THE LAND BEFORE THE GALLERY.

The Queensland Art Gallery opened in 1895, initially in a single room of Brisbane’s Town Hall, as a civic instrument of a newly confident colonial society. It would take well over a century for the institution to reckon publicly, systematically, and with genuine depth, with what had existed on these lands for thousands of years before it. That reckoning is still underway. It may always be underway. And understanding First Nations art at QAGOMA means understanding why that is not a failure but a condition — the condition of custodianship itself, which is never concluded, never archived into a final state, never permitted to harden into monument.

The land on which both buildings of QAGOMA stand — the Queensland Art Gallery on the South Bank of the Maiwar (Brisbane) River, and the Gallery of Modern Art nearby — sits within country long held by the Turrbal and Yuggera peoples. QAGOMA’s own public materials acknowledge that “the rich and complex history of the land on which QAGOMA now stands, in Meanjin (Brisbane), stretches back thousands of years under the custodianship of the Turrbal and Yuggera peoples.” That phrase — custodianship — is not incidental. It is the conceptual spine of everything the institution does, or aspires to do, when it engages with the creative inheritance of First Nations Australia. Custodianship is not ownership. It is relationship. It is obligation. It is a form of care that extends both backward into history and forward into consequence.

This article is specifically about First Nations art within QAGOMA’s collection and programs. The broader architecture of the state collection, the institution’s dual-building identity, and the Asia Pacific Triennial — all of which provide essential context — are addressed elsewhere in this series. Here, the focus is on one specific question: what does it mean for a state art institution to hold, interpret, display, and actively deepen its relationship with the creative production of the world’s oldest continuing culture?

THE COLLECTION AND ITS SCOPE.

Artistic expressions from the world’s oldest continuing culture are drawn from all regions of the country in the Gallery’s holdings of Indigenous Australian artworks, especially the rich diversity of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures and experiences in Queensland. That breadth is significant. Queensland is among the most culturally diverse of all Australian states in terms of First Nations communities — it encompasses rainforest peoples of Far North Queensland, desert language groups of the western interior, coastal and island cultures of the Torres Strait, and river and plains communities across the vast interior. Any institution that holds Queensland’s state art collection and claims a meaningful relationship with First Nations creative practice must, at minimum, reflect that diversity. QAGOMA’s collection does not merely nod in this direction; it has developed it as a genuine priority.

The Indigenous Australian Art collection has a focus on contemporary art, including paintings, sculpture, printmaking, photography, video and installation. This emphasis on the contemporary is deliberate and carries its own argument. First Nations art is often received — by institutions, by markets, by international audiences — through a framework of the ancient and the ceremonial, as though the creative traditions of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples are essentially archaeological. QAGOMA’s collecting focus resists this framing. It insists that these are living traditions, practiced by living artists, engaging with the full range of contemporary concerns — identity, colonialism, climate, family, land rights, language, humour, grief, joy — through both inherited and experimental forms.

One of the gallery’s significant initiatives is the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Collection, one of the most important of its kind in the world. This collection spans historical and contemporary works, reflecting the diversity and vitality of Indigenous art practices across Australia. That claim — one of the most important of its kind in the world — is not self-promotion but institutional context. Australia’s major public galleries have all built First Nations holdings over recent decades, but QAGOMA’s collection has a particular character: shaped not just by acquisition policy but by decades of relationship-building across Queensland and beyond, informed by the institution’s long engagement with regional artists and communities, and by a collecting philosophy that values ongoing creative dialogue over the static preservation of heritage objects.

The collection includes artists from across the full spectrum of contemporary Indigenous practice. Vincent Namatjira, of the Western Aranda people, appears in the collection — his work placing Indigenous subjects at the centre of portraiture traditions inherited from European painting, with wit, warmth, and profound cultural authority. Works by Wawiriya Burton and Ngoia Pollard Napaltjarri — both from desert communities, both painting Country in ways that encode knowledge as well as image — sit within a collection that traces the movements of both tradition and innovation across generations and geographies.

WHAT CUSTODIANSHIP MEANS FOR AN INSTITUTION.

The word custodianship, when applied to a public gallery’s relationship with First Nations art, carries a different weight than it does in ordinary institutional language. A gallery that “holds” a collection is typically described as its custodian in a neutral, administrative sense. But when that collection is First Nations art — works that emerge from living cultural relationships, from knowledge systems that are transmitted communally, from traditions where the artwork may carry ceremonial significance, community intellectual property, or ancestral obligation — custodianship becomes something more demanding.

