Beyond Australia The Art of Australia

This programme contains some scenes

which some viewers may find upsetting.

A place of golden beaches and bodies. Barbecues and bikinis.

Endless empty land.

Sydney Harbour...

But art and culture?

Australia's been my home for over 30 years,

and I've often thought about the first settlers who landed here

on this fatal shore over two centuries ago.

To these strangers,

this place seemed utterly devoid of civilisation.

Of course, they were wrong.

But how could these often reluctant arrivals make a new life,

let alone come to feel at home

in an empty, disturbing and distant wilderness?

I want to explore how art and artists played their roles

in this unfolding drama.

From early settlement till today,

I'm taking a trip deep into the art of Australia.

This is one of the great icons of Australian art.

I'll be looking at the work of significant artists,

both past and present.

What is it with this lurid, lurid yellow?

Their work reveals much about Australia's identity

and how it's evolved.

She's going up and she's going down.

For me Australian art has always been a big part of the quest

to make sense of this vast continent and our place in it.

Its haunting landscapes.

Its ever-present dangers.

Its dramatic and controversial history.

And of course, its great beauty.

Australian art reflects the development of a unique

and incredibly diverse culture.

Who's for an ice cream?

It's a great story.

This is my journey into how it all happened.

The story of the art of Australia.

I love it here.

The Sydney Opera House is Australia's most recognisable

cultural icon.

A cathedral to the arts.

On the surface it proclaims Australia

as a modern progressive country.

A land with its own pride and identity.

No longer isolated on the edge of the world.

I remember so well my very first visit to Australia.

And of course I was brought here to the Opera House.

I walked into this fantastic building,

I saw a terrific performance of Madame Butterfly,

and then I came out here afterwards on this terrace overlooking

the harbour to have a drink.

I looked around and I thought, "Wow. I've arrived."

But as a newcomer, I sensed a peculiar tension.

The building is the vision of a Danish architect, Jorn Utzon.

The decision in 1957 to hire a foreign architect

to design such an important icon

exposed a fundamental anxiety - the cultural cringe.

The idea that culture had to be imported

and that European culture was somehow superior.

In Australia in the 1950s, this notion was commonplace.

There was growth and prosperity.

The suburbs sprawled and the world was shrinking.

For the first time, Australia was becoming less isolated.

More than a million new migrants arrived,

and they were no longer just British

but Greek, Italian and Eastern European.

The new medium of television deepened the connection

to the wider world, but also brought the worry of the Cold War

as the influence of American culture grew.

But this exposure proved to be a double-edged sword.

Whilst artists could travel more easily to find inspiration

overseas, trailblazers like Sidney Nolan and Arthur Boyd,

who'd done so much to create Australia's artistic identity

left for London.

And that was the problem.

If you had to leave to make it as an artist,

then Australia must be a cultural backwater.

A place where art and artists were viewed with some suspicion.

In some ways, this anxiety had always been there.

In the convict period, the pictures of Joseph Lycett

tried and failed to present Australia

as more than just a prison.

Though the magnificence of the place fired imaginations,

it took the entire 19th century before the impressionists

really captured Australia's essence.

Then in the 20th century two world wars

and a profound loss of innocence helped inspire the masterworks

of modern artists like Sidney Nolan and Arthur Boyd.

But now they worked abroad.

The irony was, as Australia worked ever harder

to overcome its cultural anxiety,

the deeper the artistic identity crisis became.

From the '50s to the 21st century

the convulsions and controversies that resulted

shaped out and enabled Australia to find cultural recognition

and come to terms with its own place in the world.

The story of how this happened begins far away from the arts scene

on Bribie Island off the coast of Queensland,

where an artist had made his home in a thatched hut.

A man who came to art late, in his 40s.

His name was Ian Fairweather.

He was a recluse who shunned the art world.

Ironically he was one of the first artists to introduce Australia

to a radical international art form - abstract painting.

