Original subtitles

The Pacific Ocean is the world's biggest feature.

Covering over 60 million square miles,

it dominates a third of our planet's surface,

and is larger than all seven continents combined.

250 years ago,

Captain Cook began voyaging across

this great ocean and set foot in places

that few Europeans have seen before,

including Australia,

New Zealand and the great Polynesian islands of Tahiti and Hawaii.

But he also made contact with people.

Entire societies long hidden from the rest of the world.

It was the beginning of an historic encounter between Oceania and the

West, between the indigenous people

and those who went on to colonise them.

In this series,

I'll explore the momentous impact of that and later encounters.

How they disrupted and destroyed many indigenous communities,

but opened our eyes to a new world of images,

reinvigorated Western art,

and irrevocably changed the global imagination.

This isn't a simple story.

It's a complicated story, and not always a happy one,

because contact and conflict,

exploration and exploitation so often go hand in hand.

But one thing I think is certain -

these encounters were dynamite and they detonated a cultural explosion

that is still resonating today.

And I won't be telling this story alone.

In these programmes,

indigenous people from all over Oceania will have their say,

describing their art, and reflecting

on the often painful legacy of encounter.

My people, we've sat and we've watched this for 250 years.

This episode tells the story of an indigenous people who were almost

destroyed by the devastating impact of colonisation,

but whose extraordinary creativity endured,

flourished, and is today famous around the world.

I'm beginning not with Cook's first discovery, but his largest,

the great island continent of Australia.

Our story begins with a discovery,

long before the time of Captain Cook.

About 65,000 years ago,

a small group of mariners sailed

from Southeast Asia to an island called Sahul.

They populated its vast northern landscapes,

living off the region's fauna and flora.

Over time, these aboriginal people

developed a culture unlike any other.

These societies were unusually dependent on what we call art.

They didn't have a written language,

so they filled their images with meaning, using them to communicate,

to tell stories and to preserve invaluable, indeed, often sacred,

information. And this they kept doing,

generation after generation, millennium after millennium.

And in doing so,

they created the oldest continuous

artistic tradition anywhere in the world.

Many of their artworks were ephemeral.

They were drawn into the earth or

painted onto bodies and vanished soon

after they were made.

But some of them still survive.

This is Injalak Hill, in Arnhem Land, northern Australia.

Indigenous people have lived here for tens of thousands of years,

sheltering in its sandstone structures.

Over the millennia, they have done something remarkable here.

Amid the crevices and boulders, there are innumerable paintings.

Humans and animals stalk these ancient stone surfaces.

Some dating back 10,000 years, others painted only decades ago.

But the most breathtaking sight at Injalak is this one.

Wow!

An enormous rock overhang, covered in paintings.

Perhaps more than 1,000 of them, one on top of the other.

A palimpsest, painted through the generations.

This is the main gallery at Injalak

and it is so full of images that it's

quite difficult to decipher what's going on,

but it's clear that we are looking at a menagerie of local animals.

So what do we have? Well, up here, there is a long-necked turtle.

Over there is a giant rock python - two, three,

perhaps even four metres long, that runs along the surface of stone.

There is a kangaroo, or a wallaby.

Over here, we have a black echidna, or porcupine.

And up here,

we have these cockatoo feathers that are waving out at us like hands.

But the most obvious figures in this painting are of course the fish,

and there are dozens of them.

These barramundi started being painted here 8,000 years ago,

and in a uniquely perceptive way.

The artists have even shown their internal organs

in a manner known as the x-ray style.

As I continue my journey through the rocks, I find yet more paintings.

Spirit figures stare out at me from every corner.

This is a vast, labyrinthine art

gallery like nothing I've seen before.

I have been to many art sites in my time, but none of them,

none of them has affected me quite like this one.

It's not simply the quality of the art - which is breathtaking,

of course - it is the continuity of the art.

Paintings were being made here at Injalak Hill before the pyramids,

before Stonehenge,

and they are still being made in the same ways in our own time,

and there is nothing like that continuity in Europe.

