"As with any country, there are many Australian styles. Many that we have looked at so far - Victorian, Edwardian, Federation, Art Deco have, despite their historic, Eurocentric nature, undergone subtle metamorphoses, rendering them specifically Australian. 

Arguably, the foundation for much that is deemed Australian style, is our distance from our western heritage. Australia is simply too far away from those cultural roots to participate in a stylistic dialogue with Europe and North America; it has been forced to find and develop its own language of style - a contemporary style which, like the Mediterranean, accepts the sun and the light as our natural inheritance. Visitors to Australia for the first time are struck, almost physically, by the light - which has a quality unknown in Europe and North America: clear, hard, lazer intense by day, gauzily pastel at dusk. Colours are deep and saturated, shadows are black.

Australian style, in all its urban, suburban and country variations, has been formed through the interplay of historic and international influences, its own complex multiculture and the strange individuality of an island-continent possessing unique birds, animals and plant life. OETA has sought to capture this diversity and complexity through the many tiles on offer in its "Australiana Series".

For better or worse, Australia has developed through the imposition of European cultures on a vast continent inhabited by an Aboriginal people possessing a sensitive, profound and delicate relationship with the land. In recent years white Australians have come to acknowledge that relationship and to tentatively embrace Aboriginal culture in all its richness, colour and vitality. 

In 1995 OETA formed an alliance with the Tobwabba Art Group of the Worimi Aboriginal community, to produce a range of decorative wall tiles. The range became an immediate success, winning the Premier Award at the national Tilex Exposition in 1995. These tiles have been used in commercial as well as domestic situations as decorative border tiles, and as individual pieces of art, but the uses to which these tiles can be put are myriad.  

** Available in the heritage glaze colour palette (see Plain Wall Tiles). 

*** Available in extensive hand painted colour range.