Parkers: Best place to get art materials in Australia
At Parkers you'll find high-quality materials not available in any other art supply store in Australia. These include such exotic items as genuine vermilion paint and real lead-white oil paint (supposedly ‘not available anywhere’ according to many art shop proprietors), which is so much nicer for flesh tones than titanium white; oil paints made with cold-pressed linseed oil, such as Old Holland and Michael Harding brands; every decent to excellent brand of paint (oils, watercolours, etc.); an array of pigments, an excellent assortment of quality brushes and a beautiful range of quality linen. Also tempting and worth a long browse is their selection of watercolour papers, many handmade (a far more diverse range than is available anywhere else I can find in Sydney); Indian and oriental papers; printmaking papers and fine drawing papers—in as great a variety of surfaces (rough, medium, hot-pressed, ‘soft-pressed’, etc.) and sizes as you can imagine.
Parkers have a strong emphasis on quality, but their prices are reasonable and they're always happy to help you understand what you're buying. The staff are very helpful and know what they’re talking about--many are artists themselves. If they're not sure how to answer your question, they'll look it up and try to give you a precise answer. This makes a wonderful contrast to the vague, unreliable information on offer in so many art supply stores like: 'I think so', 'I'm sure it is' (archival/acid-free or whatever, when it’s not), 'It doesn't really matter if it's archival because everything's acid-free these days' or the especially annoying and often wrong: 'I don't think you'll find that anywhere'. I have even been told that a nameless and probably low-grade paper was a Canson paper (and it was so labelled) when in fact it was nothing of the kind.
It's very annoying to pay good money for cruddy materials, and in the long run, unless you don't care much about the permanence or the look of your work, very much a false economy.