Born in South Australia in 1940, Plant grew up in Williamstown and as a schoolgirl saw paintings by John Perceval of fishing boats in the suburb's harbour in Melbourne,[1] and later wrote the first monograph on the artist.
With Ursula Hoff she wrote on contemporary art in The National Gallery of Victoria; Painting, Drawing, Sculpture published in 1968,[4] and that year was appointed Lecturer at RMIT University.
"[8] Plant's research and writing is wide-ranging, in catalogue essays, academic papers, book reviews, journal articles and monographs, from 14th century Padua to J. M. W. Turner[9] and Paul Klee[10] to settlers' domestication of the Australian bush.
[16] The book studies the deterioration of Venice during French and Austrian occupation, but, at the same time, its cultural resilience in many fields - literature, local and foreign, opera, glass-making, lace-making, and its high tourist value.
Paul Giles in the Australian Book Review hailed Plant's 2017 book Love and Lament: An essay on the Arts in Australia in the Twentieth Century,[17] as "multivalent, wide-angled" and "ranging widely across architecture, film, photography, music, dance, and popular culture, as well as literature and painting [demonstrating] convincingly that, as she puts it, there was 'no dormant period' in Australian cultural and artistic life during this time.