Historical ironies: the Australian Aboriginal art revolution*

Margaret Preston, an Australian painter, has been credited as the first nonanthropologist to begin to explore Australian Aboriginal art as an art. Preston saw in Aboriginal painting the well-spring for an ‘indigenous art of Australia’. The seeking of a national identity, and specifically a connection with place, is common to many if not most societies, reflecting a Herderian idea of art, language and culture shaped by land, and a connection between people and place. But if this is common to most societies, it is perhaps most keenly felt in colonial settler states. For Preston, if there were to be a truly national art, it would be through inspiration from Aboriginal art and its relation to land; all it needed was the ‘all seeing eye of the Western Artist to adapt it to the 20th century’.1