In her Royal Historical Society of Victoria award-winning book The Art of Being Melbourne, Maree Coote creates a clever history of Melbourne as seen through artworks of Melbourne's urban landscape. Art meets History as she tracks the Melbourne zeitgeist through 20 decades of art from 1835 to today. 
For the first time, the colonial mavericks, Impressionsist masters, iconic Moderns and young contemporaries come together in a single volume to describe the city, its development, and the parallel invocation of our culture and identity.

The Art of Being Melbourne went on to win the New York Independent Publisher Award.