Aboriginal art has been a dominant movement in contemporary Australian art over the last 10 years. This statement would have been almost unthinkable 20 – or even 15 – years ago as Australia’s indigenous populations struggled for mainstream recognition of the importance of their culture to their very existence. Here were a people decimated by the arrival of Europeans, people whose land had been stripped from them and their families torn apart by official government policy. Not only in the 18th or 19th centuries, but well into the 20th as well. Tens of thousands of years of Dreaming washed away by a flood of convicts and settlers, their diseases, their ideas, their intentions, both good and bad.
Aboriginal people – like many prehistoric cultures – had expressed themselves through rock and cave art prior to European settlement, but the transition from ancient expression to modern art is a relatively recent phenomenon.
