For Stavroula Adameitis, kitsch isn’t something to be cringed at.

“Kitsch is history that hasn’t been taken seriously yet,” Adameitis said.

“The objects we dismiss as daggy – the Big Things, souvenir tea towels and tyre swans – are in fact primary sources: They document what ordinary Australians loved, bought, displayed and passed down, which tells you more about how a country actually felt to live in than any official record.”

Adameitis said she has been “obsessed” with kitsch culture all her life, first as a young television-crazed Greek Australian kid in the 1980s.

“[I was] secretly thrilled whenever I caught a cold because it meant convalescing at Yiayia’s house watching Midday with Kerri-Anne. Prime cultural research time! Immersing myself in television was how I learned to belong to Australian culture while standing slightly outside it,” she said.

As an adult, those hours of “research” glued to the screen have been central to Adameitis’s work as Frida Las Vegas, the colourful, nostalgic alter ego and fashion brand through which she has channelled her “maximalist, retina-blasting” style since 2013.

Adameitis works under the alias Frida Las Vegas since 2013. Photo: Stuart Humphreys

Adameitis launched a bold new project last week: Australianarama: A Campendium of Kitsch.

It has been released by independent Adelaide publisher Pink Shorts Press, but Adameitis said she started collecting ideas for the book a decade ago.

“For many years Australianarama was a ‘secret’ project alongside my art practice,” she said. “I’m the kind of person who likes to finish a project before revealing it.”

As Australianarama took shape, Adameitis expanded its scope beyond her own affection for Australian kitsch culture – and even developed what she calls a “critical framework” for defining what falls into the kitsch basket.

“I call [it] the ART POPS criteria – Artificial, Reproducible, Too Much, Popular, Openhearted, Playful, Sentimental – then appl[ied] it across food, fashion, tourism, architecture, screen culture and objects,” she said.

“Many photos were submitted through an open callout from members of the public, who shared their personal happy snaps from the 1970s through to the 1990s.

“To challenge my own assumptions about kitsch, I interviewed a bunch of incredible creatives who regularly play with kitsch in their own work, like visual artist Tony Albert, baker Katherine Sabbath and drag queen Art Simone.”

‘More in common with a showbag than a hardcover book’. Photo: Angus Adameitis

Placing her own illustrations alongside historical ephemera and photography, Adameitis pitches Australianarama as an encyclopedia-style record of Australian popular culture across four decades, from the 1960s through to the turn of the millennium.

The result, she said, was a “technicolour time capsule that has more in common with a showbag than a hardcover book”.

“Each page is chockers with more icons than the last: The pie floater, rainbow Paddle Pop, the Big Lobster, Malls Balls, Expo ’88, the Sydney Olympics, Humphrey B. Bear and Young Talent Time all make a razzle dazzle appearance,” she said.

“My illustrations sit alongside archival photographs and playful commentary that celebrates the good and the so-bad-it’s-good aspects of antipodean pop culture, but it doesn’t shy away from the trickier questions either, like who gets to define Australiana.”

It isn’t all about nostalgia either.

“The book ends by looking forward: there’s a chapter on future nostalgia asking what we’re making in culture right now that the next generations will first find embarrassing, then irresistible,” Adameitis said.

“I went into the process thinking about nostalgia and came out thinking about the future. I’m most interested in finding what post-cringe Australiana can be, and what futures worth inheriting might look like. What are we co-creating now that might be remembered as being both extra and uniquely Australian in the next 50 years or more?”

The research process also confirmed Adameitis’ conviction that the seemingly “silly stuff” featured in her work can still provoke serious conversations about cultural history.

“Love it or loathe it, kitsch is a powerful conduit for understanding not only who we were, but who we want to become. Nobody puts their guard up against a giant fibreglass lobster, and a frog cake gets past people’s defences in ways a lecture might not,” she said.

Australianarama came out this month.Photo: Pink Shorts Press

“Kitsch can be an open-hearted facilitator for difficult conversations about national identity, memory and belonging.”

Having spent spent years tapping the well of kitsch culture for her illustrations, textiles and installations as Frida Las Vegas, Adameitis says the book is a “satisfying full-circle moment”.

“Over the years, I’ve shot my designs on location at the very icons that inspired them, so those images now sit in the book alongside the objects they pay homage to,” she said.

“A decade of fashion campaigns turned out to be field research for the book all along. The book itself is designed as a kitsch art object, being a book about kitsch that is kitsch, right down to the special collector’s edition with a lenticular cover.”

Committing her lifelong love of kitsch to print also reflects Adameitis greater goal of recognising those parts of Australian life and culture that conventional history books often miss.

“We preserve grand buildings and oil paintings, but the Sunnyboy wrapper and the Razzamatazz stockings carry just as much cultural memory, although they’ve never been given the dignity of an archive. That’s what the book is: A people’s archive of Australian popular culture, treated with the reverence (and the humour) it deserves.”