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This article’s title refers to the larger project of illuminating the social networks informing Australian artistic communities from the late colonial period to the middle of the twentieth century. Focusing primarily on developments in photography, the article itself asks what were the links between creative practices and the social relationships that characterised the modernist period in particular? It attempts to answer this question by examining the relationship between two retrospectively celebrated women photographers working in the war years in Australia – Olive Cotton and Margaret Michaelis. For a fair portion of their lives Cotton and Michaelis lived in the same city, worked contemporaneously in the relatively small field of studio photography, and shared similar artistic and commercial ambitions, yet they had virtually no professional or personal contact with each other. There is some evidence to suggest that social networks played a role in training early Australian women photographers, particularly those working in the professional studio system between the 1890s and the 1920s. Social networks would take on an explicitly political role in the consciousness-raising feminist context of women’s photography in Australia from the 1970s to the 1990s. Given that Cotton and Michaelis were professional photographers during the interval between these periods, one is bound to ask whether their lack of contact had a personal basis or there was a wider more socially determined reason. In other words, was there something about the social conditions effecting Australia’s artistic associations at this time that explains the lack of artistic connections between women, and if so was this lack the same across all the arts or particularly pronounced in photography? [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]