Australian style has been formed through the interaction of historic and international infuences, our complex multiculture and the strange individuality of an island-continent possessing unique birds, animals and plant life, combined with a quality of light unknown anywhere else in the world: clear, hard, laser intense by day, gauzily pastel at dusk. Colours are deep and saturated, shadows are black.

Australia's indigenous population possesses a sensitive, profound and delicate relationship with the land. In recent years white Australians have come to recognise 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. (Royalties from the sale of this range go to the Tobwabba Art Group and benefit the Worimi community.