[3] Member John Perceval exhibited a ceramic sculpture Antipodean Angel, a laughing figure standing on its hands, at Terry Clune Gallery in Sydney in May 1959.

In 1959 none were direct members of the Heide Circle that had maintained its importance with the Melbourne Branch of the Contemporary Art Society (CAS) since the early 1940s, though Sunday and John Reed championed the group.

The Age, in its 'News of the Day' greeted their emergence;For the layman mystified by most modern art, the exhibition by a newly formed group called the Antipodeans, which opens at the Victorian Artists' Society rooms tomorrow, holds out real promise.

"[7]The article quotes Smith, who opened the show on Tuesday 4 August 1959,[8] explaining their raison d'être as a stand against "abstract and non-figurative art, which is dazzling young artists everywhere," and that they had chosen the name Antipodeans because it "signifies where we live, but avoids any national overtones in the word Australian.

The Australian painters feared that American abstraction was becoming the new orthodoxy,[6] and that intolerance towards the modernist figurative art they practiced was increasing internationally.

[9]The manifesto was seen by some local artists and critics at the time as a statement in favour of conservatism and reaction, and as a call to isolate Australia from international art.

Their case was not helped by the fact that they were all enjoying some commercial success, as against their immediate rivals (the local abstractionists Roger Kemp, Leonard French, Inge King and George Johnson) who were struggling.

[10] Nevertheless, with the assistance of British museum director Kenneth Clark, works by group members were included in a 1961 exhibition entitled Recent Australian Painting at the Whitechapel Gallery in London (alongside that of Jon Molvig, Albert Tucker, Sidney Nolan, Fred Williams and others).