
Big, black and weighing in at 2.2 kilograms, 65,000 Years: A Short History of Australian Art bares its authority without flinching. The editors’ names Marcia Langton AO and Judith Ryan AM embossed in silver on the cover confer gravitas – and if we are not sufficiently impressed by the solemnity of the book’s physical presence, the assertion on the back cover that, ‘Long before the British invaded Australia in 1788, first peoples’ art traditions flourished for thousands of generations…’ whets the reader’s appetite. The book’s ambition to become a definitive text on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art is writ large.
Commencing as a complement to a forthcoming exhibition of the same name at the University of Melbourne’s Potter Museum of Art, the book 65,000 Years has gathered its own momentum, awaiting the final redevelopment of the museum and the launch of the exhibition in May 2025.
Both contributing editors are well known and impeccably credentialled. Professor Marcia Langton is one of Australia’s foremost public intellectuals. An anthropologist and geographer, since 2000 she has held the Foundation Chair of Australian Indigenous Studies at the University of Melbourne (UoM). Judith Ryan is currently Senior Curator, University Museums and Collections, UoM and is best known as the indefatigable curator of Indigenous art at the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV). Her tenure from 1987–2021 coincided with the period when First Nations art was fully recognised and became prominent in Australia, when her NGV catalogues brought accessible scholarship to the understanding of numerous art movements.
Given the book’s promise to reveal the remarkable age-depth of cultural history, I was alarmed on reading the opening line of Langton’s introductory essay that the title, 65,000 Years: A Short History of Australian Art is ‘ironic’. It is intended as a ‘polemic’ device to draw the reader’s attention to ‘the unique antiquity of Aboriginal design traditions’, especially when compared with the short duration of European pictorial history on these lands. For clarity, the book’s 25 essays (by as many specialists, some in collaboration with cultural custodians) cover the history of First Nations’ art produced post–European invasion, not for the millennia inferred by the book’s title.
Turning the 341 pages, I found a single image of rock art, a form habitually associated with antiquity. Pointedly, this image was taken in Manilakarr Country on the Arnhem Peninsula and includes a crystal-clear representation of a Makassan prahu from Sulawesi in the Indonesian archipelago. Shown in profile, the vessel is juxtaposed against two stencilled and painted forearms, fingers outstretched. I assume the image is intended to highlight the extent of the intercultural contact across the Top End of Australia, before the establishment of the penal colony on the continent’s east coast in 1788. Close inspection of the Manilakarr rockface reveals numerous faint figurative images surrounding the central motifs. This is a site where history has been told and retold through millennia.
Langton emphasises that the 65,000 years of antiquity alluded to stems directly from archaeological evidence gathered at Madjedbebe, a rock shelter on the lands of the Mirarr people of the Stone Country adjacent to Kakadu National Park. In a subsequent chapter, Bim nakimukken (The big picture): timeless artistry and Country, Eve Chaloupka (Ballardong Noongar, Czech, English) notes the proximity of Madjedbebe to Oenpelli station (Gunbalanya). Significantly, it was at Oenpelli in 1912, where station manager Paddy Cahill began to assemble the first collection of bark paintings for Walter Baldwin Spencer, Foundation Chair of Biology at UoM. The collection derives its importance not only from its quality and the aesthetic power of its imagery, but also because its imagery establishes an indelible link between local rock art and the ancestral figures depicted on bark intended for cross-cultural exchange. These startling images (many in the ‘X-ray’ mode) continue to win supporters, and influence minds, well beyond the region of their creation. The process of revivification and reinvention that drove the bark painters at Oenpelli, became the modus operandi for various pioneers of contemporary art at other remote Indigenous communities across the twenthieth century. Despite Spencer’s stated admiration for the ‘first-rate examples of first-rate artists’, the names of the individuals who created these movable cultural treasures were not recorded. Australia’s art history is much the poorer for this omission.
Across the book’s ten chapters, several essays discuss the visual legacy of contact between the First Australians and those who sailed to the Great Southern Peninsula from Europe. The term ‘Great Southern Peninsula’ was new to me, so for clarification it refers to the south-east portion of the Australian continent, including Tasmania. In this section, two essays are devoted to the analysis of portraits of First Australians by the European newcomers — French explorers, British-born colonists and ex-convicts. Historian Greg Lehman (Trawulwuy) shines new light on the subjectivity of the purportedly empirical project to capture the likenesses of the ‘natives of New Holland’ and Van Diemen’s Land. Noting the resounding silence of the sitters, Lehman explains how the tenor of French artist Nicolas-Martin Petit’s representations were transformed while sketching a Palawa man. The subject seized the drawing from the artist, Petit then managed to grasp and retain the drawing, however, the mood of quizzical interaction changed irrevocably, and conflict ensued. I had previously been puzzled by a stylistic schism in Petit’s portraits. By pinpointing a particular transformative event, Lehman effectively turns the lens from the subject, 180 degrees, to focus on distortions occurring in the artist’s mind as his apparently ‘quiet’ sitters assert their agency. Rather than allowing his subjects’ voice, Petit subsequently portrayed his Palawa subjects as grotesque, ‘distrustful and perfidious’.[1]
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Citing Trawlwoolway artist and academic Julie Gough, Lehman insists archival images must be ‘reclaimed and reused’, asserting that agency in the archive is ‘essential if we are to gain an honest, powerful relationship—and truly own—our colonial past and the implications it has for today.’ Lehman proposes First Nations artists should exploit the archive with the aim of ‘truth-telling’, as expounded in introductory essays by Langton and Ryan.
