65,000 Years: A Short History of Australian Art reframes the entire narrative of Australian art history, tracing First Peoples' cultural and design traditions across tens of thousands of years and demanding they be read as the foundation of this continent's artistic identity.
About This Book
Long before 1788, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples were producing art of extraordinary complexity and continuity. Yet colonisation rendered these traditions invisible to the settler gaze, and Indigenous art was not recognised as ‘fine art’ until the late 1980s. This landmark publication, produced in association with a major exhibition at the University of Melbourne’s Potter Museum of Art, gathers twenty-five writers across generations and disciplines to challenge that history. Spanning media, time and language groups, it positions Indigenous Australian art not as historical artefact but as living, evolving practice at the forefront of contemporary art today. A necessary corrective to the canon.
Key Features
- 352 pages of essays and new writing by twenty-five leading thinkers on Indigenous Australian art
- Authors: Professor Marcia Langton AO and Judith Ryan AM, with exhibition curation by Shanysa McConville
- Published in association with the 65,000 Years exhibition at the Potter Museum of Art, University of Melbourne, featuring over 400 artworks
- Published by Thames & Hudson Australia, 2025
What You'll Discover
- How First Peoples’ artistic traditions shaped the Australian continent across thousands of generations before European contact
- The colonial mechanisms — including scientific racism — that deliberately excluded Indigenous art from mainstream recognition for nearly two centuries
- The hard-won rise of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander art to prominence in contemporary practice from the late 1980s onward
- Diverse perspectives from twenty-five writers working across disciplines, offering a genuinely plural account of an art history unique to this continent
About the Author
Professor Marcia Langton AO is one of Australia’s foremost scholars of Indigenous affairs, culture and art, and served as curator of the associated Potter Museum of Art exhibition. Judith Ryan AM co-curated the exhibition alongside Langton and Shanysa McConville; both Langton and Ryan are named authors of this publication.
Specifications
- Format: Hardcover
- Pages: 352
- Dimensions: 23.7 x 30.6 x 3.4 cm
- Language: English
- ISBN: 9781760764210
- Publisher: Thames & Hudson Australia
- Publication Date: 2025
Perfect For: Art historians, curators, and cultural researchers; architects and designers engaged with First Nations practice; students and academics in Australian studies, visual culture, or postcolonial theory; and anyone seeking a serious, authoritative account of Indigenous Australian art.