65,000 Years: A short history of Australian art

Ten years ago, work began on creating a testament to the duration, resilience and ingenuity of artists of the First Peoples.

The vision was to showcase the significance and brilliance of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander art created from time immemorial, throughout Australia’s colonial history and into the twenty-first century.

Working with Senior Curator Judith Ryan AM and Associate Curator Shanysa McConville, we have brought together works that feature the diversity of art genres, styles and media of First Peoples.

The exhibition 65,000 Years: A Short History of Australian Art has now launched at the newly renovated University of Melbourne’s Potter Museum of Art.

The ironic title and conceptual framework of this exhibition and accompanying publication take their inspiration from the unique antiquity of Aboriginal design traditions.

65,000 years is the earliest established date for human occupation of the Australian continent.

The evidence is clear from archaeological excavations at Madjedbebe in Arnhem Land in the Northern Territory, led by archaeologist Professor Chris Clarkson, whose study notes: "Human occupation began around 65,000 years ago, with a distinctive stone tool assemblage including grinding stones, ground ochres, reflective additives and ground-edge hatchet heads".

Politics & Society

‘What version of the past is promoted and what’s obscured?’

The works in 65,000 Years address not only ancient design and art traditions but also the contemporary world of the artists during colonial and postcolonial periods.

Some are uplifting and engaging, showing the pleasurable, beautiful and exuberant in cultural and social aspects of the artists’ lives, often as a statement of defiance against the burden of their history.

Others present a vision of the Australian wars that is searing and disturbing. The primary anti-colonial message of the works is simply – ‘This is art’.

This was not always evident, and hence the phrase ‘A Short History of Australian Art’ in the title highlights that the recognition of the artists themselves and their distinctly Australian styles and forms of art has come about only very recently.

We may be confounded by the belated and very reluctant acceptance of Aboriginal art into the fine art canon in the last few decades of the twentieth century. How this occurred is explained by Professor Ian McLean in his book, How Aborigines Invented the Idea of Contemporary Art.

He states, “The artworld’s hesitant curiosity about Papunya Tula painting quickly became an embrace. It grew into the most significant development of late-late-twentieth-century Australian art”.

Acknowledging this significance, the artworks of nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first-century Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander artists deserve to be exhibited in a major exhibition that examines the art that is unique to this continent.

Moreover, it is by addressing this art history in the context of Australia’s colonial history of invasion, dispossession, extermination and racist scientific experimentation that we will begin to fathom why, for so long, it has been denigrated and overlooked by the Australian art establishment.

In curating 65,000 Years: A Short History of Australian Art, working closely with the artworks brought about an understanding of the artists, their contexts and histories – and a relentless witnessing of the radical changes to their world that colonisation and modernity wrought.

The anti-colonial remembrance and truth-telling intentions of many of the works are evident, as are the religious and existential motivations of the artists refusing to give up their practices of honouring ancestors and ancestral places.

Artworks are instances of remembrance, memorialisation and continuity.

Arts & Culture

In this way, the beginning of a highly contested history of the University began

What emerges is the persistence of the artists to make art, whatever their circumstances, during wars, displacements to administered settlements and missions, and with few resources, but always with an eye to the sacred past, the duty to continue their cultural traditions, practices and belief systems, and above all to exercise their agency.

Despite the loss of population and land, Aboriginal traditional relationships with land and the ritual expressions of these affiliations were difficult to suppress.

This is due in no small part to the artists represented in 65,000 Years, whose rich ceremonial lives involve painting the inherited ancestral designs on bodies and sacra.

We also owe the survival of our traditions to those artists who have spoken back to the colonial system with images that force us to question the presumed authority of the British and the governmental systems they introduced to replace ours, the racism and the attempts to eradicate our cultures and knowledge systems.

What we know now is that we must find a way of writing and speaking about these art traditions and the artists that give justice to their own logic.

The introduced European art criticism failed until late in the twentieth century to acknowledge the art of the First Peoples and it struggled to understand it.

This is why the agency of the artists themselves is fundamental; only they can communicate their meanings and intentions.

They question and interrogate attitudes, histories, people, events, ideas and ideologies.

For those whose voices were not recorded, it is right and just to accord them the dignity of having intent, to give their works the correct historical context.

For those whose voices are recorded, they have provided a precious part of our history, telling us what the historians largely ignored or belittled until the force of their art traditions could no longer be ignored.

Health & Medicine

This has so rarely occurred in the University’s history

These art traditions have sustained the First Peoples throughout the history of Australia, our deep history across the thousands of generations since our ancestors first arrived here and throughout the short history of colonialism and nationhood that is yet to find an honourable place for us.

This is why the artworks in this publication and exhibition are profoundly significant: they are proof of our existence and our humanity. This is art.

The exhibition, 65,00 Years: A Short History of Australian Art is curated by the University’s Associate Provost Distinguished Professor Marca Langton, Senior Curator Judith Ryan AM and Associate Curator Shanysa McConville. It will open to the public at the University of Melbourne’s Potter Museum of Art on 30 May 2025 and run until 22 November 2025. Entry is free.

This is an edited excerpt from the publication also titled 65,000 Years: A Short History of Australian Art, which was released by the University of Melbourne with Thames & Hudson. Featuring new writing by 25 leading thinkers across generations and disciplines, this publication further examines the history of Indigenous art across time and space. It is edited by Distinguished Professor Marcia Langton and Senior Curator Judith Ryan. The publication can be purchased here.