The ‘archival turn’ of recent years is expanded upon by Ian McLean, who cites Jacques Derrida’s claim: ‘There is no political power without control of the archive, if not memory’, a notion to which I will return, for it bears on an important aspect of the book’s purpose. McLean continues to show how Indigenous contemporary artists including Gordon Bennett, Brook Andrew, Christopher Pease—and by extension Gough—have ‘mined the archive’ to reveal the inequities and paradoxes of British colonisation and the humanity of First Nations’ people whose likenesses, cultural property and bodies were stilled, killed, fragmented and stolen away in the service of European imperialism.
Working to counter the European colonial bias of the archives are a trove of animated images drawn on paper by Indigenous artists. Made during the latter nineteenth century these impressions provide a refreshing contrast to the ‘silent’ portraits of locals sketched by British and French artists. The works of William Barak, Tommy McRae and Mickey of Ulladulla are now rock-solid fixtures in the canon of Australian art. Carol Cooper examines the historic context of these individuals who, although they worked independently in diverse locations, collectively created a critical cache of images that speak with clarity and purpose about Indigenous experience during the colonial era.
Each artist seems critically aware of their moment in history. William Barak recalled the ceremonies he witnessed on the cusp of the invasion of the lands of Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation (now greater Melbourne). Tommy McRae (Kwatkwat) was Barak’s contemporary but lived in the upper Murray River region. McRae portrayed a wide range of subjects including spirited accounts of Indigenous lifeways, ceremony and ritualised battles, although he is probably most appreciated for his wicked observation of (drunken) colonists. Mickey of Ulladulla (Yuin/Dhurga) encompassed all these subjects (albeit without McRae’s capacity for parody), while providing insight into daily life on the coast of colonial New South Wales. His delicate images include diagnostically specific representations of important marine species and recognisable profiles of coastal steamers. Importantly, Cooper claims that certain figures in the tableaus by McRae and Mickey of Ulladulla are self-portraits, adding further veracity to their observations.
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Although not as well-known as the above trio, Oscar of Cooktown (Kuku Yalanji) provides a searing account of the violence that drove colonial expansion. Oscar was a child when he was torn from his coastal clan to work in Western Queensland. His observational capacity is known from a single lined notebook, containing 40 pencil drawings, several of which describe ruthless acts of frontier brutality. To communicate the extent of the violence meted out across Queensland, Cooper cites the explicit titles of a few of the drawings: Police Boys doing duty (Lynch law), Dispersing usual way, Some good shooting, Murderers hoppled to tree, Troopers dispatching and Native Mounted Police, Cartridge belts well filled (all c.1898). Thanks to Cooper’s essay, and despite knowing so little about his life, Oscar must be included with his southern peers, for his precise images resound with the horror of frontier violence: once seen, they cannot be forgotten.
Ruth Pullin’s essay Cross-cultural connections: Johnny Dawson, Eugene von Guérard and Robert Dowling offers an intriguing counterpoint to the assault delivered by Oscar’s images (although the pastoral encounters she describes occurred two decades after the wave of massacres and valiant resistance by the ‘fighting Gunditjmara’ of southwestern Victoria). Most intriguing are the paired portraits of Dawson (Gunditjmara) by von Guérard (Austrian) and vice versa, as they convey a precious moment of cross-cultural exchange and mutual vulnerability between individuals of incommensurate life experience. Unsurprisingly, given the context of their creations, both portraits are delicately rendered. Our appreciation of Dawson’s vision is further enhanced by the reproduction of his vivid impressions of colonial Victorians, in their finest, at an equestrian circus he attended in Melbourne in the early 1880s.

65,000 Years is both a heavy book (literally) and as a consequence of the brutal history it encompasses. Fourteen essays—a substantial portion of the book—focus on the 20th century, when ‘Aboriginal Art’ gained widespread recognition. This period of momentous and unrelenting change, commencing with the application of social Darwinism and concluding with the celebration of Indigenous culture, can only be summarised here.