Imagine if you had a single piece of paper and you gave that piece of

paper to a Palaeolithic cave painter and they made, I don't know,

a hand stencil on it.

And they then handed it to an Ancient Greek artist,

who drew an Aphrodite.

And that artist handed it to Michelangelo,

who drew a Madonna and Child.

And Michelangelo then handed it to Rembrandt,

and Rembrandt to Cezanne,

and Cezanne to Picasso.

All of them adding to the same piece of paper,

contributing to the same work of art.

A work of art that spanned an entire civilisation.

We would find it completely astonishing.

And yet that is what we have here.

But aboriginal Australians would soon be interrupted.

Hidden away on one rock face is a

spine-chilling painting of visitors from

a far-away world.

At 6:00am on April 20th, 1770,

a British ship called the Endeavour first reached Australia...

..and set in motion a seminal cultural collision.

The ship was commanded by James Cook and carried a team of scientists and

artists led by the gentleman botanist Joseph Banks.

Over the course of their long voyage, they had achieved much.

They had crossed the South Pacific,

and conducted astronomical experiments

in Tahiti. They had charted the

entire coastline of New Zealand and made

first contact with the Maori.

But now, two years into their expedition,

they were hunting for something bigger.

When many people of Cook's era thought about the world,

they felt there was something missing.

The northern hemisphere was full of land and the southern hemisphere was

full of water - and this, they reasoned, made the Earth top-heavy.

Now, they were certain it all had to even out,

so they became convinced that there

was a great landmass in the south that

they simply hadn't discovered yet.

A southern continent that they called Terra Australis.

And that, by this stage in the mission,

is what Cook was trying to find.

And on that momentous day in April 1770,

he thought he might have found it.

When Cook and his crew disembarked,

they became the first Europeans to set foot on this land,

what is now the south-east coast of Australia.

It was unlike anywhere they had been before.

It's really hard to imagine how Cook

and his crew must have felt when they

first walked along this vast and beautiful coastline.

To us, Australia is a long way away but, to them,

this was land that no European even knew existed before.

This was another planet.

In many respects, this was the 18th-century equivalent

of the moon landing.

And it was filled with things that seemed to belong to another world.

Joseph Banks and his fellow botanist Daniel Solander had been sent by the

Royal Society in London to learn as much as they could about these new

lands, and they lost no time in setting to work.

Between them, they found 1,000 new species of plants in just 70 days,

and so named the area Botanists, or Botany Bay.

As they made their way up the coast,

they also discovered exotic animals, and one perplexed them more than any

other.

"It was of a mouse colour, very slender-made and swift of foot.

"I should have taken it for a wild dog, but for its walking or running,

"in which it leapt like a hare or deer.

"The full size of a greyhound and shaped in every respect like one."

Joseph Banks was so captivated by this bouncing greyhound that he

commissioned the famed equestrian painter George Stubbs to paint it.

Stubbs called it The Kongouro.

This is the first painting of a

kangaroo in the history of Western art.

Stubbs had never seen one alive, of course,

but he was able to base this image

on sketches that had come back from the

Endeavour, on verbal descriptions, and perhaps most helpfully,

on a kangaroo skin owned by Joseph Banks that Stubbs had inflated like

a balloon in his studio.

And I must say, he's done a pretty good job.

Despite a handful of anatomical inaccuracies here and there,

it, on the whole, is extremely convincing.

And what's more, Stubbs has gone to

great lengths to place this Australian

creature in an Australian landscape.

We've got these scrubby eucalypt trees

and this distinctive pinkish light.

Now, Stubbs first exhibited this

painting together with a picture of a dingo in London in 1773,

and its impact on the British public was formidable.

Some people stood aghast in front of it.

Others broke into heated debate.

And some people thought it was a

practical joke and burst into laughter.

But nothing better captured the wonders of the new, new world.

This painting was seen as proof that Cook's voyages were rewriting the

very laws of nature.

Of course, indigenous Australians had been painting such creatures for

millennia, and in a distinctive style that is still practised today.

My ancestors have been painting bark for a long, long time.

