THOUGH ostensibly a tale of two cities, there's little doubt where the heart of the exhibition Melbourne><Brisbane lies. The man behind it, David Pestorius, is a Brisbane-based former barrister, gallery owner and producer/promoter of art events, as well as a passionate archivist of the period from 1976 to 1983 when the music and art worlds seemed to fuse, randomly, radically and irrevocably.

''It's not about nostalgia,'' says Pestorius in the gallery of the Ian Potter Museum of Art at Melbourne University four days before the show's opening. ''I want people to see how what's happening today was influenced by what happened then. It's an ongoing story.''

I saw elements of this show two years ago on a visit to Brisbane, the city in which I grew up. The Brisbane Sound at the Institute of Modern Art in the Valley struck me as being as much an exercise in fandom as it was history. That didn't invalidate it, but all those fanzines, posters, band photos and set lists did make for a curious gallery experience.

At the Potter, Pestorius has built on that show significantly. In one of the two rooms housing the show, there are four screens on which footage of Robert Forster plays continuously. In all that footage, the musician, rock critic and former co-frontman of the Go-Betweens is performing in galleries. The point, Pestorius says, is to illustrate the fact that in the punk and post-punk moment, the boundaries between art and music were all but obliterated. Musicians such as Forster saw themselves as artists, just as many artists picked up guitars and keyboards and formed bands.

In the other room, there's a cabinet full of releases by the Saints - often credited as having released the first true punk single with (I'm) Stranded in September 1976 - and the Laughing Clowns. ''It's a deliberately provocative gesture,'' says Pestorius. ''I want people to think about the through line there.''