The best Aboriginal works are no longer trapped in an ethnographic category but possess a unique aesthetic aura born of truth. Rather than appearing as a tokenistic and marginalised inclusion within post-1788 Australian art, it is time to give due recognition to the art tradition that long predates it.
When we paint - whether it is on our bodies for ceremony or on bark or canvas for the market - we are not just painting for fun or profit. We are painting as we have always done to demonstrate our continuing link with our country and the rights and responsibilities we have to it. Furthermore, we paint to show the rest of the world that we own this country and that the land owns us.
— Galarrwuy Yunupingu in Windows on the Dreaming: Aboriginal Paintings in the Australian National Gallery.
ABORIGINAL artists have transformed the way we see the land and the history of art in this country. Their rise to a position of acceptance, even prominence, within the mainstream has been gradual, starting in Arnhem Land in the 1870s, when Paul Foelsche, a member of the Northern Territory police force, collected bark paintings from around Port Essington, in the Cobourg Peninsula, the first works on bark of any great number to enter museum collections.
In 1912, the anthropologist Baldwin Spencer commissioned Gagadju and Kunwinjku artists from the escarpment country to paint images similar to those found on rock and bark shelters in Arnhem Land, in exchange for sticks of tobacco, setting the pattern for a form of representation - x-ray images of food sources and spirit beings - which became characteristic of Kunwinjku art for most of the 20th century.
Arnhem Land bears the scars of European intrusion, protectionism and control, although it has suffered less disruption to languages, law and rights in land than southern coastal parts of indigenous Australia. After the Aboriginals Ordinance of 1918, whites needed a permit to enter Arnhem Land, although this proved difficult to police, especially among traders, pastoralists and zealous Christian missionaries. The area was already infiltrated with missions when it was proclaimed an Aboriginal Reserve in 1931, in part established to contain pastoralists' violence against the indigenous population.
In the early 1960s, Yolngu of Yirrkala, facing the loss of their land to bauxite miners in the Gove peninsula, used the language of art to assert their authority and to show that Christian and Yolngu belief were not incompatible. Following the Elcho Island Adjustment Movement of 1957, when clan leaders erected a spectacular display of mardayin (their most secret objects) outside the church at Galiwin'ku, Yolngu leaders produced the Yirrkala Church Panels of 1962-63, juxtaposing clan designs of the two moieties of the area, Dhuwa and Yirritja.
These great tableaus, which were hung on either side of the altar, laid down the sacred designs that constitute charters to their lands established before time. The artists forged a tangible symbol of the strength of their religion and cultural law, equivalent to the Ten Commandments or the Koran, showing that Yolngu art, politics and cultural law are inseparable and inviolable.
Only days after the Yirrkala Church Panels were unveiled, a large area of Yolngu country was excised from the Arnhem Land Reserve, without one Yolngu voice being heard. In 1963, Yolngu sent a bilingual bark petition to the federal government demanding that their rights in land be protected and recognised.
The barks were bordered by absolute symbols of Yolngu political power, designs belonging to clans whose lands were most immediately threatened by mining, which represent title deeds to clan estates and ceremonial places, according to Yolngu law. They introduced a wild card into the official system of negotiation, which stood outside the terminology of legal parliamentary discourse and established that Yolngu had not been consulted and did not consent to the destruction of their land - their identity - where ancestral beings left reservoirs of spiritual power and their spirits reside.
The origins of the Western Desert art movement in Papunya, a government assimilation settlement 250km northwest of Alice Springs, in the early 1970s are well known. The situation was very different from that in Arnhem Land, but the same attachment to country was the driving force.
The Papunya of 1971, where more than 1400 Pintupi, Luritja, Warlpiri, Anmatyerre and Pitjantjatjara peoples were stationed for their supposed advancement, was a place with a high morbidity rate, riots and despair. The senior men, ill prepared to make the transition to a sedentary existence, were motivated to take up painting by a need to assert the strength of their culture against the odds, as Charlie Tjararu Tjungurrayi famously expressed it: "If I don't paint this story some white fella might come and steal my country."
