Australian Art Timeline

Genetic evidence of maternal lineages shows that Aboriginal populations moved into Australia around 50,000 years ago when megafauna still lived here. There is evidence from 40,000 years ago of rock art, jewellery, and stone tools.

About 30,000 years ago, an ice age began, and sea levels dropped about 120 metres. Mainland Australia was connected with Papua New Guinea and Tasmania (called Sahul) at this time.

With the end of the ice age came warmer temperatures and melting ice. Sea levels rose and Tasmania was cut-off from the mainland around 11,000 years ago. New Guinea separated from Australia around 8,000 years ago.

Rock art is the oldest surviving human art form across Australia. However, dot painting, bark painting, carvings, sculptures, weaving and string art are other forms of Aboriginal art. 

Rock art, paintings and carving (petroglyphs) can be found throughout Australia. Different areas may show distinct and variable expressions of culture.

The oldest Australian rock art is in the Pilbara region of Western Australia and the Olary district of South Australia. 

There are three periods of rock art based on the styles and content of the art: the Pre-Estuarine (c. 40,000–6000 BCE), Estuarine (c. 6000 BCE–500 CE), and Fresh Water (c. 500 CE–present) periods.

Aboriginal Rock art, Karratha, Western Australia (Ngarda-Ngarli are the traditional owners of the Murujuga land)

Aboriginal Rock art, Karratha, Western Australia (Ngarda-Ngarli are the traditional owners of the Murujuga land)

Arkaroo Rock, a cultural site of the Adnyamathanha people of the Flinders Ranges in South Australia

Wandjina Petroglyphs (cloud and rain spirits) - Kimberley, Australia, ca. 3000 BCE

Baiame Cave is a cultural site of the Wonnarua people at Milbrodale, Singleton, NSW

Carved trees--Wiradjuri Country, Arborglyphs [carved tree], Gamboola near Molong, 1912.
Anthropologists such as Clifton Cappie Towle, Lindsay Black, Russell Black and Edmund Milne travelled around NSW, searching for Aboriginal relics, to document Aboriginal culture, and took hundreds of photographs. This one is taken by Edmund Milne

Maireener shell necklace are from the east and north coasts of Tasmania and the Bass Strait islands. Tasmanian Aboriginal (Palawa) women have made these for generations

Snake Bay, Melville Island, pukumani grave posts (The Pukumani ceremony takes place two to six months after the burial and can last for a few days), Age (Melbourne, Vic. : 1854 - 1954), Tuesday 23 November 1954

This man is making a Dilly Bag from lawyer cane (Callamus australis), called by the {A}boriginals yappalam. These are the only dilly bags in Australia made by the men, Sydney Mail (NSW : 1912 - 1938), Wednesday 24 December 1913

Frank Hurley-Torres Strait man wearing native headdress,Erub(Darnley island),1921. The Dhari is the distinctive traditional dance and ceremonial headdress of the Torres Strait. It is the central motif on the region's flag and symbolises the identity and unity of all Torres Strait Islanders.
Dhari is the Meriam Mir word for 'headdress' and is used in the eastern islands. In the central and western islands where Kala Lagaw Ya is spoken, the headdress is called Dhoeri. Customarily worn and made by males, dhari designs vary from island to island.

1606: Early European depictions

The first documented landing on Australia by a European was in 1606. The Dutch explorer Willem Janszoon landed on the western side of Cape York Peninsula and charted about 300 km of coastline. A clash with the Wik Aboriginal people led to the death of about nine crew members.

This map is a 1670 copy of what was drawn on board the Duyfken. Willem Janszoon captained the first recorded European landing on the Australian continent in 1606

Dutch and English navigators visited the western and northern coasts of the Australian continent from the seventeenth century onwards. In 1642, Abel Tasman, a Dutch navigator, explored part of Tasmania's coast. James Cook was the first European to visit the eastern mainland of Australia in 1770. 

1770

To Europeans, the culture of Australia's Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, its landscape, flora and fauna were strange and unfamiliar.

Sydney Parkinson was employed by Joseph Banks on James Cook's first voyage to the Pacific from 1768-1771. James Cook's 1770 voyage first charted the eastern coastline of Australia. Parkinson was the first European to draw the kangaroo.

