After the successful 1974 etching exhibition at Sydney's Bloomfield Galleries, the continuing rise in prices and increasing scarcity of the originals made it clear that many art enthusiasts wanted etchings for their collections, but could not afford them. The demand was such that after consultation with Jane Lindsay, Lin Bloomfield decided to publish three folios of limited edition facsimile reproductions of the etchings at an affordable price.
The Norman Lindsay Facsimile Etchings were launched with considerable publicity on 30 November 1974 at Bloomfield Galleries. The metal plates which had been cancelled by Jane Lindsay and all the printing materials (subsequently destroyed) were also displayed. Each facsimile was hung next to the original etchings to demonstrate the quality of the facsimile.
The first set of facsimile etchings was presented in three folios which included:
Folio 1 ($100): Enter the Magicians, The Innocents, Decoy, Argument
Folio 2 ($50): The Bauble, Bargains, Dryad, The Butterfly
Folio 3 ($100): Self Portrait, C Sharp Minor Quartet, Life in the Temple
This exhibition proved that in some quarters censorship was still flourishing. Full page advertisements featuring Self Portrait were placed with the Sydney Morning Herald and the Australian newspapers. The Australian accepted and published the advertisement without fuss. The Sydney Morning Herald, after examining a small, clear reproduction of Self Portrait also accepted. Delivery of the full-size photograph, however, sparked a series of emergency meetings ascending the management ladder until a top level directive not to publish was issued. By then it was too late to photograph another image for the advertisement so the page ran on 30 November 1974, p.14, as a blank with the words This etching was banned in 1930. Norman Lindsay is still a controversial figure in 1974.
Trying to find out the reasoning behind the ban was not easy. As the Bulletin (14 December 1974, p.20) reported under the cheeky heading 'All The Nudes fit to Print', Mrs Bloomfield kept asking people at the Herald what exactly the management objected to in the etching: could they point, perhaps, to any particular feature ...? She got answers which kept mentioning "segments of our society" and "sections of our readership which, unlike the readers of other papers, tend to write in to us with their objections". She surmised, however, that it was the main male nude figure which did not appeal.
In November 1994 Bloomfield Galleries held a commemorative exhibition of the forty Norman Lindsay facsimile etchings, published over twenty years, together with seven remaining cancelled plates from the first editions. Desire was a special release for this exhibition.
In 1998 unpublished etchings were released for the first time as facsimile etchings. All the unpublished etchings are rare and the majority are exceedingly rare. In most instances the only known prints are in the Mitchell Library folios.
2005 saw the first release of etchings where the originals had only previously been available in limited edition books and therefore extremely rare. Columbine from the 1918 Colombine and Your Fate from the 1927 The Etchings of Norman Lindsay were released as facsimile etchings in specially printed folios, sold together, similar to the first release of facsimile etchings in 1974.
April 2006 saw the release of Atlantis, the 100th Norman Lindsay Facsimile Etching published by Odana Editions and to commemorate this significant event, an exhibition was held at Bloomfield Galleries exhibiting all one hundred Norman Lindsay Facsimile Etchings published from 1974 to 2006.