In 1953 Ian Fairweather came here.

Up till then he'd been the most extraordinary itinerant.

From Scotland, to Canada, to China, to Australia,

the Philippines, back to China, back to Australia.

On one occasion he nearly even lost his life on a crazy raft journey

to Indonesia.

But back to Bribie Island he came, and made his home here.

"Glad to be back in the sun," he said,

"in the friendly bush."

A maverick way ahead of his time,

Fairweather brought his artistic influences to bear on a subject

previously ignored by Australian art.

Its Asian neighbours, their peoples, landscapes and spirituality.

This ambitious work, Anak Bayan, or Son Of Country,

measures nearly two and a half metres wide.

It was painted on Bribie Island in 1957 under primitive conditions.

It's the name of a busy street in Manila

where he lived during the 1930s.

It's an abstract map of Filipino people

thronging in the street, with glimpses of Cezanne,

but with a tenacious line drawn straight from the expressive force

of Chinese calligraphy.

This is the exact spot where Ian Fairweather had his shack.

Marked now, for some peculiar reason, by a very large rock.

He was the artist's artist. They saw him as the godfather of abstraction.

An eccentric, a hermit, an inspiration.

The artist who painted this portrait of Fairweather praised him

for providing a physical and spiritual bridge into another world.

His name was John Olsen.

In 1956, as an adventurous 28-year-old,

Olsen travelled to Spain.

Instead of staying overseas like Sidney Nolan

and Arthur Boyd, he returned in 1960.

Influenced by Fairweather and the colours and vitality

of Mediterranean culture, he painted this picture - Spanish Encounter.

Olsen tells the story that he painted this in five hours

one night.

He'd had a row with his girlfriend that night and she'd gone to bed

and Olsen stayed up all night painting this.

It's full of wonderful hints

and reminiscences of his time in Europe and Spain particularly.

You can see in here little hints of Picasso,

of Miro, of Dubuffet, Tapies, all the artists he loved.

Of course the result is a picture of incredible, I think,

vitality and exuberance.

You can't stand in front of this picture

and not be moved by the sheer emotion of it all.

He's flexing his muscles. He's flexing his mind.

He's flexing his imagination on the canvas.

Look at this line going down here and these lines across here.

There's tremendous expression, tremendous energy.

It's a very bold painting. Nothing like this had been seen before.

So when it was first shown in Sydney it generated huge excitement,

and the artists looked at it and said,

"Maybe this is the future of Australian art."

Today John Olsen is the grand old man of Australian art.

Back then he was at the forefront of the abstract revolution.

He was fighting to take Australian art in a whole new direction.

I felt everything was open.

It was just an open field

and I felt that there was more to do in Australia.

And what I brought back was the confidence

and the feeling that I'd seen the best that Europe had to give.

-Yeah, and that was...

-And that liberated me.

Yeah, it was inspiration. Inspiration liberates.

Exactly right.

So...I was cheeky.

A lot of your fellow artists thought you'd gone a bit mad,

a bit bonkers, didn't they?

Well, that was their problem, not mine.

Olsen fought for abstract art's acceptance.

It was fresh, energetic and modern.

Another group flew the flag for more traditional figurative art,

representing the real world.

In many ways it was an aesthetic battle between past and future.

One side standing for tradition, the other demanding change.

Before long, these revolutionaries used abstract art

to redefine traditional Australian themes, like the landscape.

Like Olsen, Fred Williams had experienced the latest trends

in Europe.

But in the late 1950s, when he returned to Australia,

he joked to friends that he wanted to paint the gum tree.

At the time nothing could've been more unfashionable.

Undeterred, Williams took abstract art into the bush,

and like the impressionists of the 19th century

developed a radical new way of seeing the landscape.

In Silver And Grey you can see Williams' unique interpretation

of the Australian bush.

Never before had the landscape been so poetically distilled,

like a visual haiku.

Here Williams has scattered his symbolic motifs of the bush

across the canvass like seeds across a field.

