Art in the Australian continent has two very different stories, which have become intertwined in recent times, but can never be reduced to a single narrative. The first of these, of course, is the story of the art produced by the original inhabitants of the land, who came here tens of thousands of years before the Neolithic Revolution and the beginning of urban life in the northern hemisphere, and whose way of life seems to have remained remarkably stable, all but untouched by the history of the rest of humanity, until the beginning of British settlement at the end of the eighteenth cen- tury. First contact with the Europeans, in fact, was much earlier, at the beginning of the seventeenth, but this encounter and others that followed had virtually no effect on the lives of the Aborigines until the colony of Sydney was established in 1788.
Aboriginal art before settlement is a complex and specialized subject, the study of archaeologists and anthropologists, who work with necessarily limited resources, since the indigenous people left no architecture and had no writing; their cultural artefacts were almost all perishable and discarded after their use in ceremonies, and the earliest samples of such material that we possess today were collected by explorers and missionaries from the late eighteenth century onwards. The most significant perma- nent monuments of past Aboriginal culture are in remarkable sets of cave paintings and stone engravings, but their significance is not always clear today.