The red ochre is for painting background on bark.

My mother's brother taught me how to paint.

You have to do a lot of practice, by watching the elders painting.

My inspiration came from the elders from the

Bingara rock art, and that's how

they've shared the stories.

Then we get the grass brush.

Then we would do the outline.

I collect grass along the billabong edge of creek beds.

I cut them and use them

to do the lines I'm painting.

Kangaroo, it's...

..a food source for us.

We kill, we cook and eat.

The cross etching represent the flesh,

or the meat, inside the animal.

That's how we want to teach our kids to see

what the animal

has inside his body.

That's how we paint x-ray styles.

Yes, I am happy. I'm proud that I am

part of the tradition.

I wonder what George Stubbs would have made of this.

His beloved kongouro, as

painted by someone who knew it, inside out.

But these two very different

cultures would soon come to know each other.

Before landing at Botany Bay,

the Endeavour observed indigenous Australians along the coast.

The Polynesian navigator Tupaia,

who'd been with Cook's crew since Tahiti,

depicted some men fishing for food in the ocean,

and in doing so

became the first outsider to represent aboriginal people.

Contact, however, proved difficult.

The inhabitants of this great

southern territory resisted all attempts at

communication. It's clear that

indigenous Australians wanted nothing to do

with these white-faced, heavily-clothed invaders.

But Cook, who had been observing them carefully over the period -

often through a telescope, because he couldn't get any closer -

was actually quite impressed by the people he encountered here,

and this is what he wrote in his journal in August, 1770.

"They may appear to some to be the most wretched people on Earth, but

"in reality they are far more happy than we Europeans.

"They live in a tranquillity which

"is not disturbed by the inequality of condition."

And yet there is a bitter irony in that passage,

because that tranquillity, that very happiness,

would be thoroughly disturbed - and, in part,

due to the actions of Cook himself.

Because at the very same time,

and without bothering to gain the consent

of people who had been living here for thousands of years,

he declared all of eastern Australia to be British territory.

His decision would have momentous consequences.

18 years later, the British returned to claim their prize,

In January 1788,

11 British ships carrying more than 1,000 people anchored at Botany Bay,

The new arrivals, however, weren't so impressed,

so they travelled a few miles north,

where they found an unusually safe and deep harbour.

They then established a settlement there,

which they named after the then Home Secretary, Sydney.

New South Wales was to be Britain's latest penal colony,

and 700 of its first residents were convicts, some of whom were artists.

One of these was Thomas Watling.

This is his depiction of Sydney Harbour in 1794,

painted just six years after the arrival of the first fleet.

But perhaps the most interesting of

these convict artists was Thomas Bock.

Bock had been born in Birmingham in 1793, and by his 20s

had established himself as a successful local engraver,

with a wife and five children.

But then he committed his crime.

In his early thirties,

Bock became infatuated with a 17-year-old woman and persuaded her,

against her parents' wishes, to leave home.

He placed her in some lonely lodgings

and paid regular secret visits.

When, inevitably, she became pregnant,

he was so determined to cover his tracks that he forced her to drink

poison, in the hope that he could bring about a miscarriage.

She survived, thankfully, and so did the baby.

And in 1823, Bock was sentenced to 14 years in Australia.

Bock arrived at the penal colony here in Tasmania -

then called Van Diemen's Land - the following January.

But he soon established himself as a sought-after local artist,

who even plied his trade in the morgue.

This is his portrait of Alexander Pearce,

just hanged for murder and cannibalism.

In the 1830s,

Bock also painted a series of portraits of indigenous Tasmanians.

It's hard to believe that at the very same time,

their community was being displaced by Bock's ruthless countrymen.

In my view, Bock's most bewitching aboriginal portrait is this one.

This is Mathinna.

She's only about seven years old,

but she's already lived a life of some upheaval.

Her father was a local Chief,

but the British tracked him down and took her away from her parents and

placed her in an orphanage.

She was then offered as a kind of

exotic gift to the Governor of Tasmania

and his wife, who adopted her.