It is an abstract painting, but I think it beautifully evokes the mood

and texture of the Australian bush.

Yet, just as Williams was perfecting his own Australian abstraction,

another trend from abroad would drive abstract art

to greater extremes.

It happened during a period of great social and political upheaval.

As Australia began to turn away from its British roots,

young people started rebelling against traditional values.

Women demanded equal rights, and large numbers protested against

Australia sending troops to fight in Vietnam.

America was on the march in the Cold War,

and art was part of a charm offensive.

In 1967 a hugely influential exhibition,

Two Decades Of American Painting, toured America's Asian allies -

Japan, India and Australia.

This was a chance for Australian artists here

to see works by the stars of American abstraction.

Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Willem de Kooning.

New York had become the epicentre of the abstract art movement,

and its influence was spreading.

ARCHIVE: Painters flock here from all schools of art,

abstract expressionism,

romantic realism, drippers and splatterers.

The best and the worst can be found here.

Australian artists turned to America for inspiration.

Sid Ball was there, soaking up the energy.

I'd gone to America and I saw the greatness of American art.

What was the real excitement about it?

It was the breakaway from cubism at the time throughout the world,

in America especially. You had people like Mark Rothko...

Franz Kline, Barnett Newman, all those guys.

..using colour towards extreme.

They saw how colour can be flattened and expansive.

When Ball returned to Australia, he started spreading the news.

This extreme version of abstract art, Colour Field Painting,

was where it was at.

Being Australian and painting Australia was irrelevant.

Soon other Australian artists eager to be part of the movement

joined him. In 1968 they caused a major sensation

at the newly opened National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne.

This is the great moment in the story of Australian art.

-The famous poster of The Field.

-You designed the poster, didn't you?

I did indeed. It caused a lot of controversy.

The Field was the very first exhibition at the new gallery.

The board of trustees had wanted a retrospective

by the impressionist Arthur Streeton.

But, instead of gum trees they got this.

A gallery lined with silver foil and 74 ultra-abstract works.

It split the art world.

For supporters, this was a pivotal moment.

Abstraction moved from the margins to the mainstream.

Australian art was shedding its parochialism.

But for many it felt like a step too far.

It was too derivative and said nothing about being Australian.

Artists like John Olsen were sidelined by the new wave

of abstraction.

His Five Bells, for example.

A great celebration of the fertile inner life of nature

was deemed to be too Australian,

with all these lines going all over the place, too messy.

It wasn't clinical enough.

It was not abstract enough for the new order.

Now everything in Australian art was being challenged.

It was a full-blown cultural revolution.

Many artists rejected painting and sculpture altogether,

embracing performance, installation, conceptual and environmental art.

Art was splintering into a myriad of styles.

Yet still, a nagging doubt remained.

If it was elsewhere, it was somehow more clever, more relevant,

more happening.

And the foreign influences just kept coming.

In October 1969, something quite remarkable happened here.

In this bay, just a few kilometres south of the city of Sydney,

Christo, the great wrapper, and his wife Jeanne-Claude came out here

and wrapped those cliffs.

In fact, it was more than that.

They wrapped no less than two and a half kilometres of the coastline.

They came from Paris at the invitation of Hungarian-born

businessman and collector John Kaldor.

He wanted to bring artists to Australia to introduce

the public to the best contemporary art from around the world.

They used 95,000 square metres of fabric to wrap these cliffs.

There were 15 professional mountaineers.

And there were over 100 students to help tie the fabric down.

The public was astounded.

Not just by the scale but by the sheer audacity of the project.

Although it isn't my cup of tea, I should imagine that to many

thousands of people it would be their cup of tea with cream added into it.

I think it's a great thing to have happened here

and I think it will do Australia and its artists a great deal of good.

Very exciting.

The very fact that he's chosen somewhere like Australia,

which is pretty off the map to most people.

This was one of the most outstanding events in the history

of contemporary art.