Sydney Parkinson was the first European to draw the kangaroo. Soon after the landing at Endeavour River a party exploring inland saw an animal ‘as large as a greyhound, of a mouse colour and very swift’. Parkinson was employed by Joseph Banks to travel with him on James Cook's first voyage to the Pacific in 1768, in HMS Endeavour. Parkinson made nearly a thousand drawings of plants and animals collected by Banks and Daniel Solander on the voyage.

1772

George Stubbs' version of the kangaroo (1772) was based only on a not terribly well-preserved kangaroo hide, a few of Parkinson's drawings, and information supplied by Joseph Banks.

The painting was first exhibited by the Society of Artists in London in 1773, together with his painting of a dingo, Portrait of a Large Dog.

The Kongouro from New Holland (Kangaroo) 1772 by George Stubbs. National Maritime Museum object reference ZBA5754

Early Colonial Period: British colonisation (1788–1850)

Early Colonial Art in Australia were mostly scientific, natural history illustrations, designed to show the strange and distant land to Europeans. European art conventions were also followed in the early days.

Many of the artists from the First Fleet were naval officers. The First Fleet was a fleet of 11 ships which arrived at Sydney Cove in January of 1788.

Governor John Hunter, an officer of the Royal Navy, joined the First Fleet as Second Captain of the Sirius, under Captain Arthur Phillip, Governor of the colony. Hunter became the second Governor of New South Wales. He was also an artist.

John Hunter's sketchbook, 'Birds & Flowers of New South Wales drawn on the spot in 1788, 89 and 90'. Sketchbook was owned by Robert Anderson Seton

William Bradley was a British naval officer and cartographer sent to Australia with the First Fleet.

First Fleet entering Sydney, 1788, William Bradley (1758-1833)

Thomas Watling, born in Dumfries, Scotland, is thought to be the first professional artist to arrive in New South Wales. Arriving in Sydney, as a convict, on 7 October 1792.

Wattling wrote in a letters to his aunt, 1794: The air, the sky, the land, are objects entirely different from all that a Briton has been accustomed to see before. The sky clear and warm; in the summer very seldom overcast, or any haze discernable in the azure; the rains, when we have them, falling in torrents, & the clouds immediately dispersing. Thunder, as said, in loud contending peals, happening often daily, & always within every two or three days, at this season of the year. Eruscations and flashes of lightning, constantly succeeding each other in quick and rapid succession. The land, an immense forest, extended over a plain country, the maritime parts of which, are interspersed with rocks, yet covered with venerable majestic trees, hoary with age, or torn with tempests.--In a word, the easy, liberal mind, will be here filled with astonishment, and find much entertainment from the various novel objects that every where present themselves. (1,)

Thomas Watling - A Direct North General View of Sydney Cove, 1794

Midshipman, George Raper's Watercolours of Norfolk Island 1790-1791

The melancholy loss of HMS Sirius off Norfolk Island, March 19th 1790, painted by George Raper

Phillip Gidley King arrived in Port Jackson with the First Fleet in 1788. He was governor of New South Wales from 1800 until 1806 and is also remembered for his art works.

A family of New South Wales [picture] / from a sketch by Governor King, 1792 (many Aboriginal mothers traditionally carried their child on their shoulder in this way)

Joseph Lycett is one of the most well-known convict artists. His art works provide a pictorial record of the early period of the colony.

Corroboree at Newcastle, painting, oil on wooden panel, 70.5 x 122.4 cm, by Joseph Lycett, circa 1818 

Bull Cave is an art site at Darling Avenue, Kentlyn, City of Campbelltown, NSW. The cave, first recorded in June 1971, appears to depict a historical event by Aboriginal artist{s}: the escape and subsequent flourishing of the First Fleet cattle in the area, now known as the Cowpastures.

This art  appears to depict an historical event: the escape and subsequent flourishing of the First Fleet cattle in the area which came to be known as the Cowpastures, NSW, by Aboriginal people

Later Colonial Art (1850–1895)

Ferdinand Lucas Bauer was an Austrian botanical illustrator who travelled on Matthew Flinders' expedition to Australia (1801-1803) as a natural history artist. Interestingly, Bauer was a son of the court painter to the Prince of Liechtenstein.

