Jon Cattapan: Possible Histories traces Cattapan's art from his student days to the present. Beginning with the Dadaist grotesquerie and surrealist erotica of Melbourne's 1970s punk scene, it traces Cattapan's themes of isolation and longing into later explorations of postmodern cities and global information flows.

Emerging from the author's twenty-year friendship with the artist, this book includes extensive interviews and personal commentaries from the artist, along with numerous illustrations of his source materials and working processes. Cattapan makes painting a way of thinking, processing and reinvesting ethical positions into art.

Cattapan's work takes us into disputed territories where national character is debated in areas such as border control, ethnicity and community. Fluid forms and oozing pools of colour capture the transition from the 'hard' economy of industrial modernity to the 'liquid' state of an information society.