It was no local event - it was a worldwide event.

Christo and Jeanne-Claude made their names here at Little Bay,

but quickly moved on to greater success,

wrapping buildings and monuments around the world.

The wrapping of Little Bay had a huge impact on the local art scene.

It was the largest artwork in the world,

but it was a hard act to follow.

The cultural crisis of identity for art in Australia was growing.

How should it move forward?

The crisis came to a head in 1973,

a pivotal year when one of the artists who'd helped define

Australian art returned from London.

Even for the best artists,

transcending their Australian-ness was problematic.

Arthur Boyd made his name in the 1950s

when he came here to the Northern Territory.

The trip inspired his Half-Caste Bride series.

It had catapulted him to fame here and in Britain,

where he'd lived for most of the next 20 years.

But now he was back, and suffering an existential crisis.

For Boyd, being Australian had become a creative millstone,

restricting his artistic freedom.

He worried the younger generation of abstract artists simply felt

paintings like his, even painting itself, were no longer relevant.

He painted a series of works expressing his torment.

The most sinister is Interior With Black Rabbit.

For me, this picture sums up the dilemma

that Arthur Boyd had been struggling with for three decades.

In fact, I suspect that's him, the crumpled figure in the corner,

weighed down with history, here in the dark,

out in the glaring light of the landscape.

It's a painting that speaks eloquently

and powerfully of that sense of dislocation.

Boyd was frustrated.

No matter how good his art was,

he was always being pigeonholed as an Australian artist.

He wanted to be recognised as an artist,

not just an Australian artist.

It was the same old problem - how to be Australian

and beyond Australia at the same time.

Later in 1973, the Queen arrived to open the Sydney Opera House.

However, behind the celebrations,

the cultural cringe had erupted into full-blown conflict.

The daring design by Danish architect Jorn Utzon

epitomised the tensions between Australia's yearning to be noticed

and the anxiety that its home-grown culture was terminally parochial.

Utzon had already resigned in disgust long before its completion,

feeling his vision had been fatally compromised.

Then, in the very same week,

a fight broke out over yet another cultural import.

When the National Gallery of Australia bought this painting,

Blue Poles, by American abstract expressionist Jackson Pollock

for a record price,

it was, for many, the last straw.

A major controversy erupted.

Many demanded answers to why Australia had shipped in culture

at such premium prices,

especially art that looked like this.

When the government finally agreed that it could be purchased for

A1.3 million, there was the predictable outcry in the media.

The conservative press had a field day.

Would you pay 1.3 million for this?

Believe it not, we've discovered a piece of wood that rivals Blue Poles.

On the other side of the divide, Gough Whitlam,

the first Labour Prime Minister in over two decades,

was keen to prove Australia's cultural independence

and cosmopolitan taste.

He pushed trough the purchase.

But as the battle raged over Blue Poles,

one artist in Sydney was completing his masterpiece.

A painter whose work held the promise that Australia's

cultural inferiority might just be overcome.

His name was Brett Whiteley.

Australia had never seen anything like him.

Trained in Sydney, he had lived in London when it was swinging

in the '60s and hung out in New York at the Chelsea Hotel

with Andy Warhol and Bob Dylan.

He was Australia's first rock star artist.

The Whiteley studio.

When I arrived here the first artist I really wanted to meet

was Brett Whiteley, the enfant terrible of Australian art.

And I met this mercurial,

quicksilver person whose mind just jumped all over the place.

When I look at this wall, this is Brett Whiteley.

It's full of all those quirky moments

with this darting mind of his.

Look here.

He wrote there, "Oysters think."

And up there's my favourite - "Life is brief,

"but my God Thursday afternoon seems incredibly long."

You know, he might have looked a bit like Harpo Marx

and been this mercurial character,

but he was a very serious artist

and he was also the most wonderful, spontaneous draughtsman.