Bauer produced around 300 watercolours of his Australian sketches.

Banksia coccinea, Plate 3 from Illustrationes Florae Novae Hollandiae , Ferdinand Bauer (1760–1826), SLVIC

Charles Alexandre Lesueur was a French naturalist, artist, and explorer, a member of the Baudin Expedition to Australia from 1800 to 1804.

Illustration of Banded hare-wallabies of Bernier Island. Charles-Alexandre Lesueur (Bernier Island is one of three islands that comprise the Bernier and Dorre Island Nature Reserve in the Shark Bay World Heritage area in Western Australia)

John Lewin, arrived in Sydney in 1800, was Australia's first free-settler professional artist. Lewin was a close observer of the Australian landscape and its fauna, producing naturalist art.

Reproduction of a painting by John Lewin of Sydney cove, NSW, in 1808, SLNSW

Augustus Earle, artist and traveller, was born in London, arriving in Hobart in 1825. Earle was rescued after being marooned on a remote island. His art works are interesting and diverse.

Augustus Earle, Portrait of Bungaree, a native of New South Wales, with Fort Macquarie, Sydney Harbour, in background, (1826): (Bungaree, from the Broken Bay area of New South Wales, ) oil on canvas; 68.5 x 50.5 cm. National Library of Australia

Illustration of convicts outside of Hyde Park Barracks, on Macquarie Street in Sydney, published 1830, Augustus Earle’s Views in New South Wales and Van Diemen's Land, SLNSW

The Birds of Australia was a book written by an English ornithologist with a total of 600 plates. John Gould published seven volumes between 1840 and 1848, and classified and described around 200 new Australian bird species.

 Cacatua Banksian-The Birds of Australia 1848, John Gould, National Library of Australia Digital Collections

Harriet and Helena Scott came to the attention of the scientific and art world in 1846 with their first butterfly and moth drawings. Harriet and her sister Helena, were mostly forgotten until a 2011 exhibition.

Both sisters were involved in the production of Australia's first Christmas cards in 1879.

Aglaosoma lauta & Cerura Australis, Harriet Morgan (née Scott) - State Library of New South Wales

Helena Forde (née Scott) – Artist (Australian) Born in Sydney, New South Wales, (from Diamond Snake, Morelia spilotes illustration from The Snakes of Australia by Gerard Krefft)

Benjanim Duterrau, an artist of French descent, was born in England and trained as an engraver. He emigrated to Van Diemen's Land in 1832, where he set-up an art-studio in Hobart.

Benjamin DUTERRAU (1767 - 11 July 1851) Born in London, England. Died in Hobart, Tasmania, Australia. Depicting in 1824, when George Augustus Robinson travelled to Hobart, Van Diemen's Land, where he attempted to negotiate a peace between European settlers and Aboriginal Tasmanians

Robert Dowling was born in England and came to Launceston, Tasmania with his parents in 1839. Dowling received lessons from, artists, Thomas Bock and Frederick Strange. In 1850, Dowling advertised as a portrait painter.

Robert Dowling | Group of Natives of Tasmania, 1859. Tasmanian Aboriginal people wearing animal-skin cloaks and shell necklaces, and some hold spears. A man and a woman, who appear to have been hunting, are about to join the group - the man is carrying a creature on a stick over his shoulder.

Sculptor Benjamin Law emigrated from Britain to Hobart, Van Diemen's Land (Tasmania), arriving 1835. He is most famous for his sculpted busts of Tasmanian Aboriginal people, Wooraddy and Trukanini. He also created a bust of George Augustus Robinson, "protector" of the Aborigines.

Benjamin Law's 1835 bust of Truganini, commissioned by George Augustus Robinson

John Glover was a successful British landscape painter who migrated to Van Diemen's Land in 1831, at the age of 64. Despite being 182 cm, and over 114 kg, with two club feet, he was able to establish himself as "the father of Australian landscape painting".

John Glover - The River Nile, Van Diemen's Land, from Mr Glover's Farm (1837)

Conrad Martens, a landscape painter, was English-born but of Austrian descent. Martens joined the HMS Beagle crew from 1833 to1834. He arrived in Australia in 1835, and his many paintings are a valuable visual record of life in the early colony.

The Funeral of Rear Admiral Philip Parker King, Sydney, 1856, by Conrad Martens

Gold Rushes and Expansion (1851–1885)

The discovery of gold in New South Wales in 1851 would spark the gold rushes that would transform a convict colony with the influx of free emigrants. Floods of fortune-seekers entered the country. In the Victorian census of 1854, Scots were the third largest group after the English and Irish.

The forced eviction of inhabitants of the Highlands and western islands of Scotland forced many to emigrate. The Eureka stockade leader and politician, Peter Lalor came to Australia from his home in Ireland in the 1840s to escape the Great Famine. 

The volume of Chinese immigration significantly increased. Most of the people who came to Australia for the gold rush were from Guangdong province. “John Alloo’s Chinese restaurant”, depicted in a sketch by S.T. Gill, was a popular place to eat on the Ballarat goldfields.

S.T. Gill, "Interior of John Alloo's Chinese Restaurant, main road, Ballarat," plate 4 from The diggers and diggings of Victoria as they were in 1852

Indeed, the art of S. T. Gill provides important insights into everyday life in colonial Victoria, depicting the daily life on the gold fields. His painting, "Aborigines met on the road to the diggings", 1854, has been interpreted various ways by viewers.

The traditional ways of life for Aboriginal people were further disrupted during the Gold Rush period. Some Aboriginal people, however, also participated as goldseekers.

'Canvas Town' Yarra river, Melbourne en-route to the diggings, from: The Victorian Gold Fields 1852-3 An Original Album by S. T. Gill

The National Gallery of Victoria, Australia's oldest art museum, was founded in 1861.

Abram Buvelot, a Swiss landscape painter, arrived in Melbourne in February 1865. Buvelot wasa photographer in business in Bourke Street. Buvelot never learnt to speak English, and his wife, also an artist, managed their business. He influenced the Heidelberg School of painters.

Summer Afternoon, Templestowe, VIC, 1866, Louis Buvelot

Other important artists of this period are: Eugene von Guerard, Nicholas Chevalier, William Strutt, John Skinner Prout, and Knut Bull.

William Charles Piguenit, who was mainly self-taught, was an Australian-born artist.

The Flood in the Darling, 1890, painted by WC Piguenit (using a plein air technique)

The Heidelberg School (1885–1910)- Australian Impressionists

In the 1880s, the Heidelberg school of painting near Melbourne developed the first distinctively Australian style of watercolour painting.

Artists, such as Arthur Streeton, Frederick McCubbin, Tom Roberts, and Charles Conder were inspired by naturalist and impressionist ideas, and to capture Australian life, the bush, and the harsh sunlight of this land.

Lost, 1886, Frederick McCubbin

Holiday sketch at Coogee, 1888, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Tom Roberts

Arthur Streeton, ‘The purple noon's transparent might’ (1896), painted on the Hawkesbury River, NSW

William Priestly MacIntosh was a sculptor in Sydney. His works often decorated significant public buildings. Macintosh studied anatomy and sculpture in Edinburgh, he then emigrated to New South Wales in 1880. He was one of the first sculptors to use Australian flora and fauna in his stoneworks.

Guardian Genius of the City above George St, Sydney, NSW. entrance, Queen Victoria Building, Sydney (1898–1899), William Priestly MacIntosh

20th-century Australian artists include: Arthur Boyd, Rupert Bunny, Grace Cossington Smith, H. H. Calvert, William Dobell, Albert Namatjira, Russell Drysdale, James Gleeson, Sidney Nolan, John Olsen, Margaret Preston, Hugh Ramsay, Lloyd Rees, Imants Tillers, J. W. Tristram, Roland Wakelin, Brett Whiteley, Fred Williams and Blamire Young. Some of these are represented below.

Federation era (1901–1914)

Australia became a nation on 1 January 1901, when the British Parliament passed legislation enabling the six Australian colonies to form the Commonwealth of Australia. Art of this period reflects pride in a distinctive Australian identity and respect for the inheritance from the United Kingdom. 

Sir Hans Heysen was a German-born Australian artist renown for his watercolour landscapes.

Droving into the Light, 1914–21, State Art Collection, Art Gallery of Western Australia, Hans Heysen

Rupert Bunny was born in Melbourne, has been described as a: "sumptuous colourist and splendidly erudite painter of ideal themes, and the creator of the most ambitious Salon paintings produced by an Australian."

Endormies (circa 1904), Rupert Bunny

Art critic Robert Hughes said that E. Phillips Fox was "the first native-born artist to grasp the principles of an impressionist technique and apply them to Australian landscape".

The Landing of Captain Cook at Botany Bay, 1770 (1902), E. Phillips Fox 

Golden Willows, 1907, New England Regional Art Museum, Julian Ashton

Pietro Giacoma Porcelli was born in Bisceglie, near Bari in Italy, on January 30, 1872. His family emigrated to Australia when Pietro was age 8. He later studied at the New South Wales Academy of Art.

Porcelli's first commissioned work was the life-sized bust of Sir John Forrest, the first Premier of Western Australia, at the main entrance of Parliament House in West Perth. Porcelli lived and worked in WA from 1898, working mostly in the Neoclassical style.

The Jewish War Memorial was erected in 1920 to honour soldiers of the Jewish faith who died in WWI. The monument was designed by sculptor Pietro Porcelli, at Kings Park and Botanic Garden, WA

Early Modernism

Elioth Gruner continues artistic experimentation, discarding naturalistic detail, and emphasising the effects of light and atmosphere.

Morning Light was largely painted en plein air at Emu Plains—now an outer western suburb of Sydney but then a rural area—on a farm owned by James Innes. By Elioth Gruner in 1916

Margaret Preston was an Australian painter and printmaker who is regarded as one of Australia's leading modernists of the early 20th century.

MARGARET PRESTON'S AUSTRALIAN FLORA, RubyGoes (prints produced between 1916 and 1956)

The Depression and WWII (Late Modernism)

Developments continue in abstract expressionism, colour field painting, lyrical abstraction, geometric abstraction, minimalism, abstract illusionism, installation process art, pop art, postminimalism, and other late 20th-century Modernist movements. 

Sidney Nolan was born in Melbourne, at that time an inner working-class suburb of Melbourne. His parents, Sidney and Dora, were both fifth-generation Australians of Irish descent. 

Nolan expresses his love of the Australian landscape in a surreal and expressive style.

This is a copy of Sidney Nolan's First-class Marksman, a painting from 1946.

Australian painter of the late 20th century, Arthur Boyd's work ranges from impressionist paintings to an expressionist style which explored matters of social conscience.

Melbourne Burning is a 1946-1947 painting by Australian artist Arthur Boyd

Albert (Elea) Namatjira was the first Aboriginal person to become an internationally renowned artist in the 1930s. An Arrernte painter from the MacDonnell Ranges in Central Australia, Namatjira is one of the greatest and most influential Australian artists and a pioneer of contemporary Indigenous Australian art.

Mt. Hermannsburg, James Range, Northern Territory by Albert Namatjira, about 1959, Aussie~mobs

Postmodernism 

From about 1970 to 1990, Postmodernism upset established ideas about art and design.

Brett Whiteley worked with painting, sculpture and the graphic arts in an uninhibited style. Many of his works are abstract, but later tended toward Expressionism. Subject matter could be dark and disturbing.

Brett Whitley "Almost Once", Domain, Sydney, 1991, Martin Pueschel

Artist Guo Jian was once a propaganda poster artist in The Chinese People's Liberation Army (1979-82). Following the Tiananmen protests and subsequent crackdown of 1989, Jian left China, arriving in Australia in 1992. His art is both political and mocking.

Excitement: Great Tiananmen, 1998, Guo Jian (This painting is a statement on the decay and corruption of the P.L.A.)

Injalak Arts has been a centre for art, craft and community since opening in 1989, located in Gunbalanya in West Arnhem Land in the Northern Territory. Australian Aboriginal fibre sculpture has long been used for practical or ceremonial purposes. Today, many artists use innovative materials and explore creative expression.

Fibre art sculpture of a fish, by Robyn Nabegeyo, Injalak Arts