Ron Radford, the Director of Canberra’s National Gallery of Australia, can say almost exactly when Australians and overseas visitors became interested in Aboriginal art.
˜’You can pinpoint it to the 1988 Bicentennial,” Mr Radford said. ˜’That’s when people would come up to the front desk and say, ˜Can you direct me to the Aboriginal art?’ I can assure you that did not happen before the Bicentennial.”
A former director of the State Gallery of South Australia and head of the NGA for five years, Radford said the state galleries were not very interested in showing Indigenous art before 1988, though they had been collecting it since the 1950s.
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