It’s unusual for an exhibition catalogue to appear 8 months in advance of the exhibition it records. Indeed, the opposite is more often the case as printing and publication delays see the art viewed before its elucidation appears. So why has the Melbourne University team headed by Prof Marcia Langton and Senior Curator Judith Ryan rushed out their 340 page collection of 23 essays so far in advance of an exhibition perhaps ironically entitled 65,000 Years – A Short History of Australian Art, which opens at the Potter Museum of Art next May?

One answer is that it’s not strictly a catalogue – there’s no clarity as to whether the art shown and discussed in the book is actually part of the exhibition. Though there is mention of loans to that from 70 private collections and “many new commissions”. Another may well be delays in refurbishing the Potter Museum, which was originally opening this year.

But it was clearly important for MU to tell its story, and that has two aspects. One is the reclaiming of three absolutely essential collections of early barks from their loans to the Melbourne Museum. Arguably, the Baldwin Spencer Collection dating back to 1913 actually invented ‘art’ for Aboriginal people. For anthropologist Spencer arrived in Oenpelli, western Arnhemland and saw both rock art and its temporary translation to wet-season bark shelters and commissioned its reproduction on to sheets of stringybark as “a transportable commodity”. For, while foolishly believing that Aborigines were “a doomed race”, he recognised that their rock art “had the delicate lines of civilised Japanese or Chinese artworks”. 170 works resulted, all described but lacking the artist’s name.

In the 1930s, academic Donald Thomson thought rather differently. He was sent to north-east of Arnhemland to avoid a military expedition against the Yolŋu. Meeting and coming to an understanding with leaders such as Woŋgu, it was natural for the Traditional Owner (and, thanks to Baldwin Spencer, artist) to explain his laws and culture to the balanda visually. Interestingly, it emerges from Judith Ryan’s writing that Arnhem and the Deserts (after 1971) went about announcing their cultures to the world in diametrically opposite ways. While the Yolŋu began by transferring abstract ritual body painting designs to bark, before deciding these were too sacred to show and switching to more figurative story-telling, the Desert men began with figurative ceremonial stories before hiding them behind dotting.

The third MU collection is that of Leonhard Adam, a German-born Dunera Boy/Man, who was initially incarcerated before MU obtained his release because of his pre-existing reputation as author of the book, Primitive Art. As such he recognised the aesthetic qualities of a large collection of barks from Groote Eylandt in the Gulf of Carpentaria which had been gathered by British trepang trader, F H Gray. He recommended MU obtain them, and Gray donated them in 1946. These were then exhibited at a 1973 exhibition curated by the Egyptian-born Grazia Gunn, who writes incisively on Groote art and artefacts in the book.

It would seem that outsiders often have the advantage over native non-Indigenous Australians when it came to appreciating the values of ATSI art. Indeed, it emerges several times during the book that overseas exhibitions and writers such as Herbert Read and Kenneth Clark recognised that barks were “in the category of art simply enough in their sensuous quality”. They were not just to be appreciated for their ethnographic meaning. And that was well before homegrown writers such as Bernard Smith and Robert Hughes continued to ignore the art of First Nations, as did our major institutions.

A quirky thought: while Robert Hughes is often credited with his major re-assessment that “Aboriginal art was the last great art movement of the 20th Century”, no one has ever been able to trace that statement’s origins. Marcia Langton, however has MU Professor Ian McLean much more certainly opining, “It grew into the most significant development of late 20th Century Australian art”, which may well be a more useful benchmark for all of us. Langton also draws the interesting conclusion that the “sedentarisation” (does she mean ‘sit-down time’?) caused by government and missionary efforts at assimilation actually gave the acrylic canvases from the Deserts and the ochre paintings in East Kimberley the time they needed to emerge. “The exhibition is studded”, she foreshadows, “with the heroic works by men and women who pioneered the transformation of traditional design and material with modern materials, the outstanding artists who have spoken back to the colonial gaze”.

