However regrettable, these omissions are conscious and courageous. Sayers eschews ‘batting list’ art history, naming the names, as in the Book of Numbers, without commentary or interpretation.

For Sayers, Aboriginal art is neither a foreword nor an afterthought. He embraces from the start ‘the duality’ in the history of Australian art, both Indigenous and white settlement. The consequences are far-reaching.

In his introduction, Sayers compares a pencil sketch of Groote Eylandt by William Westall of 1803, with a bark painting by Gulpidja produced in situ in 1948, showing the journey of the Groote Eylandt ancestor figure, Jundurrana. Whatever topographical interests the Westall sketch may possess, it looks uncertain, provisional, timid compared to the rich and mysterious density of the bark painting with its mythological narrative. It is the land observed by a stranger versus the land possessed by its keeper and its servant. Although Sayers does not ram the point home – indeed he steps back from a brilliant comparison disclaiming ‘that we must admit that there are limitations which prevent us from entering fully into either’ – this pair of images should trouble the mind. Does Australian Aboriginal art hold up a fierce reflecting mirror to the art of white settlement and find the latter wanting?

Certainly, Sayers never lets us forget the Aboriginal presence. His opening chapter, ‘Art and the Dreaming’, describes the rock carvers and painters and points to the ‘continuous present’ of Aboriginal art. Images from millennia past inhabit the same world as images made within living memory. What gives rise to that phenomenon is the power of the urmyth of the Dreaming, sensitively and sensibly articulated by Sayers. The Dreaming myth of creation, the formation of the land through the action of the spirit ancestors, is equally one of ‘a continuous present’. The land was both formed in the dawn of time and exists today in the individual’s Dreaming. Such a myth surely does more for one than ‘the big bang’ theory of the Universe.

Sayers passes easily to the early colonial portraits of Aborigines, reserving a special sympathy for John Glover’s depictions of Aboriginal life, which betray an imaginative empathy beyond mere curiosity. All this might be fairly expected, but in a good chapter, ‘Colonial Art Worlds 1851–88’, Sayers introduces compellingly the photography of Richard Daintree and Antoine Fauchery renewing the presence of Aborigines in Australian visual culture. He concludes the chapter with three late colonial Aboriginal artists – William Barak, Tommy McRae, and Mickey of Ulladulla – going as far afield as Dresden and Switzerland to find images of their work.

Aboriginal art again comes to the fore in the turn of the century and the decades following – the years of Exodus and Leviticus, as Bernard Smith once dourly called them. This re-emergence comes partly through the home-grown arts and crafts movement where Indigenous crafts were revalued and partly through the prodigious scientific and cultural labours of those remarkable figures, Baldwin Spencer and A.C. Haddon, who created large public collections of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander art.

As the century progresses and modernism takes its toehold in Australia between the wars, Sayers follows the story of Aboriginal art no less relentlessly. The chapter on ‘Aboriginal Art and Its Reception 1934–49’, ranges from Albert Namatjira and the Hermannsburg painters, to Margaret Preston’s art and advocacy, to the rediscovery of the Arnhem Land bark painters. It’s a bit of a mouthful. Surprisingly, for one who espouses a new, revisionist art history, projecting his book ‘as an examination of the context of illustrated examples’, Namatjira is treated in rather muted social tones.

Namatjira’s story remains a shocking one. The most conservative forces in Australian culture, i.e. those who decided who would shake the Queen’s hand in 1954, lionised him because his art was attuned to their conservative views of what landscape painting should be: preferably watercolour for spontaneity, brightly coloured, and retaining the most conventional of compositional devices. The good Aborigine was the most assimilated one and in Namatjira’s case that meant maintaining a mode of painting acceptable to the aesthetics of the Melbourne Club. By omitting the tragic and disastrous facts surrounding Namatjira’s life and patronage, Sayers offers up a somewhat sanitised account of his art.

