An Introduction

The Perfect Diary is a gorgeous, useful, entertaining and inspiring week-to-an-opening diary which features the works of contemporary Australasian artists, writers, poets, cartoonists and photographers. For ten years The Perfect Diary has been bringing magnificent art and writing to its happy owners and has helped many hundreds of Australasian artists and writers to get their work to a large and discerning audience.

The 2005 edition of the diary is the tenth Perfect Diary and it’s more beautiful than ever. It’s packed with quotations, national and international festival and event information, gorgeous background images of printed tin toys from around the world, sections for addresses, writing music, notes and sketches, a free pen and Post-It Notes©. There are year planners, charts, a place to record special dates and even an embossed Braille alphabet on the back cover.

The Perfect Diary retrospective

The 2005 edition celebrates a decade of bringing art and writing out into people's daily lives with a sixteen page retrospective of some of the great work from the preceding nine editions - over 60 poems, stories and images as well as some choice quotes and beautiful incidental pictures - a wonderful snapshot of Australasia's recent cultural life.

Readers’ Choice Award

Each year readers can vote in the Perfect Diary Readers’ Choice Award, one of the few truly popular art and literature awards in Australasia. The voting forms appear in each diary, readers nominate their favourite work that year and post the forms to us (the last closing date for votes was 14 July 2005) The contributor who gets the most votes received $1,000! The winning work from 2005, by Sydney artist Richard Ellard (a.k.a. chmo) was no 1 betty, can be seen here.

Many thanks to all of our readers’ that voted in 2005, there was a large number of contributors who received a large number of votes and not one of them emerged voteless - that’s because we're getting a huge number of excellent contributions each year and we’re choosing a good, diverse and interesting mix.