And she lived, it must be said, in some style, in Government House,

as a kind of trophy black princess.

And it was they who commissioned Thomas Bock to make this portrait.

Mathinna is shown in this elegant, almost English, pose,

her hands clasped neatly at her knees, her legs crossed.

And she is wearing this extraordinary flaming scarlet dress.

But in a nod to her aboriginal origins,

Bock has shown her not wearing shoes.

Mathinna has these incredible, deep, dark,

bright eyes that stare back at us with intelligence and confidence.

But as you look at this picture longer,

as you look at her for longer,

you begin, I think, to detect a

sense of profound loneliness and sadness.

And why wouldn't she be?

Do you know what I find so extraordinary about this image?

Thomas Bock was essentially a convicted criminal and yet, here,

he has produced this incredibly tender,

incredibly sensitive portrait of a girl who he was told belonged to an

inferior race.

And I wonder, I just wonder whether sitter and artist kind of understood

each other. Because after all, both of them were exiles in Tasmania.

Both of them had been torn away from their families.

When the Governor and his wife returned to Britain,

Mathinna was abandoned.

She took to drink, and at the age of 17,

she drunkenly drowned in a puddle.

Her needless death seems to

encapsulate the fate of many indigenous

Australians, whose lives were turned upside down by colonisation.

But for the colonisers, the future was bright.

In the following decades, the fabric of Australia was transformed.

White settlers began to arrive in the country in increasingly large

numbers, turning vast swathes of land into highly profitable farms.

By the end of the 19th century,

there were more than three million settlers in Australia,

and they came to see this place not as a colony, but a country.

Not as a prison, but a paradise.

To them, this was a land of opportunity.

It was a sunny, spacious antidote to Europe,

where the class system was less

rigid and where profits and fortunes were

there to be made.

This national identity was soon expressed in art.

And one painting in particular

captured the new Australian optimism.

Arthur Streeton's Golden Summer, Eaglemont.

This is Australia's Hay Wain,

its most famous image,

a painting that, for many people,

encapsulates the very idea of Australia.

A picture reproduced on countless postcards,

chocolate boxes and postage stamps.

And it's easy to see why it was, and is, so popular.

When you look at it, you can almost feel the wind in your hair.

You can almost feel the sun on your face.

And it is painted with such wonderful looseness of touch.

I love these wispy clouds over here.

I love this half-visible moon that's twinkling in the sky.

Now, the painting is built almost

entirely of prismatic hues of yellows,

of violets, of blues that Streeton had borrowed from the French

Impressionists, but that

nevertheless capture a light that is singularly

and peculiarly Australian.

Now, this painting was conceived in 1888, 1889,

only 100 years after the first fleet landed in Australia and established

the colony of New South Wales.

But you wouldn't know it because

this painting makes it seem like they

have been here forever.

The landscape has been tamed.

The new world looks like the old world.

And the Australian wilderness has

been converted into a patchwork quilt of

fields that are filled with farmers and sheep and farmhouses.

But Streeton's paradise had come at a cost.

Aboriginal Australians had been moved off this land.

They had been devastated by diseases

against which they had no protection,

and massacred with impunity.

By the time this painting was made,

the aboriginal population had plummeted from over 300,000

to around 80,000.

And all the while,

British attitudes towards indigenous people were hardening.

And they were captured in the new medium of photography.

This photograph was taken in New South Wales.

It shows two aboriginal people - a man here and a woman here -

out in the bush.

One of them is holding a spear, the other a boomerang.

He's wearing traditional clothes.

He's wearing an apron made from a

wallaby skin and a headband made from a

dingo tail. And there is, of course, a dead kangaroo by their feet.

And yet this is, in reality, a complete fiction.

They're not out in the bush, but in a photographic studio.

And these aren't their possessions,

but props that have been given to them by their photographer.

This photograph wasn't taken for them and it wasn't given to them.

This photograph was given, or sold, by one white person to another.

And so when we look at this photograph,

what we're really looking at is a group of people whose land has been

taken, whose traditions have been almost entirely wiped out,

being forced into fancy dress in

order to entertain the very people who

have displaced them.

