I could write more of the pressing need to analyse that trend and those conservatising events such as the Bicentenary, the Olympics, East Timor, even Tampa, but my focus here is Peter Daly's recent prints. My point is that Daly's images achieve more than I could say in words about the need to interrogate contemporary Australian culture's comfort zones.

Arrestingly powerful images dominate Daly's new series of sugar lift etchings elegant in their rough-hewn quality and modern primitive style. Daly and master printer Tom Goulder at the inner city Sydney workshop of Duck Print Limited Editions executed these prints. Among the strongest is Myth History, a compact plate in stark blue black ink with a solitary red cross. It is arguably one of Daly's most significant achievements of the last few years, tying as it does his recent work to his earlier output - a long history of strongly imagined political works in various media.

In these prints Daly continues a long debate with himself and us about the imaging of Anzac, nuclear disarmament, bureaucratic euphemism, the loss of individual commitment and care, and all their political appropriations and appendages. This debate began in art school where already Daly's work focussed on extending the public's awareness of the nexus between art and politics, and in bringing the public's awareness to this link through art.

Daly was born in Coraki, Northern NSW, in 1947. After travel, work experience and time in Vietnam, he completed a BA in Visual Arts in 1989, and a Graduate Diploma of Visual Arts in 1990 at Sydney's City Art Institute and the university of New South Wales. He was awarded a graduate college fellowship at Western Michigan university where he completed an MFA in 1996.

Daly's commitment to political art practice is nowhere more evident than in his continuing involvement in exhibitions about Australia's participation in the Vietnam War, and particularly about the conflict's aftermath. Daly has been central to the early 'Dogtags' exhibition, a curatorial influence in 'Vietnam Voices' (originating at the Casula Power House Arts Centre and touring nationally 1993), and the exhibition 'Prints of the Aftermath', PB Gallery Swinburne University in 2001. He has been involved with the Australian Art of the Vietnam Experience website and its originating exhibition at the Australian Defence Force Academy in 1999.

Daly's work is mostly focussed on an analysis of how political forces subvert those freedoms which democracies promise ubiquitously while consistently denying them to sectors of their populations. Daly's descriptions of his Vietnam experiences speak loudly of such foci of denial and resistance as do the works of several of his colleagues, but they are by no means the only subjects of his practice. While in the USA he avidly pursued anti-nuclear and other political themes.

Stylistically his work is typified by a bold use of colour, a blend of sharp linear drawing and design, producing a seemingly naive figuration densely charged with symbolic value. Often his prints are filled with iconic outlined heads, full-faced or sharply profiled in thickly drawn lines, and clustering in a foreshortened space. They are drawn with urgency, eloquently underpinning their protesting nature. Certainly deceptively simple in execution, Daly's work is effective in its confrontational and stark emotional impact.

The references of Myth History and the other works - Extinction (featuring flowers and a thylacine), Yesterday Today Survivor, and You and Me, are seemingly clear takes on Australian culture and events, but are also puzzling. The soldiers and the donkey in Myth History immediately invoke Simpson's legend. At once well known, and even held in the highest esteem as central to ANZAC mythology, here it is ambivalently quoted. So too, the Tasmanian Tiger print Extinction, and the romantic implications of You and Me, speak about cycles of loss and reparation in modern society. In the others there are layers of social critique Implicit in the talking heads juxtaposed with frees, or flowers and gardens.

Daly deploys a forceful vocabulary of expression and symbolism. The simple face with a sharp nose, raised eyebrows, and the Spiky Short hair - the soldier a.k.a. common man - or occasional slouch hat is often seen. The raised eyebrows, the sometimes vacant, frightened or dazzled eyes evoke the damage of war - the shock and bewilderment of disillusion. Elsewhere some have bow ties, some crowns, some hats. Bow ties are often juxtaposed to a certain facial blankness - the bosses, the kings, those in charge, the emotionless order givers. Evocative of cartoon-like expressions, these faces depict the tragic, the hilarious, the terrifying, or worse, the just existing bow-tied banal bureaucratic bunnies. Once learnt, the lexicon is quickly read but its politics are none the less vibrant and enticing. Daly Often surrounds his iconic heads with a filigree of calligraphic lines and strokes, making his image more densely layered. This focus on the gesture of his hand, the hand that traced that line, spotted that dot, crossed that cross, filled that colour. This speaks most eloquently of the political act. Engagement is everything.

These new prints also convey an impression of the profound. In Myth History for example, the primary layer of black ink depicts a figurative story - Simpson, the donkey, soldiers. The simple cross in bold red floats from above the black figures to somewhere deep under them. Obviously it's a red cross - that almost universal symbol of mercy and care. So, the Simpson legend is reinforced. Notionally we also mark the death of a Christian (Soldier) in this way. The contrary view of this iconography is to suggest ambivalence regarding myth and history. In war we also reward some acts with that most ambiguous of signs - crosses of iron, crosses of war, Victoria's crosses - as medals of killing, symbolically re-dressed as awards for valour. In Daly's print Simpson's donkey stands for the soldiery bearing the burdens of society's acts of war and peace. The soldiers are also literally donkeys in the most pejorative sense, fit only for donkey work. Floating through the print Daly's cross signifies the ambiguous relationship of Simpson's charity and the donkeys' burdens. And yet one donkey bore a Messiah. Flowers, trees and other natural attributes hover in this pressing fashion in the other prints. Nothing is to be taken simply, only commitment.

Daly's prints mount a critique of Australian conservatism more coherently than I can because they incorporate So much more, as this brief analysis can merely hint. Space precludes detailed readings of all the prints but they all carry the burden of Daly's prescient understanding, conveying a most cogent critique of contemporary Australian society. The more fool us not to have read the messages earlier.

Jeff Doyle