The Gallery is committed to profiling Indigenous Australian art and strengthening relationships with Queensland’s Indigenous communities. That sentence, from the gallery’s own institutional description, is worth dwelling on. It does not say the gallery is committed to collecting Indigenous art, or displaying it, or educating the public about it — though all of those things are true. It says profiling and strengthening relationships. The language is about process, not product. It acknowledges that the institution’s relationship with First Nations communities is active, not archival — something that must be maintained, deepened, and recalibrated over time.

This matters because the history of Australian institutions and First Nations cultural material is not a clean one. For much of the twentieth century, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander objects, artworks, ancestral remains, and ceremonial materials were held by institutions — museums, galleries, universities — without community consent, without repatriation frameworks, and often without any meaningful engagement with the peoples whose cultural heritage was being held. The repatriation movement, which gained legislative and institutional traction across Australia from the 1980s onwards, fundamentally changed the terms on which galleries could claim to be custodians of First Nations cultural material. QAGOMA has operated within — and contributed to — this evolving framework.

The modern institution’s approach to custodianship is therefore not simply about displaying works responsibly. It is about how works are acquired (in genuine partnership with artists and communities), how they are documented (with appropriate cultural protocols), how they are interpreted (in language that reflects community voice, not just curatorial projection), and how they are cared for over time (with reference to the cultural obligations that may attach to particular works). This is not a problem that can be solved and then set aside. It is, as noted at the outset, a condition — one that requires ongoing institutional commitment, cultural competency, and the humility to understand that the gallery is not the final authority on what these works mean.

PROGRAMMING AS RELATIONSHIP.

If the collection is one dimension of QAGOMA’s engagement with First Nations art, its programming is another — and in many ways the more visible one. First Nations Art Tours invite visitors to reflect on the long history of place by delving into the diverse stories, complex histories, and rich cultures of First Nations artists and their work. This kind of programming — placing First Nations knowledge-holders at the centre of how the collection is interpreted for public audiences — is not merely gesture. It represents a structural choice about who speaks, in what context, and with what authority.

On this tour, you’ll hear from Kalkadoon woman, Sandy Harvey, Public Programs Officer, QAGOMA as she highlights the local history of this area, Kurilpa Point, and selected artworks from The 11th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art and QAGOMA’s Indigenous Australian Art Collection. The specificity here is important: the tour is grounded in a named Country — Kurilpa Point — interpreted by a woman from the Kalkadoon people, whose Country is in the Mount Isa region of north-west Queensland. This reflects an understanding that First Nations cultural knowledge is not generic, not interchangeable, not deliverable by any willing presenter. It is specific, it is personal, it is carried by particular people in relation to particular Country — and the institution’s role is to create the conditions in which that knowledge can be shared, on terms set by those who carry it.

QAGOMA’s Regional Liaison Officer, Georgia Walsh (Badtjala people), reflects on the importance of developing programs for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander artists and communities across Queensland. Georgia delivers the Gallery’s annual Design Tracks and Art as Exchange programs, strengthening First Nations creative career pathways and regional access to arts education. The Design Tracks program, in particular, represents QAGOMA’s understanding that its responsibility to First Nations creative practice extends well beyond the walls of its South Bank galleries. Design Tracks, which forges creative career pathways for First Nations youth across Queensland, was the winner in the Engagement category for organisations with paid staff. This residential program has been held annually in Brisbane since 2016 and for a second year in Cairns thanks to new support from Aurecon.

This geographic reach is significant. Queensland is a large state. The communities with the greatest cultural wealth in terms of First Nations creative traditions are often those with the least institutional access — remote and very remote communities in Cape York, the Gulf Country, the Torres Strait, and the Channel Country. QAGOMA’s outreach programs — Design Tracks, Art as Exchange, the Kids on Tour program that reaches regional and remote venues across the state — reflect an institutional understanding that civic cultural responsibility cannot be discharged simply by maintaining a building in South Brisbane. The state collection belongs to all Queenslanders, and the programs that animate it must reach toward the full breadth of that constituency.

CONTEMPORARY ARTISTS AND THE WEIGHT OF TRADITION.

