BECC holds a print by Dinny Nolan Tjampitjinpa, 'Women’s Dreaming', which was produced for the 1978 Commonwealth Games. Tjampitjinpa was part of an important movement of Aboriginal artists called the Papunya Tula Artists, which he joined in the 1970s. This group of artists were among the first to put traditional Aboriginal body and sand painting onto a hard surface such as canvas or wood, as has been common in Western art. Dutch explorers from 1606 mapped the north, south, and west coasts of Australia. James Cook was the first European on the east coast, in 1770. He claimed the land for Britain, despite the fact that Aboriginal communities already lived there. These communities were driven from their land and sacred spaces by the British invaders. As Australia developed, the settler colony and government treated Aboriginal people as second-class citizens. It was only in 2008 that the Australian government acknowledged the rights of Aboriginal people to the land and apologised for ‘the laws and policies of successive parliaments and governments that have inflicted profound grief, suffering and loss on these our fellow Australians’.

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Image: 'The Founding of Australia', a romanticised view of the First Fleet’s landing on the continent in 1788, painted by Algernon Talmage in 1937 (A/AUST/118 )