Sayers surprises positively as well as negatively. In his chapter on ‘Icon and Abstraction 1951–68’ – the heroic years of Australian modernism – he gives timely attention to the activities of Tony Tuckson as Curator and Collector of Aboriginal art, noting especially the 1960–61 exhibition of Australian Aboriginal Art which toured the State Galleries, frankly to various effects. Sydney got a head start on everybody in terms of Aboriginal art collecting. Melbourne, still housed with the Public Library in Swanston Street, simply passed the Aboriginal buck to the Natural History Museum and did nothing.

Unsurprisingly, Sayers’s final chapter deals with the revival of contemporary Aboriginal painting starting at Papunya in 1971, with the inspired intervention of Geoffrey Bardon and spreading to Utopia, the Kimberleys and elsewhere. The names of the principle figures – Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri, Emily Kame Kngwarreye, Rover Thomas, Turkey Tolson Tjupurrula, Gloria Petyarre and others, to indulge for a moment in batting-list criticism – are as familiar as Sidney Nolan, Arthur Boyd, Albert Tucker, Fred Williams, Bret Whiteley, Peter Booth and so on. Their pictorial styles are no less distinctive and recognisable. No other group of contemporary Australian artists over the last three decades has made their way so surely and so swiftly into the canon of Australian art. An exhibition or survey of contemporary Australian art without them would be inconceivable. How many white Australian artists can vaunt a similar claim over the last thirty years?

What effect does Andrew Sayers’s full-blooded and fair-minded account of Aboriginal art have on his account of the other side of the duality, on the art of white settlement? A sympathy certainly emerges for those white artists who encompassed in different ways Aboriginal art or an Aboriginal presence. John Glover, Margaret Preston, the later work of Russell Drysdale and Yosl Bergner all receive good marks from Sayers. He cannot help himself from noting that during that high season of Australian art in the 1880s and 1890s, ‘there was never a point at which white artists in Australia were less interested in Aboriginal people … except perhaps as the butt of cruel humour’.

It may be too much to ask that Sayers draw the moral from the new tale he tells. Although he promises a revisionist view of familiar episodes in Australian art, most notably with the Heidelberg School and its adherents, he does not quite follow through. He points, for instance, to the modification of ‘the masculine world view presented by the Heidelberg artists by an examination of the work of later nineteenth-century women painters’. But he mentions only two of these in passing – Jane Sutherland and Clara Southern – and reproduces only one work by them, compared to ten by the ‘good ole boys’.

What is harder to understand given the duality of Sayers’s Australian art history, is his ambivalence rising to equivocation about the role of landscape in the formation of Australian art. At one moment Sayers sternly rebukes the ‘exaggerated emphasis … on the role of landscape as the defining motif in Australian culture’ but goes on to say, without pausing for breath, ‘yet much of the best Australian art of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, from the hands of both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal artists has resulted from a searching engagement with the natural world’.

The book ends with a paean of praise to artists reinventing the landscape – John Wolsey, Rosalie Gascoigne, the various artists of the Aboriginal Memorial, and Bea Maddock. How can this be? Why should Sayers be so defensive about the dominant role of landscape in the formation of Australian art?

I wish that he had drawn more comfort, more confidence and more conclusion from the boldness of his dual history. If the land and the human response to it could shape an art as profound, beautiful and longstanding as that of the Aborigines, why should similar responses not serve the art of white settlement? The work of John Glover and Eugen von Guerard, Sidney Nolan and Arthur Boyd, Fred Williams and John Olsen, Jan Senbergs and Phillip Hunter represents an art of high distinction because it contains a profound, hard-won understanding of the distinctiveness of the place in which the artists stands. As much as the Aboriginal artist, these artists have given meaning and significance to place. It is one of the extraordinary experiences of Australian art and extends beyond those who can simply be characterised as ‘landscape artists’.

The Oxford History of Art is an admirable series. It ranges across a wide span of world art and brings the most recent findings of scholarship, frequently openly revisionist in tenor, to a wide lay public. The editors have got their money’s worth from Andrew Sayers. It is both brave and bracing. It operates from a moral centre. If he does not quite turn the fierce reflecting mirror of the thirty thousand-year-old tradition of Aboriginal art to the two hundred-year-old tradition of white settlement art, he has fashioned the implements to do it.