In the late '50s, Whiteley had travelled to rural New South Wales

to paint the old mining town of Sofala,

a favourite of Australian painters.

Although it's a charming, rather conventional work,

it did help him to win a travelling scholarship.

In 1960, aged just 21, Whiteley headed to London,

where he found a more positive attitude towards artists.

My generation feel, when they come to London, that there is a specific

professional attitude, a type of behaviour towards what they're doing.

In Australia,

they've got to justify their basic social position as being artists.

He shot to stardom when this work was bought by

the Tate Gallery in 1961,

making him the youngest artist ever to enter the collection.

But by the time he came back from nearly a decade away,

he was painting like this.

This is the most amazing, revolutionary

and explosive painting you could possibly imagine.

Nobody had seen anything like this before or since.

It's title, Alchemy, for a start,

means that transmutation from base lead to gold.

But it turns out to be Brett Whiteley's

great autobiographical journey.

It starts here with birth, these great voluptuous figures.

It moves to the nightmarish visions

of the 16th century painter Hieronymus Bosch.

And these lurid gaping teeth.

And then we get a glimpse of Brett himself.

And then into a moment of calm,

the landscape with the bird.

But right in the middle is the word "It". What does it mean?

Does Brett know what it means? Does anybody know what it means?

It's great design.

But he says "It" is the progression to the next thing.

In the 1970s his star was in the ascendant.

No-one could match his prolific output,

his bravura, the sheer energy and colour of his work.

In the '60s when I first found myself as a painter,

abstraction and the idea that one could and should paint that way

without the baggage and clutter of figuration from the past,

was a very liberating and extraordinary sort of feeling.

But that soon changed.

Ultimately, Whiteley found abstraction limiting

and went on to create his own erotic lyrical style.

However, as the years went on,

being the bad boy of Australian art took a terrible toll.

In 1992, aged just 53,

he was found dead from an overdose.

The hope that Whiteley,

with his paintings acclaimed both here and abroad,

would help overcome the sense of cultural inferiority

was never fully realised.

I spent many and often languid afternoons in this room with

Brett Whiteley.

Chatting about this and that, about art, of course.

People, politics, space travel.

And world affairs.

There was not much that Brett Whiteley

wasn't actually interested in.

And as really the first Australian artist to sort of comfortably

strut the world stage, he really was interested in everything.

And I also think that it's quite impossible...

..to meet anybody else quite like him.

I often think that Brett's work really resonated

because of its deeply Australian sensibility.

He painted the outback, the harbour, and this picture.

His tribute to the indigenous bark painter David Yirawala.

Yirawala had received international acclaim.

Picasso said,

"That is what I have been trying to achieve all my life."

Whiteley met Yirawala in 1971, and felt a strong affinity with

the ceremonial leader from Arnhem Land in Australia's far north.

Like all indigenous Australians,

Yirawala had been granted citizenship in 1967.

But he wasn't the first.

More than a decade earlier, one Aboriginal man had captured

the nation's attention with his paintings.

For this, he became the first indigenous Australian to be

made a citizen and granted equal rights.

Albert Namatjira was taught to paint on the mission where he'd grown up.

His watercolours of the bush made him famous.

But some in the art world dismissed them as too derivative.

Too European.

Meanwhile, Yirawala's extraordinary bark paintings,

though praised, were seen as primitive artefacts,

and consigned to tribal sections in museums.

Indigenous art, like the people who made it,

just couldn't win.

-What do we want?

-Land rights!

-When do we want them?

-Now!

By the time Whiteley met Yirawala the Land Rights Movement was

already gaining momentum.

Art was a driving force in this process,

art that bloomed in the desert.

A movement that would ultimately help Australian art surmount its

ongoing identity crisis and claim its distinctive place in the world.

It's amazing to think that a world famous art movement started here

in this tiny community out in the middle of nowhere.

Even if it is a spectacular nowhere.

The so-called discovery of Aboriginal art

has become the stuff of legend.

