Art Month Australia magazine reignited the contentious issue after publishing an image from Melbourne photographer Polixeni Papapetrou showing her then six-year-old daughter Olympia Nelson nude on its front cover.

The magazine has been available to buy in Bathurst for the past week.

Bathurst Regional Art Gallery director Richard Perram said other images of Ms Papapetrou’s children had been hung at galleries both internationally and around the country, including the Bathurst gallery. However, none of the nude images were displayed here.

“I know Polixeni Papapetrou and her husband and they are not seedy at all, she just practically uses her children in her art. Personally I don’t think it is pornographic, I think it is quiet charming,” Mr Perram said.

“Good art makes us think and this achieves that.”

Mr Perram said hysteria had been created because people were misinformed about the real meaning behind Ms Papapetrou’s work.

“People don’t realise that this is part of a much larger body of work,” he said.

“Polixeni Papapetrou has been using her children in her works for a number of years and they are not all nude. Her works are meant to be about stories. [This] work is about innocence and following the Alice in Wonderland theme.

“It is about capturing the stories children tell, their fantasies and how they live through them.”

A street poll by the Western Advocate received mixed responses to Ms Papapetrou’s work.

Gary Evans, upon seeing the image of Olympia [which had been partially blacked out for publication in a metropolitan newspaper] said more people would take notice because the image had

been censored.

“I think it has been taken too far and people would not have taken notice before,” he said.

“More people want to know what’s blacked out rather then what all the fuss is about.”

However, parent Nichole Hopgood completely understood why people were protesting against these sorts of images of children.

“I have a six-year-old daughter and I would not like to have anything like that happen to her. I would never take a photo of my children naked like that, it is just not the done thing,” she said.