries of joy were heard throughout the land as word of mouth alone spread the news that The Perfect Diary was a beautiful thing.

Improvements continued to be made as the years passed, each edition being perfecter than the one before. Each year the call for contributions reached more artists, poets, cartoonists, writers and photographers and, consequently, more contributions flooded in. Last year more than three thousand works were submitted for consideration.

As the print runs increased The Perfect Diary’s sponsors, Spicers Paper, Jasco Pty Ltd and 3M Australia, rallied round to contribute more and more materials. Two thousand six hundred copies of The Perfect Diary 2002 were printed, a huge number for an independent publisher, and currently it’s selling very fast.

The audience - more than 137,800?

There aren’t many popular publications that feature the work of 54 artists and writers every year and even less that sell in excess of 2,500 copies. Also, because each diary is used, carried around and shown to friends, for a full year the chances that other people will get to look through them are high. If only one other person looked at each diary once a week then number of people seeing each work is a staggering 137,800!

The ideas behind The Perfect Diary

The Perfect Diary brings art and writing into people’s daily lives in an extremely direct, personal and unassuming way, providing writers and artists with a unique platform for their work. Everyone is warmly welcomed tocontribute, there’s no fee and no need for a cv or artists statement. No importance is attached to anything except the work itself. A contributor could write their first poem, send it in and see it published next to one of Australia’s most established artists. All that is asked of the contributors is that they see the works they send in as "perfect" - that they’re not trying to please anyone except themselves.

$1,000 prize

To encourage more people to contribute there is now a competition each year. Readers send in their votes on a form in the diary, nominating their favourite work. The contributor whose work gets the most votes will win $1,000!

Below you’ll find the covers, contributors and an image from every Perfect Diary so far, some of them already collectors items. As well as being gorgeous they provide a snapshot of prevailing fashions and interests of emerging Australian artists and writers over the last seven years.