Those painters who worry about all of that blank space to be filled on their canvasses should check out the show at the newly re-opened Potter Museum of Art for some knowledge.
The place was buzzing last Friday, the first display of the gallery’s revamp to create a new entrance and café. Critics had flown in from interstate for the occasion, the opening of 65,000 Years: A Short History of Australian Art.
Sydney art historian Professor Roger Benjamin, who was supportive, as a senior lecturer in Art History, of the effort of the long-term director of the day, Frances Lindsay.
“It’s a radical exhibition from a curatorial point of view,” he said of the show, praising the skill and vision of curators Judith Ryan, Marcia Langton and Shanysa McConville.
“It is a very slow look, two-hour exhibition with 400 objects, one third paintings,” he said, with the title of the exhibition setting the scene for an ironic dig at the short time Europe has actually been influencing the trajectory of the local art scene.
There is a good collection of bark paintings on display, the earliest collected around 1900 by Baldwin Spencer. The great flowering of First Nations abstraction began in the early 1970s with the Papunya artists and the availability of acrylic paint.
Senior figures from several communities began transferring body patterns onto board, the dots and lines, subtle and finely-tuned with apparent precision to represent maps of country and identity.
The style has changed a lot since then, he said, possibly under the influence of Western ways of looking at art.
In the famous Emily Kngwarray paintings of the ‘90s, for example, the lines are more expressionist even though they all link back to her totem, the pencil yam. The title of one, The State of Country 1990, suggests she is mapping changes.
While these paintings are lively and readily appreciated, like the bold linear abstractions of Jaru/Walmajarri that use lines to depict creeks, the earlier ones show the restraint of detailed knowledge.
Most traditional First Nations paintings are linked to country. They are aerial without the horizon and related to the ripening of seeds, grasses and bush foods. There is no distinction between painter and place.
The exhibition invites viewers to look at the relationship between art practices by grouping paintings with urban and more obvious Western influences in separate rooms.
One feature is the depiction of communities use streets as grids while Billy Benn Perrurle depicts his home in the Harts Range in a pictorial manner.
More dramatic depictions of the clash between First Nations and European sensibilities are covered in an adults-only room in which Professor Marcia Langton calls out the grave-robbing practices of the past.
The anatomy department at the university was particularly guilty but according to Langton “produced nothing in the way of scientific research”. The remains of ancestors were not repatriated until 2003.
The history of the struggle by First Nations artists to tell their stories is well-depicted in the paintings of Gordon Bennett and Julie Dowling, whose great-great-grandmother was taken to Europe as an exhibit.
This is an exhibition packed with information and colour about the terrible history of superiority shown by the colonial forces to superb First Nations thinkers.
65,000 Years: A Short History of Australian Art
Potter Museum of Art – The University of Melbourne, Swanston Street, Melbourne
Exhibition continues to 22 November 2025
Free entry
For more information, visit: www.potter-museum.unimelb.edu.au for details.
Images: Installation view of 65,000 Years: A Short History of Australian Art, Potter Museum of Art, The University of Melbourne, 2025 – photography by Christian Capurro | Installation view of 65,000 Years: A Short History of Australian Art, Potter Museum of Art, The University of Melbourne, 2025 – photography by Christian Capurro | Billy Benn Perrurle (Alyawarr, 1943–2012), Artetyerre 2008, synthetic polymer paint on canvas, 150 × 300 cm, National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri / Canberra.
Words: Rhonda dredge