In 1948 Daryl Lindsay, the director of the National Gallery of Victoria, and Joseph Burke invited Kenneth Clark to visit Australia. Burke, a friend and protégé of Clark, had since 1946 been the first professor of art history at the University of Melbourne. At Burke’s suggestion, Clark, a recent director of the National Gallery, London, was appointed adviser to the Felton Bequest for acquisitions of European art by the NGV. Though some people uncharitably remember Clark as the man who bought a dodgy Claude, he was, in his two short years in this role, responsible for the acquisition of several major works, including Poussin’s The Crossing of the Red Sea (arguably of the same importance as the NGV’s Tiepolo), and the gorgeously sexy Siesta by Pierre Bonnard, which had been in Clark’s collection at Saltwood Castle.

Following his return to Europe, Clark wrote on 26 March 1949 to Bernard Berenson declaring that the most important art in Australia was indigenous, but that no one knew much about it and it was rarely exhibited.

I enjoyed Australia far more than I had expected to do. I find it hard to explain why without seeming patronising, but the brilliant climate seems to have had a magical effect on the Anglo Saxons, removing their inhibitions and hypocrisies. However, they are very naïve – hardly out of the pioneering stage, but they are a gifted people, only held back by laziness. It was fascinating to be in an entirely democratic country, without even the respect for wealth, or start of dispossession of the USA. The landscape … is most beautiful and I can only convey it by saying that it is like a Piero della Francesca. The grass is white, the trunks of the trees pinkish white, the leaves glaucous, exactly as in the Baptism. The light comes through the leaves, so the woods are all lilac – like the most extreme Impressionist Renoirs of the late 70’s. It is a country for painters, and in fact they have quite good ones – at least no more than anywhere else in these years of dearth. Jane [Clark] has told you of my enthusiasm for the aboriginal paintings. They are extraordinary, and totally unlike African bushman drawings or the Palaeolithic cave paintings. They do not represent a total impression of moment, but an analytic. As you know the Australian aboriginal always draws the inside of his subject as well as the out, and he makes the heart, liver, intestines etc. with a decorative pattern. Most of the paintings are life-size, on bark lined with white clay. By some freak the Abos had what we call perfect taste – all their objects have pretty, delicate colouring, and their fantasies are gentle, whereas those of the neighbouring Papuans are ugly and violent. Altogether, a study of Melanesian culture is a good corrective for the art historian, for each island or district has an art-form independent and fundamentally different from the other. All the material is in Australia, and has not been properly studied, or even exhibited … I was there at not a time to learn anything, except how ignorant we are.

      (Unpublished letter from the Berenson Archives, Villa I Tatti, Florence.)

Has the situation changed over the last half century?

Clark subsequently arranged a series of exhibitions by Nolan, Drysdale and other Australian artists whom he had encountered with Burke. So impressed was Clark by the X-ray style of Aboriginal bark painting that he attempted to arrange an exhibition of barks at the British Museum, London. Clark was particularly attracted to the 962 bark paintings collected by Baldwin Spencer from 1912 to 1921. Baldwin Spencer is said to have commissioned them as copies of rock paintings from Gunbalanya, in the Oenpelli region, creating a particular relationship between ancient Australian rock art and their visual reception in bark imagery, well before it was understood how ancient Australian rock art is.

Clark was offered Charles Mountford’s collection for display, but rejected it in favour of Spencer’s works from Kakadu. ‘I think it would be a great mistake,’ Clark wrote, ‘to introduce aboriginal art in this country except in the best examples. I am sure the right thing to do is for the Melbourne Gallery to arrange a loan to the British Museum. There cannot be any objection to lending the British Museum things which are not exhibited in Melbourne, and which are not even accessible to students.’ The exhibition never took place; even now the Spencer barks are only rarely seen. Before Clark’s arrival, there had only been two exhibitions of Aboriginal art in Melbourne: one in 1929, the other in 1943. It is unlikely that Clark saw any rock art, although he did contemplate an excursion to Uluru, then a rather daunting adventure on camel.

Melbournian indifference to indigenous culture was ruffled by the arrival of the German Jewish intellectual Leonhard Adam, who acquired collections of indigenous work for the University of Melbourne, including the famous collection of Groote Eyland barks. Such objects fell between the realms of archaeology and anthropology, even though they were perceived as aesthetic objects by the artists of early modernism in Melbourne, principally Sidney Nolan. Aboriginal art was taught for the first time in the 1950s but not reintroduced into the syllabus at the University of Melbourne until the twenty-first century. During this time, art history was taught as a Western subject, even Australian settler art not given the prominence it deserved. Rare bubbles of interest such as that of Leonhard Adam continued to burst.

Art history in Australia, originally a European-based discipline, has only recently introduced non-Western forms of art to the syllabus. In such classic works as Bernard Smith’s history of Australian art (1962), the narrative began with first contact imagery – first contact seen through European eyes. Australian art post-contact has been studied in terms of narrative structures, historical periods, stylistic analyses of movements, the definition of the works of individual artists, the dating of works, the detection of forgeries, and exhibitions of all kinds.

All these activities are essential ones, but they bring into prominence the need for a new conceptualisation of Australian art history. Curatorship is often at the cutting edge of Australian art history, as with the exhibitions associated with the Telstra Prize over the last twenty-five years at the Art Gallery of the Northern Territory, and the Inaugural National Indigenous Art Triennial 07, Culture Warriors, at the National Gallery of Australia. The interrelationship between museums and art history has always been strong in Australia, especially in Melbourne. What is really desirable would be to see indigenous art exhibited, in integrated displays, in the temporal sequence of Australian art.

In the 1950s, when ancient Australian rock art began to be reliably dated, it became clear that Australians lived in a country with some of the earliest images known to mankind, as old as their legendary French counterparts at Lascaux or Chauvet. The subject of Australian rock art is in its infancy, a field where new sites of major significance are frequently discovered; those on the Burrup Peninsula are now threatened before having been fully appreciated. Rock art had a limited audience until the development of chic international tourism; writing on the subject was either archaeological or anthropological. Archaeology has rarely been allied with art history in Australia, and rock art in Australia has never, regrettably, attained the same status in archaeology as other areas. In recent years, tourism in Northern and Central Australia has done much to make rock art known.

Recently, I travelled with my colleague Susan Lowish to Oenpelli, armed with every guide to the region, including Baldwin Spencer’s classic Wanderings in Wild Australia (1928). We went on a special excursion to see rock art on Injalak Hill, one of countless sites of rock art for some 100 kilometres, halfway to Katherine and in the other direction to the stone country. Our intention was to assess the possibility of tours for delegates after the international conference – an introduction to art that can only be seen in the landscape. So compelling is the beauty of these sites that our visitors will surely be converted forever.

The Senate inquiry of 2007 claimed that seventy per cent of contemporary indigenous work comes from the Northern Territory. Although there is enormous demand for contemporary Aboriginal art on the international market, our own museums have rarely been given sufficient resources to develop their collections. For example, the Art Gallery of the Northern Territory exhibits only one per cent of its collection, and the Gallery’s extensive early Papunyah collection (some 300 paintings) is uncatalogued and rarely seen. Similarly, the Gallery’s precious early Hermannsburg watercolour collection, comprising 500 works on paper, and its Tiwi Islands collection of 500 objects, remain unknown and uncatalogued.

At the Melbourne conference next January, indigenous Australian and New Zealand art will be presented to the international art history world in many different ways, and made part of the debate about global art history. In the past, indigenous art history was more neglected in Australia than in any other country. Now, at last, indigenous art is beginning to be displayed prominently and to be examined with due energy in art circles and beyond.