65,000 Years: A Short History of Australian Art

It’s the best—because the most floating, unpindownable—title for an art show here for ages (I’m tempted to say for 65,000 years), and it’s got people coming in droves. On the four occasions I visited the show, the Potter was full—full of elderly, well-to-do, obviously ex-Uni of Melb graduates, bending down stiffly to read the didactics, and groups of international Uni of Melb students having “Australia” explained to them by guides.

Actually, I’m tempted to suggest that the obvious success of the show is as much as anything testament to the extraordinary cultural reach and power the prestigious Uni of Melb exerts over Melbourne, even and especially when it appears to be criticising itself (more on that later).

But first the show. It’s encyclopaedic, wide-ranging, all-encompassing, certainly one of the biggest and most inclusive exhibitions of Aboriginal art I have ever seen. And this in itself is worth noting: it’s exactly the kind of show a state, let alone a national, gallery should have done ages ago, although, to be fair, the National Gallery of Victoria’s 2018 Colony exhibition comes close (more on that later too).

On the ground floor, there is “First Encounters and Responses,” which includes Nicolas-Martin Petit’s Aboriginal Warrior with Spear (1802), Augustus Earle’s Portrait of Bungaree (1826), Mickey of Ulladulla’s River with Boat (1891), and, of course, E. Phillips Fox’s Landing of Captain Cook (1902). And there is “Art of Victoria and Lutruwita,” which includes John Glover’s Mills Plains (1836), William Barak’s Corroboree (1897), Tommy McRae’s William Buckley and Dancers (1890), and Arthur Loureiro’s King Barak (1900). Of course, depending on which room the spectator enters first, there is either a kind of détente and mutual curiosity that is lost with invasion or an invasion that is followed by a certain détente.

Then in the central stairwell, we have a number of contemporary women basket weavers, such as Indra Prudence, Gumirrmirr Garrawurra, and Lorraine Connelly-Northey, who actually makes her bags out of metal. (In fact, throughout those first two rooms, in response to the absence of Aboriginal voices from the time, there are works by contemporary Aboriginal artists addressing invasion and colonisation, and even the European depiction of Aboriginal people: Gordon Bennett’s Death of the Ahistorical Subject (1993), r e a’s Poles Apart (2009), Christopher Pease’s 4 Bedrooms, 2 Bathrooms (2011), and Brook Andrew’s Sexy and Dangerous (1996).)

On the first level, we have a representation of that “founding” moment of contemporary Aboriginal art and perhaps of Aboriginal people finding their own voice or being given a voice in contemporary Australia. We have works from the Men’s Painting Shed at Papunya, such as John Tjakamarra’s Man’s Dreaming (1971) and Mick Tjapaltjarri’s Water Dreaming (1971). We have, from even earlier, Albert Namatjira’s Ormiston Gorge (1939), paired with his great-grandson Vincent’s Albert Namatjira on Country (2021). We have, from even earlier still, although this will open up one of the most profound questions of the exhibition, biologist and ethnographer Baldwin Spencer’s collection of barks from Oenpelli in West Arnhem Land from 1912 and anthropologist Donald Thomson’s collection of Yolngu barks from North-East Arnhem Land from 1935.

Finally, on the second level, in something of a literal and metaphorical ascension, we have “Cultural Astronomy,” which addresses the “intricate layers of astronomical and environmental knowledge, mapped out in the stars and passed down from generation to generation,” and includes Nym Bandak’s All the World (1958–59) and Larry Jungarrayi Spencer’s Milky Way Dreaming (1986). We have “Art of the Kimberley,” featuring Rover Thomas, Paddy Bedford, and Rusty Peters, and “Resistance and Innovation in City and Bush Studios,” which puts together a number of so-called “singular” Indigenous artists, such as Sally Gabori and Ginger Riley, with such pioneering “urban” Indigenous artists as Harry J. Wedge and Trevor Nickolls (although, as Tristen Harwood reminds us in his catalogue essay, such “urban”-based art is to be found on every level of the show).

A number of reviews of the show have been somewhat critical—no reviewer would dare be entirely critical—seeing in such a wide-ranging survey, in which so many different moments and regions are represented, a certain thinness or even tokenism. It is not so much that there is only one Mick Tjapaltjarri, one Uta Uta Tjangala, and two Emily Kngwarreyes, but why the same show had to include them all. But this is perhaps to miss the real aim and purpose of 65,000 Years. A more positive response is provided by Tim Stone, the reviewer for The Art Newspaper, who notes that the exhibition does attempt to be geographically far-reaching, to include as much as possible of Australia: “The more than 250 distinct nations across the country means that both traditional and contemporary Indigenous practice is incredibly diverse.” But even he misses the real thrust of the show, for what we would like to suggest is that it is precisely democratic, all-inclusive, wishing to leave nobody out. It is something like a poll or survey in which everybody is heard and everybody counts the same.

And then it hits us: this show, with its title making an Aboriginal claim on Australia and with its hundreds of artists all equally mounted on the wall, is not only a case for voting for an Aboriginal Voice to Parliament, but would itself seek to be something of a Voice.

We can bet that the show was originally planned years ago, before the long and protracted and I’m betting delayed rebuilding of the Potter Museum (actually, the only real change I see is the addition of a lovely coffee shop at the main entrance before you enter the exhibition space), as the opening show, and we can only imagine, as the opening was more and more delayed and the date of the referendum approached, how nervous everyone would have been getting.

And then the worst thing happened: the Voice referendum, for which Marcia Langton co-chaired the design group and was one of those on stage when Anthony Albanese first presented it to the Australian public, failed on 14 October 2023 by the fairly resounding margin of forty to sixty per cent.

For the formidable and imposing associate provost and distinguished professor Langton (more on her later) is one of the co-curators of 65,000 Years, along with the redoubtable, long-serving and now former curator of Indigenous art at the National Gallery of Victoria, Judith Ryan, and University of Melbourne associate curator Shanysa McConville.