The National Gallery of Australia (NGA) currently has a show of street art entitled Space Invaders that is drawn entirely from the collection of the NGA.

Official attitudes to street art - stencils, posters, tags, aerosol murals and paper ''paste-ups'' - in Melbourne are deeply contradictory. It is seen as art with the street art on the lane way walls seen as a tourist attraction. On the other hand, there is a tough stance on graffiti ---it is illegal and municipal teams are hard at work painting over graffiti.

The NGA say that the vanguard of Australian street art can be traced to a small number of artists experimenting during the late 1970s. They add:

It was not until the mid 1990s, however, that there was a voracious surge in the act of creating works of art on the street, which could be identified as the beginning of the contemporary Australian street art scene. It should also be acknowledged that the roots of Australian street art lie in the Australian graffiti subculture. Since graffiti’s appearance in Australia in the early 1980s, this subculture has undergone significant aesthetic transformation. In the last three decades, Australian graffiti, as we traditionally understand it, has grown from the internally coded expressions of notorious hardcore writers into a multifaceted scene that comprises a conglomeration of artists using text, symbols and signs. The graffiti subculture has multiplied its forces of collaborating practitioners and has spawned numerous street art offshoots that have, since 2000, revolutionised creativity in public spaces.

The street-stencil images held in Australia’s national art collection were created for the street, where they have long since decayed, been painted over, buffed and destroyed. In 2004, the National Gallery of Australia intervened, asking artists to print their street stencils on paper. Once put to paper, collected, preserved and displayed in a completely different context, these works of art essentially become important documents or records of imagery originally intended for the street. The collection of street stencils at the Gallery—only a portion of which is on display in Space invaders—is now a time capsule of what was happening on Australian streets at a particular moment of collective creativity.