In 1971, art teacher Geoffrey Bardon came to the remote Aboriginal

community of Papunya, in the Northern Territory.

He found a desolate and dispirited settlement,

plagued by poor living conditions and racial tensions.

Intrigued by the children's sand drawings,

Bardon encouraged the elders to paint their ancestral

dreamings on this wall with modern acrylic paints.

This is new.

The original 1971 mural was painted over by the local authorities.

So Bardon had the idea of giving the artists small canvas boards

to paint on.

The tradition was, of course, sand painting -

by its very nature temporary, but that, of course, was the point.

Transferring their imagery onto permanent wooden boards

and canvases created a problem.

On one hand,

recording their stories was a way of preserving Aboriginal culture.

But on the other, these sacred images were not meant for outsiders.

They hit upon an ingenious solution.

The dots that often surrounded their images in the sand were used

to obscure certain aspects of the paintings.

Over time, dots and dot painting developed from being merely

a masking device to a fully-realised aesthetic feature.

The sacred imagery and symbolism was adapted,

new colours were used and suddenly there was an art that was

ancient in tradition and modern in appearance.

Warlpiri man Michael Nelson Tjakamarra

had been a buffalo hunter, a truck driver,

and a drover before he took up art at the age of 30.

His grandfather had taught him sand and body painting.

At Papunya he learned the new style.

No, that's all right.

That's OK...

-That's it in the middle, is it?

-Yeah.

This is an old story.

Yeah, very old story, this one.

But being done in a very modern way.

You didn't create this image,

this was handed down to you from...

Handed down from generation to generation.

From the family line.

Your fathers, grandfathers, like that.

To us.

Have you passed this...?

You pass it on when they grow up,

because they'll have little grandchildren.

They're all learning to paint, are they?

THEY LAUGH

Not yet.

Tjakamarra moved to Papunya in 1976.

He learned to paint his dreamtime stories

from some of the big names of the Papunya movement.

Artists like Tim Leura and Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri.

Two years after he painted his first picture,

he won the first National Aboriginal Art Award

with this work, Three Dreamings.

Suddenly Tjakamarra found himself

at the epicentre of an international art movement.

It's amazing to think that

from the beginnings of this whole Papunya school in the early '70s,

-it became known around the world, didn't it?

-Yeah.

How do you feel about that?

Oh, good, yeah, proud of it.

That's all right, it will show the world.

-Yeah.

-..Our background.

Cos your work's been included in those shows

in Paris and Japan...

-Everywhere, Germany.

-Germany, yeah.

The revolution that started in Papunya

soon spread to other indigenous communities.

An incredible diversity of art began to emerge.

Each region had its own distinctive style.

These splashes...it's your trademark now, isn't it?

Yeah, my trademark.

Yeah.

Indigenous art stars emerged,

each with their own individual styles,

like Emily Kngwarreye,

who didn't start to paint seriously

until she was 80.

Her large, bold abstract paintings

took the world by surprise.

While Rover Thomas, a stockman-turned-artist

from the Kimberley region of Western Australia,

became known for his striking use of block colour.

These works strongly evoke senses of place,

meaning and tradition

but are fashioned in a contemporary way

that appeals on purely aesthetic grounds.

They began to fetch the sort of sums reserved

for A-list Western artists.

For so long, Australian art

had been searching for an identity.

Searching for a way to be recognised internationally

and yet still be Australian.

But now, suddenly, here was an art style

abstract enough to fit among the white walls

of the modern art gallery,

but authentic enough to be utterly Australian.

As Robert Hughes said,

"The last great art movement of the 20th century."

Australian art was set free.

# Celebration of a nation

# Give us a hand!

# Celebration of a nation... #

As Australians celebrated the Bicentenary

of European settlement in 1988,

indigenous culture was recognised and embraced

as part of the national story.

Australians could take pride in the achievements

of indigenous art.

It made people aware of the depth of wisdom

and experience that lay behind this creativity.

