Marcia Langton 'delighted' and 'terrified' by new exhibition 65,000 Years: A Short History of Australian Art

Australia Broadcast Center

29-05-2025

The long, woven eel trap in pale native grasses hovers above me.
I've stepped through the new mirrored entrance into the redeveloped Potter Museum of Art at the University of Melbourne; the building has become a monumental recognition and celebration of the artistic visions of the oldest continuing culture on earth.
The sinuous eel trap, made by Dhauwurd Wurrung Gunditjmara artist Sandra Aitken, is suspended in space, no longer a fishing device but seemingly a container of history, of almost-lost weaving skills and of the memory of connection to land and creativity that not even decades of colonisation could erase.
Ten years of painstaking work has culminated in an exhibition that not only brings together the infinite variety and long history of Aboriginal art, but that also recounts the brutal history of dispossession, subjection and scientific racism that is the dark heart of colonial history — and the subject of so many of these works.
The exhibition is called 65,000 Years: A Short History of Australian Art.
It's a deliberately provocative title.
It slices quickly to the point of what is almost certainly the most important exhibition of Australian Aboriginal art and design assembled in this country.
Because Indigenous Australians have been making art for as long as they have been here, telling their stories, painting their place and recording their experiences and creative visions for millennia — but colonial recognition of that art has been a very long time coming.
"I say it's a short history of Australian art,'' co-curator, writer and anthropologist Professor Marcia Langton says, "because Australian art, the art of this country, was not recognised as art until well into the 20th century, so it's both a truthful and an ironic title."
The exhibition's curators are formidable women: Professor Langton, who was originally asked to create this show a decade ago; and curator and Arrernte woman Shanysa McConville, with historian and curator of Indigenous art Judith Ryan, who both joined the project in 2021.
They are brilliant, insightful and dedicated curators. They hold every aspect of the broad, varied and long histories of Indigenous art in their minds, rapidly recalling fine details and important historical contexts.
They are awe-inspiring company: in conversation with them, I work hard to keep up.
The curatorial team consulted with communities around the country, sought the display of a major collection of historical Indigenous art and cultural objects, and have invited commissions of new work to establish a powerful timeline over centuries that Professor Langton says had to be done — "because it had never been done before".
For the curators, the task of putting together this exhibition was cultural, historic and deeply personal.
"I started out thinking that we have to address Australian history because the artists themselves do," Langton says. Not to do so, she says, "would be an act of cowardice".
"Getting those chronologies right has been really important," McConville says. "The central and western desert room in particular has been close to my heart … I wanted to get that absolutely right."
Brought together, the works are overwhelming.
They extend from the very earliest bark paintings and cultural objects — all approved for public viewing — to the first colonial representations of Indigenous Australians.
And there is work from every place, region and period of time in which art was created: former missions and settlements, deserts and homelands in and around the battlegrounds of the Australian Wars, and the suburbs and cities of new movements of contemporary Indigenous art.
The three curators also include "hero" works from the celebrated art movements of Papunya, the Kimberley and the Spinifex people among others, with major paintings by Emily Kngwarreye, Rover Thomas, Carlene West and the Tjanpi Desert weavers.
For Judith Ryan, much of the exhibition is a living tribute.
"A lot of the walls are memorial walls — of loss, sorrow and death. You can't see this art separate from dispossession and massacre: it isn't separate from history — it's the intersection of art and history."
McConville cites the room of early colonial painting as one of great significance to her, as the names, images and histories of important Aboriginal artists are depicted in the works.
"It brings them into the room and into focus. Those works are more about these artists than the colonial painters themselves," she says.
At the centre of the exhibition is the returned cultural pinnacle of the university's Indigenous collections: the Donald Thomson collection, which has been on long-term loan to Museums Victoria since 1973.
The Melbourne anthropologist's collection is astonishing: Thomson is credited with making the world's most significant ethnographic collection of Aboriginal art and cultural objects, which he started in the 1930s.
It comprises work from more than 90 communities in Cape York, Arnhem Land, the Central and Gibson Deserts, and beyond.
The room in the Potter Museum that contains many of the Thomson pieces is painted green for the grasslands of their origin, and the precious bark paintings are thrillingly familiar and mysterious.
But even in this extraordinary collection, there was something missing.
"One of the things I noticed when I started going through the catalogues was that there were no works by women except for the weaving works that Donald Thomson collected," Professor Langton says.
"But of course, none of the women are named."
The curators specifically commissioned major pieces by contemporary women artists, including the mesmerising five-metre painting, Ngangkari Ngura (Healing Country).
Betty Muffler and Maringka Burton, respected Aṉangu ngangkari (traditional healers) based at Indulkana in the APY Lands, collaborated on the painting, which focuses on healing the country in the aftermath of British atomic testing at Maralinga and Emu Field during the 1950s.
After 10 years' work, the exhibition has left its mark on its curators.
"It feels like home," McConville says.
"It's the greatest exhibition experience I have had," says Ryan who was senior curator of Indigenous art at the National Gallery of Victoria for more than 40 years.
When I tell her that I think it will blow people's minds, she quietly replies, "I hope so."
Marcia Langton feels similarly.
65,000 Years: A Short History of Australian Art is at the Potter Museum of Art (Naarm/Melbourne) from May 30 to November 23, 2025.
Virginia Trioli is presenter of Creative Types and a former co-host of ABC News Breakfast and Mornings on ABC Radio Melbourne.