That Post Impressionism, like most art movements, came to Australia’s shores with a delay was predictable, and the absence of the original social and ideological ideas that sustained it made it all the more difficult for Australian artists to really understand modernism and appreciate its radical gambits. It all too easily reverted to a style shorn of substance. Margaret Preston, who is best known for her still lifes, is one of the few artists who engaged both with modernism and with indigenous painting, using the aboriginal sense of colour and texture to create Aboriginal Landscape in 1941. The years leading up to WWII witnessed the re-emergence of the view of Australia as a hostile, hallucinatory and malevolent environment. Russell Drysdale, one of Australia’s most popular painters, made a complete break with the naturalism of the Heidleberg School. Drawing on the expressionistic and surrealistic sources he had assimilated whilst in Europe he was able to envision this harsh, unforgiving landscape and give his weird assemblages of natural and manmade objects a bizarre theatricality and a nearly caricatural stylisation which became all the more marked during the drought year in 1944. His famous painting, a decade later, ‘The Drover’s Wife’, who embodies the values of fortitude and resilience, retains elements of this surreal vision even as it marks a return to a more naturalistic style. He was in addition one of the first in his generation to depict the Aborigines.

During this interwar period Australian art was catching up with artistic ideas such as Dada, Constructivism and Cubism that had been at the forefront of European innovative art practices throughout the previous decades. An Australian avant garde was in the making which, like all avant gardes, was ignored and lampooned by the public. But for the artists associated with the literary and arts review Angry Penguins, which was based on expressionist and surrealist ideas, this was merely grist for the mill. Sydney Nolan and Arthur Boyd were among the most prominent members of this movement and both subsequently won recognition overseas. Nolan’s family, like Boyd’s and Drysdale’s, went back several generations, but whereas Drysdale’s were aristocratic farming gentry and Boyd’s part of the artistic aristocracy, Nolan’s were Irish working class. Nolan is best known for his Ned Kelly series. Riding towards the sunset through the desert landscape clad in his hand-made armour, Nolan figured Ned Kelly as a nomadic folk hero, a victim of injustice and the antithesis of the settler. Hanged for theft and murder in the 1880’s he was famed for laconically saying “Such is life” as the noose was placed over his head. Nolan has explained that the main subject of this series of paintings was the landscape, its extraordinary light and colours, which he captured through the use of enamel ripolin. Often described as naïf Nolan admitted his to debt to Douanier Rousseau and to Picasso though perhaps even more relevant is the influence of child art. However the fact that he chose to helmet his hero/anti-hero in a black square is a measure of his sophistication in its homage to the Russian modernist Malevich. There was too an element of autobiography in all this since Nolan had deserted from the army.

Boyd also produced a series of highly disquieting pictures; compared to Boyd’s, Nolan’s paintings have a strange stillness and luminosity. Boyd’s influences, grafted onto European expressionism and surrealism, were Bosch and Breughel and his scenarios are not Nolan’s red desert but the moist, dark primeval forests. His paintings often have a religious dimension and his Biblical figures, much like Stanley Spencer’s, inhabit their own familiar terrain, His protagonists caught up in an hallucinatory world of frustrated desire and anguish have an emotional intensity that contrasts with the peacefulness of his later landscapes which date from his return to Australia in 1972. It is a shame these have not been included in the show. Having landscape as the central idea around which to curate the show has meant that much figurative as well as abstract work has been excluded from what is in many respects an historical survey. Moreover, compared to the space given over to the earlier period, that given over to contemporary artists seems minimal and the choice of artists somewhat arbitrary. The two best known contemporary landscape artists are Fred Williams whose nearly abstract paintings evoke rather than describe the landscape of the outback and Olson, whose recently painted King Sun hangs resplendent from the ceiling, a work that bears witness both to Jackson Pollock and to the spirit of indigenous art making.

For me it is undeniably difficult not to look back to the three galleries of Aboriginal art and not be overwhelmed by their intricate compositions, their shapes, colours and textures while at the same time being aware just how deceptively close their relationship is to Western abstract design. Theoretically, though modern, Aboriginal art come closest to Post Modernism naturally siting itself within global art; it’s a strange meeting of opposites. The turning point for Aboriginal art was in 1971 when Geoff Barden an art teacher at Papunya School, a settlement outside Alice Springs in the Northern Territories, saw the potential for an abstract mural in some of the non- durable motifs used in aboriginal ceremonies but did not realise that the children at the school who had not reached the age of initiation did not have the sacred knowledge to do this work. When consulted the older tribal men proposed painting a large mural with the express purpose of relaying this tribal knowledge. This was done and precipitated a torrent of acrylic paintings on board, masonite or any other support though the mural was eventually painted over for fear of revealing too many tribal secrets and visual codes. But within a decade Aboriginal art was being recognised as “fine art” as opposed to ethnographic or tourist art, though the danger of its numinous dimensions being eroded by the art world’s stress on individualistic and competitive values remains.

The acceptance in the art world of Aboriginal art as the West’s primitive “other” coincided in the seventies with Post Modernism’s seeming openness to “difference” and hybrid art together with its emphasis on land and body art and on the politics of identity and the environment. Such issues sit easier with Aboriginal art in terms of its concerns with extra-aesthetic questions than with the self-scrutinising of autonomous modernist painting which despite its primitivist borrowings remained Eurocentric. But it is precisely because of these leanings which now go back over a century that the three rooms devoted to Aboriginal paintings such as Tjakamara’s Five Dreamings 1984, Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri’s Warlugulong 1976, Yunupingu’s beautiful Universe 2007 and Big Yam Dreaming 1995 by Kame Kngwarreye, that with its skeins of black paint cannot help remind us of Jackson Pollock and Brice Marsden, seem to speak to us and seem closer to both a modern and post modern aesthetic sensibility than do the rooms filled with the colonial and settler art that dates from almost two hundred years ago.

We can appreciate its beauty but this does not mean we really understand it. Aboriginal art remains profoundly foreign to the Western mind, which is why its impact on contemporary Western art is minimal. Part of Aboriginal mythology is based on the reality of the Aboriginal dreamland which is about survival in a harsh landscape and which by contrast highlights the lack of identity that has dogged Australian art since its inception. Unlike Aboriginal art Australia’s art still has a fragile root system, for compared to the eons Aborigines have dwelt in this continent the colonialist experience of living in this land is as nothing. The two worlds, the Western, within our time, and the Aboriginal, beyond time, no longer collide but do they converge. The aboriginal experience remains the dreamland for contemporary Australian art, which is beginning to forego the notion of identity as it becomes increasingly international.