In 1988,

as a symbol of its commitment to reconciliation,

the government commissioned an important work of art,

a mosaic for the new Parliament House in Canberra,

from Michael Nelson Tjakamarra.

He reworked his painting Possum And Wallaby Dreaming

into a massive mosaic.

Almost 200 square metres,

it has 90,000 hand-guillotined

granite pieces in a kaleidoscope of colours.

For the government, their links with aboriginal art were vital.

A sign of respect for indigenous traditions and land

and an acknowledgement of past mistakes.

By the early '90s,

the political will to redress these past mistakes

was firmly on the agenda.

Surely we can find just solutions

to the problems which beset the first Australians,

the people to whom the most injustice has been done.

In 1993, after an epic struggle,

indigenous Australians'

rights over their traditional lands

were finally recognised in law.

At home, Australian indigenous art

offered a celebration of country

and a tool for reconciliation.

But abroad,

it became a powerful cultural export.

by now, aboriginal art was internationally fashionable.

The corporate world was quick to take advantage.

BMW called on Michael Nelson Tjakamarra

to paint one of their cars,

just as they'd asked the likes of Andy Warhol,

Roy Lichtenstein and Alexander Calder.

And in 1994,

I received an unusual request -

to launch a jumbo jet...

and play a small part in helping to send indigenous art

to the world, quite literally.

Launching a jumbo jet is not a task

normally found in a gallery director's job description

but this is no ordinary aeroplane.

This was a flying work of art.

The 747 was painted by artist and designer John Moriarty,

commissioned by Qantas to liven up their livery.

Like other companies, Qantas wanted

to be associated with aboriginal art

but this was special.

This was the nation's flagship carrier

exporting a celebrated art movement around the world.

This is that very plane.

It's been completely repainted, of course,

but a trace of its history remains

in the little motif of the kangaroo.

Today, indigenous art

is still playing a role as cultural ambassador

at a huge exhibition in Brisbane, the seventh Asia Pacific Triennial,

APT.

This is a recent work by Michael Cook,

one of the five indigenous artists chosen to represent Australia.

His witty photomontages comment on themes of colonisation

and what it means to be "civilised"...

..turning the colonised into the coloniser.

Just as America used abstract art as a PR tool during the Vietnam War,

at the APT, aboriginal art is being used as a calling card,

a means of building the connection with Australia's Asian neighbours.

This is a unique event.

There is no other art exhibition quite like it in the world.

It's about the art of Vietnam, of India, Indonesia,

of Mongolia, of Afghanistan, of Korea, Bali,

and Australia.

It really is a declaration of how Australia sees itself today,

no longer focused on Europe and America

but here in the Asia-Pacific.

The APT has brought a very fresh view of the art, heritage

and creativity of the region,

this region where Australia belongs.

For me, the APT illustrates perfectly Australia's transformation

from British colony to modern society.

Of how Australia's moved beyond its European roots

to embrace its geographical and cultural realities.

Who we are in Australia has changed,

and so has Australian art.

I am always captivated by Bill Henson's beguiling, layered

and slightly unsettling images.

They're not concerned with being Australian.

Your art is completely universal.

You're dealing with universal issues,

you're not dealing with peculiarly Australian issues.

That's how it feels to me, certainly,

but no-one's outside their time and place.

There are inevitably traces of who you are

and where you are and when you were in everyone's work.

It's there in any artwork you want to look at

but it's certainly not a preoccupation of mine,

thinking about where I am or thinking about Australia.

Rosemary Laing's often-confronting images demand attention.

And that is her intention.

She disturbs complacent reality.

Her profile as an artist has grown, both in Australia and abroad,

but what's also changed is Australia's attitude towards artists

and their role in society.

It wasn't something that was cherished,

that is, to be an artist within one's culture.

Working as an artist here, I would be treated one way,

and then working as an artist when I was elsewhere,

I was treated completely differently, wonderfully.

-But back here...