One of the more significant intellectual contributions that QAGOMA has made to the field of First Nations art — through its collecting, exhibitions, and publications — is an insistence on the complexity of the relationship between tradition and contemporaneity in Indigenous Australian practice. This is not a simple binary. It is not the case that “traditional” art is old, ceremonial, and authentic, while “contemporary” art is westernised and derivative. The reality is more interesting, and more challenging to received categories.

Many of the artists whose work QAGOMA collects and exhibits are doing something that resists easy description: they are working within inherited visual languages — the iconographies of sand drawing, the patterning systems of body decoration, the compositional logics of Country maps — while simultaneously deploying those languages to engage with the conditions of the present. Synthetic polymer paint on linen, the medium of many works in the collection, is not a “traditional” material in any historical sense — it was adopted by Western Desert painters in the early 1970s, at Papunya, as part of a deliberate movement to make sacred knowledge visible on a transportable medium while finding ways to encode it that protected its ceremonial dimensions. The history of that movement — and its complex relationship with the art market, with institutions, with the concept of “authenticity” — is part of what any serious engagement with these works must acknowledge.

Vincent Namatjira’s practice illustrates this complexity from a different angle. His portraiture engages directly with the European tradition — with the social conventions of the painted portrait, with the iconography of Australian national identity, with figures from both the colonial and contemporary canon — and transforms all of it through a Western Aranda sensibility that is simultaneously irreverent, tender, and politically acute. His work is in the QAGOMA collection not as a representative of “contemporary Aboriginal art” in some abstract sense, but as the work of a specific artist from a specific community with a specific family history — grandson of Albert Namatjira, one of the most significant and most institutionally mishandled artists of twentieth-century Australia.

Albert Namatjira’s story — his watercolour landscapes of Central Australia, his extraordinary success as a commercial artist, his granting of citizenship at a time when most Aboriginal Australians were denied it, and his subsequent imprisonment under laws that made that citizenship a trap — is one of the defining stories of Australian cultural history. It speaks directly to the question of what institutions owe First Nations artists, and what it means to hold their work. QAGOMA holds work in this lineage conscious of that history. Albert Namatjira (1902–59) was a Western Arrernte-speaking artist from the MacDonnell Ranges, west of Alice Springs in Central Australia. The institution’s engagement with his legacy — and that of his grandson Vincent — is one thread in a much larger weaving of obligation and relationship.

THE QUESTION OF VOICE AND INTERPRETATION.

No institution that holds First Nations art can avoid the question of interpretation: who explains these works, in what language, to what audience, and with what frame of reference? For most of the twentieth century, Australian galleries and museums answered this question in the way that felt natural to them — through the voice of non-Indigenous curators, art historians, and educators, drawing on anthropological and aesthetic frameworks developed entirely outside First Nations communities. The results were, at best, partial, and at worst, actively distorting — stripping works of their cultural specificity, aestheticising what had spiritual and legal dimensions, and positioning First Nations artists as producers of exotic objects for a non-Indigenous gaze.

QAGOMA has worked, over several decades, to build an interpretive practice that is more accountable to community voice. This involves employing First Nations staff — curators, educators, public programs officers, regional liaisons — who bring insider knowledge and community relationships to their work. QAGOMA’s commitment to Indigenous art is also evident in its educational programs and publications, which serve to deepen public engagement with Aboriginal art and artists. By providing a platform for these voices, QAGOMA not only showcases their creative output but also promotes wider recognition and understanding of the cultural and historical contexts of these works.

It also involves a willingness to let some things remain opaque — to acknowledge that not all cultural knowledge is for public display, that some dimensions of a work’s meaning belong to the community that produced it and are not available to institutional interpretation. This is a challenging posture for an institution whose mandate includes public education and interpretation. But it is a necessary one. The alternative — the complete transparency that treats every artwork as an open text available to any reading — is not interpretation but appropriation.

"We acknowledge the Traditional Owners of the land on which the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art stands and recognise the creative contribution First Australians make to the art and culture of this country."

That acknowledgement, which appears on QAGOMA’s own homepage, is one of the most publicly visible statements of institutional intent. Its significance lies not in the words alone — acknowledgement statements have become standard practice across Australian institutions — but in the degree to which the institution’s actual practice reflects and deepens what those words commit to. The ongoing work of building genuine relationships with First Nations communities, developing First Nations staff capacity, deepening the collection’s representation of the full range of Queensland’s Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander creative traditions, and supporting First Nations artists through acquisition, commissioning, and education programs is the substance that either gives such an acknowledgement meaning or exposes it as formality.