And that is the second motive for MU in collating this wealth of wisdom in the book and mounting the exhibition. It is “an anti-colonial publication and exhibition” insists Judith Ryan, proving that “65,000 years of ingenuity and resilience cannot be extinguished in a comparative instant of hegemonic rule”. Or as Langton can put it, “It’s proof of our existence and humanity”. But MU has a dark past that it now wants to expunge, as Joanna Mendelssohn, Honorary Senior Fellow at the University’s School of Culture and Communication explained in The Conversation:
“The second, more potent reason (for the publication) is that this university was both a participant in some of the more shocking crimes against Indigenous Australians and the keeper of works that tell the slow tale of redemption. (In the book) Historian Ross L. Jones’s documentation of the great crime of the university’s medical faculty is harrowing reading. Over many years, bodies were “harvested” en masse – sacrificed, as he writes, “to the Western gods of progress and learning”. “Racial anatomy”, supporting theories of eugenics, became a speciality of the School of Anatomy”.

This necessary breast-beating extends to a mixed reception for anthropologist Norman Tindale, the man who proved the continued existence of Tasmanian Aboriginal people, established the discipline of tribal boundaries that denied the colonial foundation myth of Terra Nullius, and recorded detailed knowledge of Aboriginal traditions which today allows people to recover language, identify artefacts and their mode of manufacture, recreate ceremonies, and make land claims. For Judith Ryan, though, quoting Kokotha artist Yhonnie Scarce, he was a eugenicist. For Coby Edgar, hailing women artists and discussing Julie Dowling’s fascinating painting, Death of the Anthropologist (1996), Tindale was one of a select group of European men who “proved to themselves that First Nations people weren’t a dying primitive race, and that our art and cultural expression should be in art galleries of the living not museums of the dead”.

So, 65,000 Years leaves some room for debate while offering the expertise of writers such as Eve Chaloupka on the art of the Arnhem Plateau, Fred Myers on Papunya Tula, Stephen Gilchrist on the Kimberley and Arnaud Morvan on the brief flowering of Jirrawun Art. But there’s a surprising amount of coverage of 19th Century art – both black and white. A fascinating trend emerges in both early Sydney and van Dieman’s Land where Aboriginal people were pictured when quiescent, but left out of the picture when they fought back. Then there’s the discovery (for me) of Oscar, a boy from Cooktown who was ‘got’ by a Cammoweal station owner but retained enough memories of the bad days on Cape York to draw images with wonderfully ironic titles, ‘Dispersing usual way’ and ‘Police boys doing duty’ ie lynching diminished Indigenous figures.

This depth of early coverage then makes an ahistorical leap to Ian McLean’s analysis of contemporary urban artists such as Gordon Bennett, Brook Andrew and Christopher Pease. This is presumably justified by those artists’ use and abuse of historical images in order “to take control of the archive”, as McLean quotes Derrida as recommending in the ongoing battle against such claims as this from 1852 in ‘Our Antipodes’ that Australia was “the gift of continent unstained by war, usurpation, or the sufferings of a people”!

But for more traditional artists, the essentialness of ceremony as the root of their art-making keeps emerging in different writings even as Judith Ryan can claim that the great Emily Kngwarreye was not painting “encoded map-making, sacred designs or landscape”- an odd list – but was “translating body-markings that reflect the ceremonies that look after Country”. As writer Tristan Harwood points out, classic Aboriginal art is never just landscape; “it’s land relation because of the insistent Indigenous presence”.

Quibbles might include the unquestioned support for the Geoffrey Bardon legend at Papunya in a couple of places when both Luke Scholes and John Kean have done their best to update the story. The Torres Strait gets scant coverage except in chapters discussing ‘cultural astronomy’. But neither of those point out how inevitable it was that peoples lying down each night in the pitch dark would feel the need to come to an understanding of the stars, both through creative astrology and, especially in the Strait, through a necessary understanding of their movements related to wind, weather, tides and food resources.

I leave you with this defining thought from the perceptive Leonhard Adam – surely a match for the earlier McLean quote on the defining role of Aboriginal art in the late 20th Century: “No (other) Nation has produced its own culture quite independently of influencers from outside”.