Audio on demand

Explore the history of the Papunya painting movement and discover the current generation of Papunya artists at a forum held in conjunction with the National Museum’s Papunya Painting exhibition.

The sometimes life-changing, occasionally hilarious and always vital role of the mutukayi – or motor car – in the history of the people of Australia’s Western Desert is explored by an expert panel with firsthand Papunya experience.

Poet and writer Sam Wagan Watson, historian and Indigenous biographer Peter Read and National Museum curator Margo Neale discuss Indigenous issues and the intersection between historical research and imagination.

Fashion designer Jenny Kee, whose story features in the National Museum, explains how her chance survival in the Granville Train Crash in Sydney in 1977 became a catalyst for her art, in a conversation with curator and historian Roslyn Russell.

The ways the ‘active’ Indigenous voice has changed the representation of Indigenous cultures from urban areas in museums and keeping places is explored by Indigenous artist Gordon Syron, poet Sam Wagan Watson and writer Stephen Hagan.

An examination of the expression of Indigenous culture and identity by a dynamic group of contemporary artists and authors. Explores the impact the ‘art’ movement has had on Indigenous people and how cultural material can be ‘read’ as documentary text.

The fascination of Australian writers with explorer Ludwig Leichhardt, including Patrick White’s Voss, earlier elegiac poems and Lemurian novels, is examined by English lecturer Susan Martin.

The convergence of history and fiction and the power of archives and objects to inform their work on Australian women and the League of Nations is explored by political historian Lenore Coltheart and author Frank Moorhouse.

Historian Angela Philp explores Aboriginal art and culture, and the tensions between aesthetics, history and politics that have been critical in the institutional histories of the National Museum of Australia and the National Gallery of Australia.