Embedded in the art of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people is the story of Australia itself: of the theft of land by British invaders; of bloody frontier conflicts; of a people forced onto missions; of families separated and children taken; of the suppression of language and culture; of the ongoing struggle for self-determination. The art of Australia’s First Nations also tells the story of resilience, reinvention and efforts to tell the truth.
The more than 250 distinct nations across the country mean that both traditional and contemporary Indigenous art practice is incredibly diverse. For this reason, most surveys have generally focused on certain geographic regions, particular time periods, or overarching themes. The exhibition 65,000 Years: A Short History of Australian Art does all three in a show as ambitious in its breadth and scope as its lofty title might suggest. The exhibition at the University of Melbourne’s newly reopened Potter Museum is currently on track to be the most visited in the institution’s history.
A decade in the making, 65,000 Years grew out of earlier plans for a show of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander art drawn exclusively from the university’s 18,000-strong collection. With more than 400 works of art, including 194 loans from 78 lenders, across 11 tightly curated rooms, the exhibition includes many rarely seen works brought together for the first time. Among the many highlights are several bark masterpieces from western Arnhem Land collected by the academics Baldwin Spencer in the 1910s and Donald Thomson in the 1940s, including the stunning Djapu’ miny’tji (1942) bark by Woŋgu Munuŋgurr and his three eldest sons. This complex composition of animals, people and clan motifs tells the story of the Yolŋu ancestral being, Djambuwal the Thunderman. It is one of several on display that recently returned from a US tour as part of Madayin: Eight Decades of Aboriginal Australian Bark Painting from Yirrkala.
At the exhibition’s heart is the argument that Indigenous art traditions were widely disregarded until the late 20th century. If not for the efforts of artists, curators and the recognition that followed shows such as the groundbreaking Magiciens de la Terre at the Centre Pompidou in Paris in 1989, First Nations art might have been viewed only through an ethnographic lens.
The exhibition interweaves the resilience of Indigenous art with the history of Australia, from early contact to the present day. The first two rooms offer divergent views of first contact from the perspective of colonial artists and their Indigenous counterparts, alongside responses from contemporary Indigenous artists. Immediately at odds are colonial depictions of first contact and the grim reality of history. In Mills Plains, Ben Lomond, Ben Loder and Ben Nevis in the Distance (1836), John Glover depicts an Aboriginal campsite in the foothills of Ben Lomond in Tasmania. Painted six years after Lieutenant Governor George Arthur authorised the indiscriminate murder of Indigenous Tasmanians as part of the Black War, Glover’s painting is revealed as little more than a piece of colonial-era propaganda.
In the same room, the Wurundjeri artist William Barak’s Corroboree (Women in possum skin cloaks) (1897) depicts three rows of women wearing possum-pelt cloaks and brandishing spears, recording both a ceremonial dance and three stages of womanhood. Barak used art to record his people’s culture when practising it was forbidden after he was forcibly removed to Coranderrk, a government-run reserve outside Melbourne. From a technical perspective, Barak’s watercolour and charcoal drawings on cardboard may seem unrefined, but they possess an unquestionable urgency.
Art of Central and Western Desert traces the origins of arguably the most important art movement to emerge from Australia. When anthropologists first encountered Aboriginal people in Central Australia, they were astounded by their sophisticated visual language of dots, lines and symbols. Half a century later, those traditions re-emerged in the hands of Tim Leura Tjapaltjarri, Shorty Lungkata Tjungurrayi, Johnny Warangkula Tjulpurrula, Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri and others as part of government-run employment programmes initiated after the closure of the Papunya cattle station, 240km west of Alice Springs. The artists transferred with ease the iconography associated with sacred rituals, knowledge and creation stories onto boards using acrylic and polymer paint. In Johnny Warangkula Tjupurrula’s Water Dreaming (1971), concentric rings representing waterholes are interconnected by bold orange lines that record the flow of seasonal rains, with white dots denoting different plant species. In Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri’s Untitled (Snake Dreaming) (1972), brown snakes adorned with white dots radiate from a circle motif across a black surface marked with cross hatches and slender lines. The men of Papunya not only broke new artistic ground; they caused a sensation that rippled throughout Central Australia and gave licence to artists such as the late Emily Kam Kngwarray and current superstar Betty Muffler. The latter’s sprawling canvas Ngangkari Ngura (Healing Country) (2022), a collaboration with Maringka Burton, occupies an entire wall.
In the room Resistance and Innovation, walls fashioned from plywood and plasterboard offcuts evoke the studios of Destiny Deacon, Julie Dowling, Harry J. Wedge and Trevor Nickolls, a new generation of city-dwelling artists who, in the 1980s, laid the foundation for many Indigenous artists working today. Among the standout pieces is Teatowel—I seen myself (1992), a photographic diptych by the late Deacon showing an Aboriginal girl reappropriated from Axel Poignant’s 1957 picture book Piccaninny Walkabout alongside an image of a black doll dangling in front of an open window. The images are printed on a tea towel, a reference to kitsch “Aboriginalia”.
In Scientific Racism, the University of Melbourne’s shameful past as one of Australia’s leading eugenics research centres is laid bare. The room features glass vitrines housing research publications alongside contemporary works by Brook Andrew, Julie Dowling, Yhonnie Scarce and a video in which the curator Marcia Langton interrogates the racist motivations behind eugenics, which explain “why our art traditions were not recognised as art”, Langton says. “They didn’t even see us as human.”
65,000 Years: A Short History of Australian Art is a maximalist exhibition brimming with exceptional art from some of the finest artists Australia has ever produced. Its success as a cohesive experience stems from a concise vision that effortlessly unfolds across 11 distinct spaces. Even for those with some grasp of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander art, it is an exhibition that demands multiple visits and rewards those willing to thoroughly engage with the works and accompanying text.
What the other critics said
The Indigenous academic Claire G. Coleman writes in The Saturday Paper that it is “almost certainly one of the greatest survey exhibitions of Indigenous art presented”. The art historian Roger Benjamin, in The Conversation, found his expectations “exceeded”,while the art journalist Tim Byrne writing in The Guardian labelled the show “endlessly fascinating and deeply moving”, and “indispensable for the future development of Aboriginal artists, whose work integrates and builds on the legacy of their forebears”.
- 65,000 Years: A Short History of Australian Art, Potter Museum of Art, University of Melbourne, until 22 November
- The Art Newspaper's rating: the works ★★★★★; the show ★★★★★
- Curators: Marcia Langton, Judith Ryan and Shanysa McConville
- Tickets: free
