Fine arts) with first class honours in 1953 Henry Moore and William Coldstream were his external examiners, he spent a further year on a Chancellor's postgraduate award researching Archaic and Cycladic sculpture in Greece.

Thereafter he established a practice as a sculptor, exhibiting at the Woodstock Gallery in London and executing commissions, and was awarded a studio and residence at the Digswell Arts Trust at Welwyn in Hertfordshire, His interest in unresolved theoretical questions about the visual arts led him to accept a further postgraduate scholarship in the Department of Philosophy in the Australian National University in Canberra in 1962.

His PhD thesis (1965), examined by Professors E. H. Gombrich and David Armstrong, applied analytic-philosophical theories of perception to questions of pictorial representation and art-critical appraisal.

Electing to remain in Australia, Brook continued to work as a sculptor and as one of a number of Australian art critics for news periodicals who proliferated in the mid 20th century.

[citation needed] Brook abandoned art criticism after leaving Sydney, and published extensively thereafter in journals of informed opinion and more popular media as well as in the academic literature.

He retired from Flinders at the end of 1989 and lived in Cyprus from 1990 to 1992, returning temporarily to a part-time role at the University of Western Australia in Perth, before settling again in Adelaide.

His early work on perception was first publicly aired in "Perception and the appraisal of sculpture",[6] in which the important distinction he later draws between matching and simulating non-verbal representational practices is introduced as a difference between what he calls the "object accounts" and the "picture accounts" that we spontaneously give of visually perceived things; notably of three-dimensional works of art.

[7] This rather complex theoretical structure underwent continuous modification in numerous publications as his memetic account of cultural evolution developed.