With their painting, the men positioned themselves in concerted opposition to white officialdom at a settlement built to silence their language and stifle their culture. By revealing the ancestral designs that invoke power in ritual contexts, they asserted the importance of their culture to the colonisers and controllers of their destiny.
They dared to invent a permanent visual language out of the dangerous symbols hitherto kept closeted on the ceremonial ground, away from the sight of women and young men - to the distress and anger of senior men from outlying communities.
The first works, painted on scraps of recycled board, were completely different in medium and style to other forms of Aboriginal art then known: the bark paintings, carvings and artefacts of northern Australia and the watercolour landscapes painted by Albert Namatjira and other western Arrarnda artists at Hermannsburg mission from 1936 onwards.
Namatjira's watercolours - the first Aboriginal works produced in Central Australia for the commercial market - were greatly admired by the general public for his faithful observation of the landscape, their heightened colour and the clarity of the sunlight which illuminated them. Starved of access to the red centre, the public warmed to these images of the heart of their continent, though unaware of the artist's deep spiritual affinity with this land and the sacred narratives it holds.
Namatjira was quick to adopt for his own purposes Western techniques and the Western way of depicting land: in profile perspective with a horizon line. He knew the land intimately from within and was absorbed by the impact of light on solid form and the way colour modulates over distance. He didn't include men's sacred designs, or reveal the spiritual associations of particular places, but that didn't lessen the commercial value of his watercolours to a public less informed about the wider context of Aboriginal art than it is today.
Namatjira's work was enthusiastically collected by people attuned to the dominance of the landscape tradition in Australian painting and for whom Central Australia held a certain romantic attraction.
The assimilationist policies of the time, aimed at the "whitening" of indigenous Australia, made Namatjira's watercolours more marketable in 1940s and '50s Australia than ancestral designs would have been.
Namatjira, the first Central Australian artist of renown, died tragically in custody in 1959, an outcast in his own land, but he foreshadowed the emergence of contemporary Central Desert painting 12 years later.
The founding artists worked with the detritus of the settlement: unwanted fruit box ends, floor tiles and scraps of composition board. But the closeness of the first paintings to their source in men's law gave the works a solemn liturgical power, pointing to cosmological secrets. A new art form was forged that is startling in its directness and power and in its combination of figuration and abstraction.
Central Desert acrylic painting began as a form of political activism produced by male elders experiencing a profound sense of diaspora. Ultimately, it became an art form that has earned its place as important contemporary art in a mainstream context.
It never loses its political, social and cultural message, but since the artists began to work as individuals, it has evolved, strictly on its own terms.
As with other forms of modern art, the audience was slow to grasp the power and significance of Papunya Tula art. Arrogant purists, ignorant of the meaning or antiquity of Central Desert iconography, doubted the authenticity and validity of an Aboriginal art form that was not composed of organic materials and was made for the art market rather than for ceremony. Papunya Tula art is surging in popularity now, facilitated by a plethora of solo and survey exhibitions over a period of three decades.
This revelation of the power and magnitude of the artists' achievements over a period of three decades and the fact that Australians have been looking at, thinking about and absorbing the new forms of this art for at least 20 years, powerfully demonstrates that a new form of landscape painting has emerged, one that is conceptual and abstract and holds in equipoise an aerial perspective of country and the idea of being close to theground.
The success of the movement is not confined to a small group of artists throughout the Central and Western deserts, but has had a big bang effect on other forms of Aboriginal art made in widely different contexts. As a result of their brilliant contribution, Aboriginal art in all its diversity has moved from the periphery to the forefront of contemporary art practice in Australia.
In asserting the importance of land and their inalienable oneness with it, Aboriginal artists are making art that is profoundly spiritual and political which now underscores the way we perceive Australia.
The conjunction of archetypal designs and modern materials results in a rich and potent art form that speaks with a new voice and lays bare an essential difference, of cultural identity and perception, which cuts very deep.
The best Aboriginal works are no longer trapped in an ethnographic category but possess a unique aesthetic aura born of truth. Rather than appearing as a tokenistic and marginalised inclusion within post-1788 Australian art, it is time to give due recognition to the art tradition that long predates it.
Judith Ryan is senior curator of indigenous art at the National Gallery of Victoria. The exhibition Land Marks opens on Friday at the Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia.