The opening exhibition at the University of Melbourne’s newly refurbished Potter Museum of Art has been given a darkly ironic and deliberately provocative title:65,000 Years: A Short History of Australian Art. While there is a vast and storied tradition of Aboriginal art, its power and dignity have been criminally under appreciated and devalued until only recently.
For most of the 20th century “this work was considered primitive”, says the renowned academic and co-curator of the exhibition, Marcia Langton. The central point of 65,000 Years is declamatory, a forceful demonstration that “this is not an ethnographic collection”, she says. “It’s art.”
Given the international standing of Aboriginal art now, where works are hung in major galleries around the world and fetch prices in the millions, it seems bewildering that it was so debased for so long. In the book that accompanies the exhibition, Langton mentions several ethnographers who “recognised the aesthetic as well as the social and religious implications of the art they encountered”, including Karel Kupka and Ronald and Catherine Berndt. But they were exceptions: most collectors thought of the work as naive or “folk art”, and galleries and museums – where they displayed it at all – relegated it to backrooms and basements.
Langton and her fellow curators Judith Ryan and Shanysa McConville have organised 65,000 Years around several hero pieces or masterworks. Some are by renowned artists like William Barak, Albert Namatjira and Emily Kam Kngwarray, but many are by unnamed artists whose work was poorly catalogued at the time of acquisition. The opening void that connects the ground floor to the top contains woven works by unknown female artists, alongside three narrbong (or bush bags) by Wiradjuri artist Lorraine Connelly-Northey and a magnificent possum skin cloak by Mandy Nicholson. Langton “wanted women to be at the heart of the building, because women sustain life”.
The exhibition as a whole eschews prettiness and reassurance for something more honest and battle-worn; it grapples with the brutality and theft that underpins Australian colonial history with unflinching candour. Gordon Bennett’s Death of the ahistorical subject (up rode the troopers, a, b, c) takes details of a lithograph depicting a massacre of Kamilaroi mob at Slaughterhouse Creek and turns it into a dot-point cry of resistance and reclamation.Christopher Pease’s 4 Bedrooms, 2 Bathroomsdepicts an Edenic vision of pre-colonial life – superimposed with the floor plan of a new apartment, making the theft of land overt and contemporary.
Opening with a collection of works that deal powerfully but respectfully with the atrocities committed in lutruwita (Tasmania), the exhibition moves north through Australia as the viewer ascends the floors. There are rooms of bark paintings from north-eastern Arnhem Land and from Groote Eylandt in the Gulf of Carpentaria. These “tell the pre-British invasion story of the Dutch coming on their ships”, Langton explains, “as well as the Macassar praus [traditional Indonesian canoes] that were coming here for centuries before the British arrived”.
Many of the works in 65,000 Years represent complex and ongoing attempts to reconcile a history of colonial barbarity and murder with an indomitable Indigenous spirit of survival and custodianship. But perhaps the key space, at least as far as the University ofMelbourneitself is concerned, is the room labelled the “dark heart”. In it, contemporary Aboriginal artists interrogate the pseudoscientific and deeply racist history of eugenics, for which the university was an international centre.
“The point is to be offended,” Langton says of this room, which recreates the feeling of an early 20th century lab and includes an imposing portrait of Richard JA Berry, the university’s third professor of anatomy and one of the world’s leading eugenicists. The skull depicted on his desk may be a memento mori, but it also speaks of the horrors of a colonialist pedagogy, where the remains of Aboriginal people were looted, studied and boxed up for decades, all under the rubric of academia.
“A lot of government policies and white supremacist doctrine emanate from this pseudoscience,” Ryan says; she suggests a line can be drawn from Berry’s bogus study to the White Australia policy, the Stolen Generations and Black deaths in custody. McConville agrees, labelling this room “a call to arms”.
If the room is disturbing – more for its clinical, patrician atmosphere and scientific pretensions than any visceral horror it depicts – so is the history it interrogates. But while this “dark heart” of bones and instruments feels necessary, it isn’t indicative of the exhibition as a whole. It lacks the vibrancy of colour, the audacity and resilience, and the sheer joy of the artworks on display elsewhere.
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As the viewer reaches the top floors, past major works by Ginger Riley Munduwalawala and Mirdidingkingathi Juwarnda Sally Gabori, they reach a zenith of sorts; a space of astronomy, of stars and the night sky. Dominating one room arethe Tjanpi Desert Weavers’ lifesize sculptural figures of the Kungkarangkalpa (Seven Sisters), who leapt into the skies to escape a lecherous old man called Nyiru and transformed into the Pleiades. They tell a tale of pursuit and escape, of transformation and metamorphosis, that feels reminiscent of Ovid and Greek myth.
There is an expansiveness in these works that is often astonishing; they seem thoroughly uninterested in interiority or psychology in a western sense, championing the omniscient and universal over the solipsistic. Murrinhpatha artist Nym Bandak’s All the world is a case in point, with its vision of the universe under the cosmic order of the Rainbow Serpent; it includes the orbit of the sun and moon, the wet and dry seasons and the entire cycle of human life and death.
“This is what most people don’t understand,” Langton says. “Aboriginal art is conceptual art, it’s cosmological.”
65,000 Years looks to the future even while it maps the past, with more recent works by Trevor Nickolls, Harry J Wedge and Destiny Deacon illustrating the overtly activist leanings of contemporaryIndigenous art. A work like Kaylene Whiskey’s Seven Sistas story, painted on to a South Australian tourism road sign, playfully reimagines the seven sisters as pop culture figures like Whoopi Goldberg, Cher and Wonder Woman. Maximalist, intensely colourful and intrinsically interwoven with the artists’ lived experience, these works are no repudiation of past practices, but a consolidation and natural progression.
There are more than 400 works of art from First Nations artists in 65,000 Years, including rarely seen pieces from the University of Melbourne’s own collection, alongside 193 loans from 77 public and private lenders. And yet, it only touches the surface of this vast, ongoing tradition. While endlessly fascinating and deeply moving for non-Indigenous audiences, it is indispensable for the future development of Aboriginal artists, whose work integrates and builds on the legacy of their forebears – and Langton hopes it will lead to an explosion of creativity: “You can’t be what you can’t see, right?”
65,000 Years: A Short History of Australian Artis open at Potter Museum of Art until 22 November