RISING VOICES AND THE INTERNATIONAL DIMENSION.

The significance of QAGOMA’s First Nations holdings is not only a Queensland matter. In 2025, in a landmark collaboration between QAGOMA and the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A), ‘Rising Voices’ will showcase highlights from the QAGOMA Collection for global audiences in London. That a collaboration between one of Queensland’s state institutions and one of the world’s leading museums would showcase the QAGOMA Collection to international audiences speaks to the global standing of what has been built over more than a century of collecting, and more particularly over the intensive engagement with First Nations and Asia-Pacific art that has characterised the institution’s collecting since the 1980s and 1990s.

The international dimension of First Nations art is sometimes overlooked in domestic conversations that focus on repatriation, community consent, and institutional accountability. But Indigenous Australian art has had a sustained international presence since the early 1980s, when Papunya Tula paintings began appearing in major galleries in Europe and North America. Since then, the work of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander artists has entered international collections, influenced contemporary art movements globally, and earned recognition — including the most prestigious prizes in contemporary Australian art — that confirms the vitality and significance of these practices to anyone willing to look.

QAGOMA’s role in this international conversation has been shaped by its geographic and institutional position: as a Queensland state institution, it has particular depth in Queensland First Nations artistic traditions; as the host of the Asia Pacific Triennial, it has built relationships with artists and curators across a region that includes communities whose relationships to land, ceremony, and visual culture share deep resonances with those of Indigenous Australians. The intersection of these two curatorial focuses — First Nations Australian and Asia-Pacific — gives QAGOMA a distinctive perspective that no other institution in Australia fully replicates.

PERMANENCE, MEMORY, AND CIVIC INFRASTRUCTURE.

There is a particular tension in the idea of an institution “permanently” holding First Nations art. Permanence has not always served these communities well. Objects removed from Country, held in distant collections, unable to be accessed for ceremony or learning, are permanently held but not well held. The kind of permanence that First Nations communities are increasingly asserting — over their own cultural heritage, their own narratives, their own creative futures — is a different kind: one grounded not in the authority of the institution but in the ongoing life of the community.

This tension is productive. It keeps the institution honest. It prevents the collection from becoming a closed archive. And it points toward a model of civic memory that is not monumental — not a fixed record, cast in bronze — but relational, living, and responsive to the communities it serves. QAGOMA, at its best, embodies this model: a state institution that holds public cultural heritage in trust not because it owns it in any ultimate sense, but because the community — all communities — have asked it to care for these things, on their behalf, with accountability.

QAGOMA acknowledges the Traditional Owners of the land on which the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art stands and recognises the creative contribution First Australians make to the art and culture of this country. That recognition, when it is more than formality, is the beginning of a civic relationship — one that extends from the ground beneath the galleries to the walls within them to the programs that reach into regional Queensland communities and back again.

The onchain civic namespace qagoma.queensland represents the permanent digital address through which Queensland’s premier visual arts institution is anchored to the state’s emerging civic identity infrastructure. Just as QAGOMA’s buildings are anchored in specific Country — Turrbal and Yuggera land, on the south bank of the Maiwar — the namespace grounds the institution in a persistent, verifiable, state-level civic layer. That correspondence between physical and onchain grounding is not trivial when the subject is First Nations art, because the argument that First Nations art makes — again and again, in every medium and from every community — is precisely the argument for groundedness: the claim that identity, knowledge, and creativity are inseparable from place, that the land is not background but relation, that to be of a Country is to carry its memory and its obligation.

The collection QAGOMA holds — of paintings that encode desert Country in geometric abstraction, of photographs that trace the faces of communities through survival and transformation, of video works that speak in language, that grieve dispossession, that imagine futures that do not require the erasure of the past — is not a record of what First Nations peoples were. It is a record of what they are. The gallery’s responsibility is to hold it accordingly: with the understanding that custodianship is not a noun but a verb, and that the obligation it names is never finished.

That is the civic argument that QAGOMA’s engagement with First Nations art makes available to Queensland, and to anyone willing to receive it. The institution’s address — across the Maiwar, in Meanjin, within qagoma.queensland — marks the place where that argument is made permanent: not as archive, but as living commitment.