This show changes everything you think you know about Indigenous art

Have you ever walked the streets of Melbourne and wondered what it was like before the roads, the skyscrapers, the cement-covered creeks? How the land of the Kulin people appeared in pre-colonial times? Artist Brett Leavy, a Kooma man from Queensland, has gone beyond wondering. Raking through sources old and new – colonial diaries, historic artworks, archival records, CSIRO soil maps, Geoscience Australia data – he has re-imagined the pre-colonial landscape, resurrected the trees, the streams, the waterfalls, the rocks, the animals and people.

The result is Virtual Narrm, a nine-hour, photo-realistic animation, which follows a day in the life of traditional owners the Wurundjeri Woi-Wurrung, from sunrise to sunset. The timeframe draws attention to how the Wurunjderi saw the land, orienting themselves in relation to the sun. Using cutting-edge technology, Leavy winds back the centuries – “I’m building a time machine,” he tells me when we meet.

Watching Leavy’s animation stirred mixed emotions; on the one hand, the thrill of seeing the beauty of the land in its original state, on the other, a deep sense of loss. Leavy has captured the moment before the Wurundjeri’s world was catastrophically changed. He has set his work in 1834, the year before British settlers landed on the north bank of the Yarra.

Brett Leavy reimagines a pre-colonial Melbourne in Virtual Narrm, a nine-hour animation commissioned for 65,000 Years: A Short History of Australian Art.

Leavy’s is the first artwork people will see when they enter the momentous exhibition 65,000 Years: A Short History of Australian Art, which relaunches the University of Melbourne’s Potter Museum of Art after a six-year closure and extensive redevelopment. Leavy’s 32-screen animation, commissioned for the exhibition and created with the input of Wurundjeri elders, extends 11 metres across the Potter’s new foyer. The only other artwork in the space is Mandy Nicholson’s Possum Skin Cloak (2012).

“We start from Narrm,” says Indigenous art specialist Judith Ryan when we meet at the Potter. “We begin by establishing the traditional custodians and their rightful place and honouring them and taking Narrm back to how it was in 1834.”

With Ryan are her co-curators, the formidable Indigenous leader and academic Marcia Langton, and their younger colleague, Eastern Arrernte woman Shanysa McConville, who is working on her first exhibition with what she describes as the “dream team”.

Years in the planning, this vast exhibition features more than 400 artworks, extending geographically from Lutruwita/Tasmania to Zenadeth Kes/Torres Strait, and spanning in time from the 1800s, when anthropologist Walter Baldwin Spencer was collecting bark paintings in Western Arnhem Land amid the frontier wars, to the present, with high-tech works such as Leavy’s.

The exhibition’s ironic title points to its avowedly “anti-colonial” stance; its central idea is that “this is art”, and has been for some 65,000 years. In the accompanying book, Langton points to archaeological digs that took place at Madjedbebe, a remote rock shelter in Kakadu, in 2012 and 2015; paint created from ochre mixed with reflective powders made from ground mica was dated to about 65,000 years ago.

“So that’s how long there has been art in this country,” Langton says. “And yet not recognised as art, classified as ‘primitive’, classified as ‘material culture’ by anthropologists and archaeologists”.

Emphasising that “this is art” may seem strange or even redundant at a time when Indigenous art is celebrated nationally and internationally. In Victoria alone right now, it is the focus of exhibitions at the TarraWarra Biennial (We Are Eagles), and the Heide Museum of Modern Art (Blak In-Justice).

From left, Marcia Langton, Judith Ryan and Shanysa McConville have curated an ambitious exhibition charting 65,000 years of Indigenous art.Credit: Wayne Taylor

Such recognition is “very recent”, says Langton. “When James Mollison [founding director of the National Gallery of Australia] went to Arnhem Land in 1981, and declared ‘this is art’, it was the first time that anybody from the world of fine art recognised our design traditions as ‘art’.”

Langton began working on the exhibition a decade ago, after the Potter’s chair, Peter Jopling, asked her to curate an exhibition of the University of Melbourne’s collection of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander works.

“And I immediately said yes, not realising that I was dedicating the next 10 years of my life to this,” she says.

Kaylene Whiskey (Yankunytjatjara, born 1976), Seven Sistas story, 2021.Credit: Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory, Darwin

She started by searching the university’s large and dispersed archive of Indigenous art, which includes important collections such as those of Baldwin Spencer, the university’s foundation chair of biology; ethnologist Leonhard Adams, who collected Anindilyakwa bark paintings from Groote Eylandt in the 1940s; and anthropologist Donald Thomson, who collected artworks, weavings and cultural objects from north-east Arnhem Land in the 1930s and ’40s.

But Langton also found that there were major gaps in the university’s holdings – no contemporary works from Arnhem Land or the Kimberley, no Western Desert paintings, nothing from the Torres Strait or Tasmania.

Betty Muffler (Pitjantjatjara, born 1945), Maringka Burton (Pitjantjatjara, born 1950), Ngangkari Ngura (Healing Country), 2022. Credit: The University of Melbourne Art Collection

“It had been collected randomly, by anthropologists or private collectors … so you have a bit of this and a bit of that, and nothing of that, and notably, apart from woven works in the Thomson collection, no works by women. Nothing! Nothing!” Langton says, showing her trademark passion. (Thomson did not list the names of the women weavers.)

