65,000 Years: A Short History of Australian Art
As a title, 65,000 Years: A Short History of Australian Art, is heavily ironic. It’s obviously not possible to have a show of Aboriginal art that stretches back 65,000 years. At that time, Australia, New Guinea and Tasmania formed a single land mass. The ancestors of today’s Aboriginal people are believed to have crossed a narrow land bridge from what is now South-East Asia.
If one burrows deeply enough into the past it’s difficult to say that any group of people “owns” a particular place, such is the turmoil of migration and conquest. But for the purposes of this show, 65,000 years is an impressive title deed. It sure beats 237 years, the time that has passed since the arrival of the First Fleet.
This exhibition has been a long time in the making, and the expectation was that we’d see a landmark survey of Aboriginal art. What we have instead is largely a history lesson, presented with a polemical slant. There are fascinating images and artefacts, and some high-quality paintings, but the selection of recent material feels random, as if the curators were ticking a box rather than searching for the very best examples of an artist’s work.