-It's interesting.

-Back here it was just like...

-What was the difference?

It's better off saying you're a cleaner than saying you're

an artist.

Today, being an artist in Australia is something to be celebrated.

Art here has never been more lively. There are more artists,

more galleries and more exhibitions than ever before.

For a young country like Australia,

having an equally young culture used to cause anxiety.

But today, it's truly liberating.

And there's an amazing irony in all this.

Australia has always imported and borrowed a rich variety

of influences from overseas.

This now makes it the perfect place

to be at the forefront of contemporary culture,

which is global and gregarious.

In Australia, maybe the future has already arrived

at a place that redefines the term "art gallery".

OPERA PLAYS

Like the Sydney Opera House, it's a piece of art in its own right.

A subterranean world

in an unfashionable working-class suburb of Hobart in Tasmania.

Welcome to the Museum of Old and New art - MONA -

a museum that's forcing people to see art

in a completely different way.

Is it a crazy collection of curios,

arranged without rhyme or reason,

or the ultimate expression of contemporary culture?

It is distinctively Australian, precisely

because it can absorb influences from anywhere.

There's something wonderful about this place,

it's absolutely one of a kind.

It could only have happened here.

It's the unique vision of a maverick Aussie millionaire

who made his fortune in, that's right, gambling,

who has no time for the rules and is driven only

by his amazing instinct for risk.

His name is David Walsh.

It's his private gallery and collection,

and he can pretty much do whatever he wants with it.

Whenever I come down here, I think, "My God,

"does anybody see the world as David Walsh sees it?"

"Does anybody see the world as anybody else sees it?"

is my question,

and I kind of think we're trying to portray some of that message here

by being anarchic and attempting to...

Turn the tables.

Yeah, a public collection

tends to have an air of authority,

the state behind it, the notion of wisdom built in.

One of the things we do at MONA that really a public gallery can't do

is we can mess with artists, we can reinterpret,

we can put one work inside another work,

we can try and make the whole thing a Disneyland,

we can...try to entertain.

Some people are offended, some find it disgusting.

I've had some letters from people that said it changed their life.

For two centuries,

Australian art has been looking for a place of its own

amid a welter of foreign styles.

With the exception of aboriginal art,

it has depended on adopting and adapting ideas

that originate elsewhere,

picking the best and giving them an Australian twang.

For so long, that was seen as a problem,

as if Australian culture was always behind the times,

but MONA is unashamedly post-modern.

It copies, it appropriates,

it rearranges art and our lives.

And, of course, it confronts our obsession with sex and death.

The story of Australian art since the 1950s

has been the tension between wanting to express something

distinctively Australian

and wanting to be truly international.

And to bring down the boundaries between what art is and can be.

And I think that's exactly what David Walsh is doing here at MONA.

At the heart of the museum is a giant snake,

made up of over 1,600 individual paintings.

It's by one of my favourite Australian artists, Sidney Nolan.

When I look around this place,

I feel Nolan's dream to develop a uniquely Australian vision

has been realised,

but in a way he could never have imagined.

Nolan's snake is a dreamtime being,

a reminder that, far from being a cultural backwater,

Australia is actually home to

humankind's oldest continuous artistic tradition.

When Europeans arrived, they had no idea of this.

Regardless, art continued to reflect Australia's dramatic evolution.

Perhaps art never stopped being about

coming to terms with this extraordinary place,

even though the obsession

with referencing Australia has long gone.

From the moment I arrived here,

nearly 35 years ago,

my journey into art has helped me to understand

what this country is about,

what it is to be Australian.

Art explores the heart and soul of this country

in ever more interesting ways,

how its diversity of peoples express their feelings,

sentiments and instincts

for the land, for each other, for our lives.

The art of Australia is a conversation

with the past, the present and the future.

It's a conversation to which there is no end.

Plenty of debate, discussion, controversy and fulfilment,

but no ending.

There will always be more to this story.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd