Hanging Australia (ATOM Study Guide)

We all have a sense of who we are – of what makes an Australian, of what makes Australia. A musician explores it with sound, a writer with words, artists with paint and pigment, clay and canvas, camera and film. Art invites us to see things not as they are but as they appear, full of meaning and emotion to artists. Australian landscape art invites us to see our land through the eyes of artists. Indigenous, colonial and contemporary artists have all created a rich reaction to the drama, beauty and harshness of Australia's landscape; their art is ours to share. Hanging Australia is an invitation to enter their world and explore their Australia.

Those who have drawn inspiration from the shapes, colours, light and shade of our landscape are the subject of this program – their work is our story. The selection of more than 200 works for exhibition at London's Royal Academy in an exhibition simply called Australia was, as we learn, not without controversy. But it is this selection that gives us the representation of Australia that forms the structure of the program.

As we follow the chronology of packing, shipping, unpacking, hanging and responding to the reaction of the largest exhibition of Australian art ever sent overseas, we also investigate the particular works, and their artists, to see how key subjects that sum up Australia have been understood throughout history.

As the exhibition takes to the road, travelling from the National Gallery in Canberra to the airport in Sydney for dispatch to Britain, so we consider 'the road' as a motif in Australian art. And not just the road through the bush or through a suburb a century ago, but a video installation that will greet visitors to the London exhibition and express Australian art in the twenty-first century.

When we examine paintings from the exhibition that express artists' understanding of the city – to which, in the end, all roads lead – we meet some of the best-known names in Australian art of the modern era: Tom Roberts, Frederick McCubbin and pioneer photographer Harold Cazneaux.

The collection reaches London. Out journey through the best of Australian landscape art reaches the barren interior of the driest inhabited continent – and we meet the work of Russell Drysdale and his possibly even better-known contemporary Sidney Nolan, whose iconic Ned Kelly adorns the posters of the exhibition plastered on the walls of the London Underground stations.

John Olsen's hugely dramatic painting of the sun is hung over the heads of visitors to the Royal Academy. The centrality of the sun in our experience leads us to look at visions of the beach and Australia's beach culture before, by contrast, we turn inland for visions and versions of pastoral Australia.

We have heard from artists and from curators as the artworks have made their journey from the gallery walls of Australia to the gallery walls of London. And as the exhibition opens we hear from those confronted by Australia – the casual visitor, the critic, the member of London's notoriously critical art establishment.

But what they make of Australia is less important than what the art makes of our country and invites us to make of ourselves.

Curriculum Links

The curriculum areas that Hanging Australia can be linked to include The Arts and English, particularly in Years 10–12.