Langton set about filling the gaps, increasing the representation of women artists and trying to find a “masterwork” from each genre, movement, period, approaching her art curator friends to help build an exhibition worthy of its title.

“And at some point I’d heard that Judith had retired from the NGV,” Langton says. “So I thought, beauty, this is what I need. I need Judith, because the job was becoming too massive and really required an expert curator who knows how to borrow works from institutions, public galleries, private lenders and there isn’t anybody else in the country who has the knowledge of Indigenous art that Judith has… and we’ve been a team ever since.”

Ryan, previously the NGV’s senior curator of Indigenous art, is now Senior Curator, Art Museums, at the University of Melbourne. The many Indigenous artists she has worked with over the years include Swan Hill-born sculptor Lorraine Connelly-Northey, one of seven artists commissioned to create new works for this exhibition.

Lorraine Connelly-Northey was commissioned to create a new work for the Potter exhibition.Credit: Janie Barrett

“Of course you’re going to go in when Judith’s asking you,” says Connelly-Northey by phone from her home just outside of Albury, on Waradgerie country, her mother’s traditional land. “Nobody says no to Judith. Well, I don’t.”

Connelly-Northey is known for her contemporary interpretations of traditional bush bags, which she makes from scrap metal scavenged from around Swan Hill. For this exhibition, she’s shaped rusted bits of discarded farm equipment – a cone-shaped seed harvester, a studded water pipe, a circular piece of dimpled tin – into three large bush-bags, almost two metres high. Scouting for the right material can mean travelling thousands of kilometres, but this time she “got lucky” and found what she needed in a matter of months.

“Things fell into my hands when I was travelling … so that was really exciting,” she says.

Connelly-Northey’s sculptures will be shown in the museum’s new atrium alongside other contemporary and cultural objects made by women, including the Tjanpi Desert Weavers’ large-scale installation of the Seven Sisters ancestral story, on loan from the NGA.

The exhibition spans the beautiful to the brutal; from wondrous linocuts, dance machines, and paintings about cultural astronomy, such as Nyapanyapa Yunupiŋu’s Garak – night sky (2020), to the horrors of the Australian wars and dark chapters of the university’s own past. A section of the exhibition, off-limits to children, exposes the scientific racism (eugenics) that occurred at the university during the early 20th century under the direction of Richard Berry, professor of anatomy, who readily accepted Indigenous remains from infamous grave robber George Murray Black. Photographs, letters, instruments, receipts and other documents from this time will be displayed alongside works by contemporary artists responding to these distressing acts, including Brook Garru Andrew, Julie Dowling, Yhonnie Scarce and Judy Watson.

Colonial paintings by non-Indigenous artists are also included, such as E. Phillips Fox’s Landing of Captain Cook at Botany Bay, 1770, on loan from the NGV.

“The moment I saw it, I said: ‘What are we doing with that ugly thing?’” Langton says.

Ryan persuaded her that it was important to include the painting, which depicts the British firing at Gweagal men defending their country with spears.

Minimini Numalkiyiya Mamarika (Anindilyakwa, c. 1900–1972) Macassan prau with three figures, waves and sea creatures, c. 1941–45.Credit: The University of Melbourne Art Collection

“This was the beginning of the Australian wars,” Ryan says. “We want people to look at the truth of it, because it happened, and the fact that [the painting] was commissioned by the NGV from an artist who was living in London to celebrate Federation in which there was no consultation with the First People of this land. So it is an important work. It is particularly ugly, but its truth is undeniable.”

“I gave in because I saw the point,” says Langton. “I think it’s regrettable that the point has to be made, that there are now, more than ever, people who deny that there was an invasion.”

Oscar (Kuku Yalanji, born 1878) No 26 Dispersing usual way. Some good shooting Sketchbook, c. 1898.Credit: National Museum of Australia

Some of the most poignant works in the exhibition are those by Indigenous artists documenting the frontier wars as they were happening, such as the drawings of Oscar, a Kuku Yalanji man born in north-eastern Queensland in 1878, who was taken from his community aged nine by a cattle station manager. The manager, A.H. Glissan, preserved and captioned 40 drawings Oscar made in the 1890s. They are quietly gruesome, with disturbing titles such as No. 26 Dispersing the usual way. Some good shooting.

I ask Langton what she would like people to take away from the exhibition.

“I want people to grapple with that immense antiquity and short colonial and post-colonial period and the tragedy that has befallen Aboriginal people and yet even so producing the major artworks of this country,” she says. “And I don’t care if people don’t like it and want to contest it. Fine. Go ahead. But this is an historically important event, not just an exhibition.”

65,000 Years: A Short History of Australian Art is at The Potter Museum of Art, University of Melbourne, from May 30 to November 23. Marcia Langton and Judith Ryan take part in Tradition and Innovation: 65,000 Years of Indigenous Art at the State Library (sold out) as part of the Melbourne Writers Festival. The Age is a festival partner.

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