More concerning images are found elsewhere.

Made not for entertainment, but for scientific research,

in a quest for proof that aboriginal Australians

belonged to an inferior race.

These photographs were taken by a man called Paul Foelsche,

who founded the Northern Territory Police Force in the late 1860s,

early 1870s.

Now, he was, it must be said, a divisive figure.

Some people think he was an able and efficient and intelligent policeman,

others think he was responsible for dozens of massacres of aboriginal

people over the decades.

Either way, when he wasn't policing northern Australia,

he was an enthusiastic

anthropologist and amateur photographer.

And in the course of this research,

he took hundreds of images of indigenous people.

This image, I think, is particularly distressing because here

a powerless young woman has been

forced to stand naked in an unfamiliar

room, in front of a strange white man with a camera.

And in many respects, the most

alarming thing in this photograph is this,

the measuring stick,

because she and many other people like her were being measured so they

could be compared to other races.

The British used this perceived

biological inferiority as a justification

for colonisation.

These prejudices cast a long shadow over Australia's history that

stretches right up to the present.

Today, aboriginal people are still victims of this old intolerance.

My father is a Western Islander tribe.

My mother was from Luritja Pintupi tribe from the west.

I heard a story my mum told me about my grandfather.

He was taken in chains to Adelong.

They had a police station there a long time ago.

Of course, that place was strange to him,

the jail. He just killed himself.

That's the story I heard from my mother.

Australian government made too many rules,

giving our land away.

Stories, dreaming.

I don't know if they did apologise, I don't know,

but we are still fighting for our rights and freedom,

and that makes me sad

and angry, because we are the first people here in Australia.

It's really sad, you know?

We should be working together as Australians,

teaching our children black or white, whatever colour we are.

Even in this world.

Especially Australia.

By 1900,

aboriginal people had been written out of the story of modern Australia

and certainly out of its art.

But in the 20th century, that would begin to change,

and it would come from an unlikely place.

This is Australia's Western Desert - a vast,

arid landscape in the country's interior, isolated and inhospitable.

Deserts aren't typically places

where much grows, and yet it was here,

in this hot, dry and largely barren landscape that the seeds of an

aboriginal revival were sown.

An artistic revival that would first be recognised here in Australia and

later all over the world.

The revival began in Hermannsburg,

a small aboriginal settlement 80 miles from Alice Springs.

At its centre is a Lutheran Mission which, since 1877,

offered indigenous people accommodation,

education and some protection from white settlers

in return for conversion.

Over the years, many boys and girls grew up in these peaceful

surroundings, but one stood out from all others.

His name was Elea.

Elea had been born in July 1902 and had grown into a studious young man

who excelled at everything he did.

He had worked as a carpenter, a blacksmith,

a stock hand and a camel driver,

but his aspirations changed

dramatically when he was 32 years old.

In 1934, two artists - two white artists -

came here to Hermannsburg to mount an exhibition.

Now, Elea had never seen such things as paintings before and he was

instantly transfixed, so he begged his pastor...

begged his pastor for a small box of watercolours.

The pastor agreed, and when they finally arrived,

Elea set to work teaching himself how to paint.

Two years later, one of the artists, Rex Battarbee,

returned to Hermannsburg for a painting trip.

Elea became his guide and the two began painting alongside each other.

Elea quickly mastered his craft and began signing

his pictures Albert Namatjira.

Soon, Namatjira's work was being

shown in Australia's cities and the white public was captivated.

Some are now in the National Gallery of Australia, in Canberra.

This is one of Albert Namatjira's early works, dating to 1939.

He'd only properly been painting for about three years when he made it.

And I like to think of it as a kind of action painting.

It's a freeze-frame.

On the left, there is a kangaroo -

a rather more convincing kangaroo

than the one managed by George Stubbs -

and on the right is a hunter.

And this hunter is moving so stealthily

that it's almost as if he's snuck

into the painting without Namatjira noticing.

He's right at the edge.

And he's about to release this long spear.

Now, what's going to happen next?

Is he going to hit the kangaroo?

Is he going to miss it?

Is the kangaroo going to escape?

Obviously, we don't know.

But what we do know is this beautiful,

tranquil landscape is about to be disturbed

and these birds are about to vanish.

This is Mount Hermannsburg,

the great guardian mountain that towers over the village in which

Namatjira had been born.

So in some ways, it's a celebration of home.

But above all, it's a study in light and colour.

Namatjira has tried to capture the way that the soft, low,

milky light of morning or late afternoon has transfigured this arid

landscape into a kaleidoscope of hues.

The mountain becomes a kind of irresistible, almost abstract,

pattern of teals and turquoises, greens and purples.

It is a tour de force.

And it's the confidence that is most impressive here.

Anyone who's ever worked in watercolour

will know that as soon as you

hesitate, everything is over.

Well, Namatjira hasn't hesitated once.

Every stroke, every mark is deployed with certainty and precision.

One of Namatjira's favourite subjects

was the ghost gum tree - a eucalypt,

native to central Australia.

To indigenous people, ghost gums

were important markers in the desert.

They only sprung up where there was ground water, and so they indicated

sources of life.

Their white bark shone in the moonlight,

so offered guidance after dark.

These trees were also believed to embody the spirits of the dead,

hence the name ghost gum,

and that might explain why Namatjira has depicted this tree almost as

though it's a human.

The branches are like limbs, the bark wrinkles like skin.

And if you squint your eyes, the patterns on the trunk become eyes,

noses and mouths.

I wonder whether these trees, which Namatjira painted repeatedly,

are perhaps self-portraits.

Portraits of Namatjira himself,

a symbol of life and creativity in the desert.

Today, Namatjira's paintings divide opinion.

Some think they are sad symbols of aboriginal assimilation.

But for others, they are powerful hybrid artworks.

A Western-style vision of Australia

that no Westerner could have produced.

What's certain is they made him famous.

In 1954, he met the Queen.

And in 1957, as amazing as it seems,

he became the first aboriginal person to be granted full Australian

But it was this that led to his downfall.

As a full citizen, Namatjira was

entitled to purchase and consume alcohol,

unlike any other indigenous Australian.

So naturally, he shared it with his family,

his friends and other members of his community.

And that is why, in 1958,

he was charged with supplying

alcohol to indigenous Australians and

sentenced to three months of hard labour in the outback.

In many respects, he never recovered.

He returned from his sentence weak and haggard.

Within a few months, he was dead, aged 57.

And yet, Namatjira left a legacy.

Throughout his life, he encouraged

his family and friends to also take up

painting, and they are still doing so today.

These are Albert Namatjira's grandchildren.

I've accompanied them on one of

their regular watercolour trips near Alice Springs.

These are the gum trees?

Yeah. Red wood.

So, Mervyn, what do you think of Albert Namatjira and his paintings?

He's good. The first native

Australian ever done real good painting.

I don't know how he done all this.

It's real nice.

Why do you think he was so good?

Was it talent? Yeah, it was talent because he had it all in his mind,

when he was looking at the country,

the landscape, the colour of the land.

So, Gloria, what are you painting today?

I'm painting Mount Hermannsburg.

So, did you have any lessons, or did you...

No. You taught yourself?

Yep. I began painting when I was 12.

You began when you were 12? Yeah.

I was just sitting around with my uncles and my dad,

who was all painters,

and just by watching them...

..got me inspired.

Right. And then that's how I learnt to paint.

Without Albert Namatjira, if there was no Albert Namatjira,

would you be painting now?

No.

There'd be no artists.

He started a great tradition.

Yeah.

That he passed on to the next generation, to the next.

Like Albert before them,

Namatjira's descendants seem to have a rare ability to capture the vivid

colours of the Australian desert,

and I have seen first-hand how important art has become to them.

And yet, for all their creativity,

the Namatjira family have always worked in the Western style.

But other aboriginal artists have done something completely different.

In February 1971,

a van filled with belongings hurtled west into the Australian desert.

It was carrying a Sydney schoolteacher

called Geoff Bardon, and he was

heading to his latest posting.

It was going to be a challenging job.

Barden had been appointed as an art teacher at a primary school in a

remote aboriginal settlement called Papunya,

which was six hours' drive from Alice Springs,

which itself was about a week's drive from Sydney.

Papunya was a home for exiles.

More than a thousand indigenous Australians living impoverished and

dislocated lives in the desert.

Their traditions being eradicated by the authorities.

But a powerful creative impulse remained.

Bardon noticed the children making beautiful drawings in the sand.

Near-abstract patterns of lines,

dots and spirals that clearly had great significance to the indigenous

community. And he encouraged them to start painting and drawing these

images onto paper.

But he didn't confine his efforts to the children.

He persuaded their parents and grandparents to do the same.

And by the middle of 1971,

he had persuaded a large group of men

to paint a mural on the school wall.

The piece became known as Honey Ant Dreaming -

a ten-metre-wide masterpiece that

became a source of intense pride in the

community. The mural opened the floodgates.

Gardeners, dustmen,

kangaroo hunters and pensioners started visiting Bardon's classroom.

With paint and brushes provided by the school,

they painted on anything they could find.

Broken tables, floor tiles.

These amateur artists, who had never worked with such materials before,

possessed almost limitless creativity.

Working not in the Western style, but with indigenous motifs,

they produced one extraordinary image after another.

All of these pictures were inspired by the vast landscape of the Western

Desert, but they didn't paint it like Namatjira.

They showed it from above.

In stylised, abstract motifs, representing rivers,

sandhills and sacred sites.

The journeys across them,

the rituals that took place in them, and the stories that unfolded there.

One of these artists was a cattle rancher and stockman,

who went on to become one of Bardon's most prolific proteges.

His name was Mick Namarari Tjapaltjarri and, for him,

the desert had long been associated with tragedy.

One day, when Mick was seven or

eight years old, his father went missing.

The following morning,

his increasingly concerned family followed his tracks into the desert.

And after a short while, they found his body,

with a spear through its back, murdered by a revenge party.

Everyone burst into tears and Mick's grandmother was so distraught that

she built a fire and threw herself into it.

Mick tried to pull her out, but it was too late.

The incident would have destroyed many people,

but it spurred Mick to ever greater creativity.

This, in my view, is Mick Namarari's masterpiece.

It is called Sunrise Chasing Away The Night,

and it was painted in the late 1970s.

Like so many Papunya landscapes,

it shows the Western Desert from a bird's eye view.

We are, in fact, not looking from the sky,

but from space, from heaven.

These extraordinary white circles are stars,

so we are looking through the stars,

down onto the Australian landscape below.

And you can see the yellows, the ochres, the greys,

the oranges of the soil,

with these dots representing the rocks and pebbles that scatter its

surface.

There are paths across this landscape,

the tracks of the people that inhabit it.

And at its centre is this extraordinary concentric circle,

which marks a sacred site, a ceremonial site,

at which a campfire might well have been burning throughout the night.

But now it is morning,

and Namarari has depicted a sunrise like none I've seen before,

a sunrise from above.

On the right, in the east,

the sun is just beginning to creep up over the horizon and is spreading

its white light west across the desert.

And as it does so, the dark shadow of the night -

which is represented with this

extraordinarily rich black acrylic paint -

is being pushed out of the picture.

What a painting this is!

And you know, Mick Namarari has never been taught how to paint,

he'd never been to an art gallery,

he'd never been on a plane and

looked down on the ground beneath him,

and so all of this had to come from within.

All of it had to come from his imagination.

This is hybrid art at its best.

A glorious combination of Western

materials and an indigenous imagination.

It's not surprising, then,

that dot paintings are now among Australia's most prized artworks.

Aboriginal art is big business,

with some dot paintings commanding astronomical sums.

The National Gallery in Canberra is the new owner of a painting by

Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri, which

sold for 2.4 million dollars overnight,

a world-record price for aboriginal art.

Jamie Wilczek reports.

To what extent these vast amounts

benefit the wider aboriginal community

is a subject of debate,

but these paintings are now recognised as some of

Australia's finest cultural achievements

and that in itself is something

to be celebrated.

Aboriginal people have been victims of centuries of injustice and they

remain marginalised politically,

socially and economically, but not artistically.

Aboriginal art galleries and art centres

are now all across the country,

and for many indigenous people art has become an escape from misery

and from poverty, and it's also enabled them

to make their mark on modern Australia.

Indeed, over the last few decades,

aboriginal motifs have come to symbolise

Australia itself.

Throughout the world, aboriginal dot painting is instantly recognisable

and even adorns Australia's national airline.

Indigenous creativity has fuelled the global imagination

and has entered the canon of modern art.

And now a new generation of

indigenous artists are reinvigorating

traditional techniques

and bringing their art to international audiences.

My name's Dale Harding.

I'm a contemporary artist currently based in Brisbane.

And in my matrilineal line I inherit responsibility,

language and territories for the Bidjara people, the Ghungalu people,

Garingbal people and also Nguri people of Central Queensland.

Reckitt's Blue is what's described as an optical whitener.

It's a laundry product, manufactured from synthetic ultramarine pigment,

and washing soda, and two generations of my mum's family

were indentured domestic servants,

forced to work under the labour of the Department of Native Affairs,

and the Queensland government in Australia,

and Reckitt's Blue was a pigment

that was used in the laundry by domestic

servants and indentured house workers

to clean and to whiten and to

brighten the bed linen and the clothes of their employers and their

colonial masters,

so throughout Bidjara, Ghungalu, Garingbal and Nguri territories

in central Queensland,

rock art features prominently.

Negative and positive stencil works where an item, an object, a hand,

something of significance was placed against the surface,

and a negative or positive stencil was made.

There's at least 19,500 years of continual cultural expression on

Bidjara sites which I inherit through my grandfather's line.

What I do in a gallery context is different.

It's a different thing altogether.

It's contemporary art, but using and employing and remembering and

continuing to hold the continuum of our rock art practice

enables the possibility that younger

generations coming forward will know this is normal and their

bodies will remember what to do.

Rock art sites across the Australian continent, but particularly

I can speak for, in central Queensland,

are vulnerable to all sorts of

exposures - exposures to literally the weather and time,

exposure to not being in contact with their countrymen.

Sites are to be cared for and are to be

cherished and celebrated, but if we think of cultural continuum,

there would be new forms coming, they would be new expressions,

there would be new representations and there would be futures at sites.

The death drive of care,

the death drive of trying to preserve something

that is seen as static and finished discounts me, discounts my body,

discounts my family and discounts aboriginal people across the entire

Australian continent.

On the 26th of January, 1988,

Australia celebrated its bicentenary.

It was 200 years since the first fleet had settled these shores.

But many indigenous Australians saw nothing to celebrate.

For them it was the anniversary of an invasion.

To mark the occasion,

43 aboriginal artists from Arnhem Land made their own memorial.

It is one of the masterpieces of modern Australian art.

The aboriginal memorial consists of 200 hollow log coffins,

each marking a year of European settlement.

They are monuments to the hundreds of thousands

of aboriginal people who have died since 1788.

And a guarantee that the dead they honour will rest in peace.

Amid this forest of souls it's hard not to reflect on the destructive

impact of European settlement in Australia, but it is nevertheless an

uplifting work of art, because it's proof that aboriginal culture,

the oldest continuous artistic tradition anywhere in the world,

is still with us.

In the 250 years since Captain Cook arrived at Botany Bay,

aboriginal people have endured unimaginable suffering,

and many of them still lead dislocated lives,

but in the last few decades it is art more than anything else that has

given them hope. It has become a source of income and self-respect,

and helped them mark their place in their own country.

Australia might long have been colonised,

but aboriginal people are now

reclaiming it with creativity.

In the next episode, we travel into

the heart of the Pacific to explore the

art and people of Polynesia, a place the Europeans saw as paradise,

and then set about destroying.