Well-chosen writers cover key regional movements in Arnhem Land (including Groote Eylandt), the Kimberley and the Central and Western Deserts. Each essay provides an authoritative account of a movement’s generation, often focussing on the contribution of its founding artists, sometimes with an abbreviated coverage of recent practitioners. Only a few of the works discussed were produced in the 21st century. Most authors establish the link between acclaimed artists and the cultures of the Old People — and in this way they reinforce the continuity of cultural expression implicit in the overarching title. The writing frequently highlights masters of the 20th century who were raised in the bush with little or no contact with non-Indigenous others. Believing themselves to be the living embodiment of totemic forebears, they paint with commanding authority — the power of their expression emanating from the intimacy of their connection to place and to the ancestors.
Some authors debate the artist’s intentions over and above their reiteration of inherited signs and stories. For example, in his chapter on Papunya Tula painting, anthropologist Fred Myers insists that the founders of contemporary desert art were ‘giving’ and ‘showing’ what was ‘like gold’, ‘dangerous’ or ‘dear’, and through this endowment they were ‘establishing a relationship and anticipating recognition’ by influential actors outside desert culture. Myers asserts that early Papunya Tula paintings should therefore be regarded as ‘political as much as personal accomplishments.’ His point is reinforced with the reproduction of an Aboriginal Land Rights poster (c.1979) that includes a map-like painting by Anatjari Tjakamarra, Creation Dreaming (c.1975). There can be no doubt that paintings by Papunya Tula artists, and painted petitions by YolÅ‹u artists, enhanced the public understanding of Indigenous ownership of Country, and in turn, helped enable various forms of land rights to be recognised in the past half-century.
Other movements, including the Aranda watercolour landscape tradition and the art that emerged at Warmun (Turkey Creek) in the East Kimberley, were initiated by individuals who grew into adulthood in the intercultural contact zone. No comprehensive history of Australian art is possible without an account of events that occurred at the Finke River Mission at Ntaria/Hermannsburg in the early 1930s, when Albert Namatjira grasped the brush from the hands of visiting southern artists and began to paint. Associate curator Shanysa McConville (Eastern Arrernte) writes how, during a period of extended drought and deprivation heightened by a world-wide economic depression, Namatjira made the most of a sequence of cross-cultural opportunities, including learning ‘carpentry, leatherwork, blacksmithing, shearing and stockwork’, before fixing on a creative career. Initially producing wooden artefacts and burning designs with hot wire on mulga-wood plaques, Namatjira began to paint translucent images of the country he loved in watercolour on paper. Setting numerous precedents, Namatjira’s fame came after sell-out exhibitions in southern cities. McConville contrasts Namatjira’s achievements on the national stage with the stark facts of his treatment at home in Central Australia, concluding by celebrating Namatjira’s legacy. An emphatic portrait by Vincent Namatjira of his great grandfather, Albert Namatjira (2021), substantiates the enduring stature of ‘the man who gave the world a glimpse of Aranda Country, Dreaming and culture’.
Some readers may be disappointed that regions such as the Tiwi Islands, North Queensland or southwest Western Australia with their own rich histories of artistic production, are not granted serious attention. However, the scope of First Nations art has increased so radically during the last few decades that no single volume of essays could encompass the entire field. Accordingly, 65,000 Years is not encyclopaedic; rather, the editors have commissioned essays about the most established movements (with particular attention to UoM collection works), and in so doing they have bolstered an existing canon of First Nations’ art, that by inference should be incorporated in any ‘short history of Australian art’. It will be fascinating to see how the editors-cum-curators reconfigure these same works in the spatial realm later this year.

The potential for more complex themes to emerge, when works are seen in relationship to each other in the dialectical space of the gallery, is foreshadowed in essays by three of the younger writers. Coby Edgar (Gulumoerrgin, Jingili, Anglo), Hannah Presley (Marri Ngarr) and Tristen Harwood (Ngalakgan) are not constrained by region; rather, they identify acts of resistance, activism, affiliation with Country and gender as seen in works by selected artists. Presley, for instance, focuses on overtly political artists, Trevor Nickolls, Harry J. Wedge, Destiny Deacon and Lin Onus, all deceased by the time of publication. Through their inclusion in 65,000 Years, and in spite of the discomfort of the arguments they pursue, each of these artists are icons of Australian contemporary art.
Harwood argues for a new understanding of various otherwise unrelated First Nations artists. He uses the term ‘landrelation’ to encompasses how disparate artists ‘enact Country’ when painting. Whereas customary signs and semantics associated with the ‘anthropological impulse’ have previously been regarded as the markers of Aboriginal Art, Harwood shows how Mirdidingkingathi Juwarnda Sally Gabori and Ginger Riley Munduwalawala use ‘high key acrylic colour and styles that are aesthetically removed from earlier Indigenous traditions, though not metaphysically removed’ to evoke the eternal presence of ancestral spirits. Edgar’s writing stands out in powerfully expressing the emotional impact of key works by women artists. In addition to the business of locating selected artists in historical context, Edgar conveys how the art of her peers and Elders enriches her understanding of living ‘in the NOW’.
65,000 Years includes a distinct tranche of essays that speak directly to the University and its role in ‘scientific racism’. The inclusion of entries on the practice of ‘racial anatomy’ distinguishes this publication from other Australian art histories. Essayist Ross L. Jones includes the unambiguous summary of the practice: ‘Over the first century of the University of Melbourne’s history an unknown, but extremely large, number of Indigenous people had their bodies collected without their permission for the purpose of teaching and scientific study.’
A sequence of UoM anatomy professors were critical to the propagation of social Darwinism in Australia. The university fuelled a network of rampant grave robbers — obsessive collectors who unearthed the physical remains of innumerable Indigenous people. Their takings were delivered obsequiously into the hands of the professors, who in their turn gained kudos via the further dissemination of these human remains. The program’s callous avarice was, of course, cloaked in the respectability of Edwardian enquiry. The Palawa researcher and writer, Jessica Clark inspects a portrait of the most notorious of the university’s ‘anatomists’, Professor Richard J. A. Berry, (1867-1962), that was permanently displayed in a lecture theatre used by medical students until 2004. The portrait is juxtaposed with works by Brook Andrew (Wiradjuri, Ngunnawal), who forensically arranges and amplifies the material culture of scientific racism, and Judy Watson (Waanyi), who reconfigures documents of state sanctioned violence as bloodied indictments.
Berry was at the height of his power at UoM when Baldwin Spencer was assembling the first collection of bark paintings from Oenpelli/Gunbalanya. The University has many points of intersection with the First Australians, however, in was not until Langton’s appointment in 2000 that Indigenous people had a voice within the institution’s walls. It must also be acknowledged that the University is engaged in a forensic examination of its own history. A complementary volume of essays titled Dhoombak Goobgoowana: A History of Indigenous Australia and the University of Melbourne, includes ‘chapters on the University of Melbourne’s colonial and eugenics history and complicity in scientific racism’.[2] The publication also ‘examines the early benefactors who were implicated in and/or benefited from the stealing of land, wealth and labour’ and ‘research that was dependent on the unacknowledged expertise of Indigenous knowledge holders.’[3]

As a reviewer, I am compelled to wonder if 65,000 Years: A Short History of Australian Art is intended as an act of redemptive truth-telling on the part of the University, or as Langton asserts, as an ‘anti-colonial statement’? Can it be both? I suspect not, especially as large institutions have many stakeholders, and routinely narrowcast specific messages to disparate audiences. Given the loss of the 2023 referendum on an Indigenous Voice to Parliament (of which Langton was a public face), the majority of the institution’s power brokers are unlikely to cede real control to First Nations representatives, even when wrapped in the cloak of reconciliation in the academy. I suspect the University, like the nation, is unreconciled to the consequence of its role in an ongoing colonial process. Perhaps Langton’s declarative position can be seen as an attempt to reclaim and reframe the archive to achieve a broader political purpose. If the aim was to enact the Trojan horse within the institution, Langton has achieved her goals spectacularly, especially so if the pomp and formality of the book’s official launch in the Old Quad, the spiritual heart of the University, is anything to go by.
While the political purpose of the book was stated by both authors at the launch, Langton acknowledged that Ryan provided much of the curatorial grunt behind the publication. Ryan’s introductory essay is narrative driven, events propelled by the immediate conditions that preceded them. Such is the nature of ‘short histories’, that key moments are lined up without discursive argument, in a sequence that, at best, is an abridged reflection of the complex lives and productions of the protagonists in those events. 65,000 Years must ultimately be regarded as ‘gathering together signs’ that as Derrida argued, ‘aims to coordinate a single corpus [in this case Aboriginal and Torres Strait art], in a system or a synchrony in which all the elements articulate the unity of an ideal configuration.’[4] According to the editors, the ‘unity’ that underpins the selection of works reproduced, and that guided the choice of essayists, constitute an ‘anti-colonial’ declaration. Dense, fascinating and packed with compelling images, the book is a product of the time and context of its production. A collaborative artefact shaped by two senior thinkers who, working from within the belly of the institutional beast, have issued 65,000 Years into a world that is veering dangerously away from the values the publication represents. I hope its case for the revision of national and institutional history is heeded.
Footnotes
- ^ Greg Lehman quoting Colin Dyer, The French Explorers and the Aboriginal Australians 1772-1839 (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 2005),128, in 65,000 years: A Short History of Australian Art, 93.
- ^ “Truth-telling book examines University of Melbourne’s relationship with Indigenous people”, University of Melbourne, 28 May 2024.
- ^ Ibid.
- ^ Derrida quoted by Ian McLean in 65,000 years, 149.