Belonging: Stories of Australian Art

For almost forty years, Australia’s national art collection has been used to tell stories of the connections between art, people and places. In recent years, our Australian art displays have tended to keep the art of First Nations and non-Indigenous artists in separate areas of the building. In 2010, the National Gallery celebrated the opening of thirteen galleries dedicated to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander art and our Australian art displays have, since the Gallery opened, reflected the perspectives of colonists.

When Nick Mitzevich was appointed Director of the National Gallery in 2018, he asked curators to consider new ways of telling our stories through art. This presented an opportunity to reframe the Australian art galleries, so that they reflect the experience of all people who have called and continue to call Australia home — Traditional Owners who have looked after this place for over 65,000 years, and those who have arrived over the last 250 years.

A collaborative project bringing together First Nations and non-Indigenous curators followed — Belonging: Stories of Australian Art is the result.

Belonging draws together historical and contemporary works of art created by more than 170 First Nations and non-Indigenous artists from across Australia and the Pacific, and focuses on art’s relationship to the experience of colonisation. It moves away from the usual narrative of Australia’s art history—a story that privileges the point of view of settlers and hinges around the so-called discovery of Australia by Captain Cook in 1770—and instead acknowledges that this place is the site of over 65,000 years of continuous sovereignty and culture.

Curators undertook extensive training in decolonising strategies and racial literacy, that they then used to develop a new way of working together based on cultural collaboration and consultation. This signaled a new culture, a new way of working, that will inform the ways collection displays are developed across the organisation in the future.

To tell a fulsome story of art from this place, our displays need to acknowledge the coexistence of First Nations and non-Indigenous perspectives. In Belonging, our curators have brought together works that tell a range of stories, each engaging different points of view, and arranged as a transhistorical display. Recognising that linear narratives and histories reflect and reproduce the perspective of the coloniser, curators brought the historical and the contemporary into close proximity by drawing on the First Nation’s notion of the Everywhen — an experience of time where the past, present and future co-exist. In First Nations cultures, time is not chronological or passing moment after moment. Instead, the Everywhen exists in an active relationship with the natural and ancestral worlds, where present and future events and experiences are shared with the past.

Belonging is based around ideas or themes that are experienced across First Nations and settler cultures. These include the experience of place, making home and of movement across this continent. This is not to suggest that the ways these ideas or themes are experienced is the same, but that they provide entry points for a range of perspectives. For example, under the theme of Country and place, the work of two of the most important movements in Australian painting are brought together for the first time. Iconic works by Australian Impressionists such as Arthur Streeton and Tom Roberts are presented alongside major paintings by senior Aboriginal ceremony men produced at the settlement of Papunya in the 1970s. The work of these two groups shows the differing ways in which First Nations and non-Indigenous artists experienced and depicted landscape, place and their connection to the land.

For many, the introduction to Australian landscape painting has been centred around the Australian Impressionists and famous paintings such as Arthur Streeton’s painting of the pastoral landscape outside Narrm/Melbourne, Golden summer, Eaglemont from 1889. At the time, these nationalist landscapes were championed by settlers as the first ‘Australian school of art’. Ever since, pastoral and bush landscapes have been celebrated by settler culture as embodying ‘Australianness’ — the experience of light and atmosphere that is particular to the experience of this place, and a contrast to the ways in which those phenomena are experienced in places such as Europe.

Since the 1970s, the work of senior ceremony men painting at Papunya have been popularly understood to represent the first great Aboriginal art movement. These paintings reference the land and law associated with a specific region. The artists used ceremonial iconography, previously applied on sacred ritual objects and in body designs and ceremonial ground paintings, to celebrate the beauty, richness and complexity of Country. This part of the display shows us the ways in which both Indigenous and non-Indigenous artists celebrate connection to Country and place through art, weaving new narratives into previously understood ones.

This display encourages people to view works such as Golden summer, Eaglemont through a new lens — one that recognises the evocative way Streeton captures the feeling of sun and heat on pasture, but one that also recognises the subject — the devastated Country of the Wurundjeri people, who were forced from their lands. The painting depicts a landscape which was cleared by settlers, destroying markers of ongoing Aboriginal connection to Country. The over-stocking of sheep stripped the land of drought-shielding indigenous grasses, leaving it vulnerable to soil aridity and erosion. The beautiful yellow pasture seen in the painting becomes a sign of colonisation. Belonging invites us to contemplate the different perspectives these works can offer.

By combining historical and contemporary works of art by Indigenous and non-Indigenous artists, Belonging helps us consider the art of the past and how this art might help us think about the present and our future. This sense of interconnectedness is echoed in a quote from Charles Perkins that features in the display:

Belonging: Stories of Australian Art is the first stage of a comprehensive retelling of the stories of art in Australia — our curators are currently working on a second stage which will draw on our collection of twentieth and twenty-first century art.