Book launch: Rethinking Australia’s art history: The challenge of Aboriginal art

Professor Ian McLean, Hugh Ramsay Chair of Australian Art, conducted the Melbourne launch of Rethinking Australia’s art history: The challenge of Aboriginal art by Dr Susan Lowish, Senior Lecturer in Australian Art History at the School of Culture and Communication, University of Melbourne.

This book aims to redefine Australia’s earliest art history by chronicling for the first time the birth of the category ‘Aboriginal art’, tracing the term’s use through published literature in the late 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries. Susan Lowish reveals how the idea of ‘Aboriginal art’ developed in the European imagination, manifested in early literature, and became a distinct classification with its own criteria and form. Part of the larger story of Aboriginal–European engagement, this book provides a new vision for an Australian art history reconciled with its colonial origins and in recognition of what came before the contemporary phenomena of Aboriginal art.