Online Course: First Peoples Art & Design From Australia

Week 1: Introduction to First Nations Art & Culture

Week 2: Reframing History

Week 3: Identity – Ruptured and Reimagined

Week 4: The Future is Indigenous

Through engagement with this course and works in the NGV Collection, participants will be able to:

• Gain an introductory knowledge of Australian First Nations art and culture.
• Understand some of the key motivators in First Peoples art, such as a profound connection to Country.
• Understand the breadth and diversity of First Nations art across Australia.
• Understand the development of First Peoples art before the British arrived in Australia, as well as post European settlement.
• Gain knowledge of key figures in contemporary First Peoples art and design.
• Develop skills in analysing, interpreting and discussing First Nations practice, both in Australia, and First Nations practice around the world.

The course is accessible from 10am on Friday 7 November.

You can complete the course in your own time.

Access will expire at midnight on Sunday 4 January.

This is a self-guided course and can be completed at your own pace. Each module contains readings, videos, activities and other materials that will take approximately 1 hour to complete. We recommend completing one module per week over four weeks.

A prescribed reading and resources list will be provided to course participants as part of the course materials, providing links to a curated selection of books, articles and videos to extend your learning.

$70 Members / $80 Adult / $75 Concession, Student & Educator

Includes 8-week access to learning materials from the course start date (Friday 7 November).

Enrol in more than one course to receive a 10% discount.

NGV Members, educators and students receive discounted enrolment to all NGV Art School courses.

Premium Members enjoy complimentary standard enrolment to NGV Online Courses. To enrol, email premiummembers@ngv.vic.gov.au

Aaron Roberts and Kim Bridgland are architects and co-founders of Melbourne based practice Edition Office.

Aunty Gail Smith is a Wurundjeri Woi wurrung Elder and a respected member of her community.

Claudia Moodoonuthi spent the first seven years of her life on Bentinck and Mornington Islands in the Gulf of Carpentaria being raised by her late great-grandmother May Moodoonuthi. During these formative years Claudia Moodoonuthi spent her time fishing, hunting, and gathering in the bush with her family, developing a deep connection to the Country and traditional ways of the Lardil and Kayardild people.

Donga Maymuru, artist

Dr. Ryan Presley was born in 1987 in Alice Springs, and currently lives and works in Brisbane. His father’s family is Marri Ngarr and originate from the Moyle River region in the Northern Territory. His mother’s family were Scandinavian immigrants to Australia. Presley’s practice wrestles with themes of power and dominion—in particular, how religion and economic control served colonialism and empire building over time, and the representation of its customs and edifices in our everyday lives.

Glenda Nicholls is a Waddi Waddi, Ngarrindjeri and Yorta Yorta artist. Her cultural name is Jule Yarra Minj (‘little river girl’) and her maternal Ngarrindjeri totem is the Writcharuki (willy-willy wagtail). Nicholls is a master weaver, constructing elaborate sculptural works that connect the present with her ancestral past. She applies cultural weaving techniques acquired from her ancestors alongside intimate knowledge of the waterways, plants and grasses on her Country. Nicholls is determined to share her cultural knowledge with younger First Nations generations, seeing this exchange as crucial to ensuring cultural practices survive into the future.

Ian McNiven an anthropological archaeologist, is digging in support of Australian Aboriginal, Torres Strait Islander, and Papua New Guinean communities – with international ramifications. His work is changing understandings of First Nations societies and what it was like before and after European arrival/invasion. Fundamental to Ian’s approach to research is Indigenous community engagement and involvement and ensuring that all of his research projects are collaborative projects where Indigenous communities are central to research development, implementation, analysis, interpretation, and outreach and outputs.

James Tylor’s multi-cultural heritage—Aboriginal, Māori and European—is a focus of his artwork, which recognizes the profound impact of colonization and migration. His approach is critical and innovative, often alluding to the erasure of Indigenous cultures. In some cases he uses early photographic techniques, such as daguerreotype, and in other cases, he manipulates new photographs by scratching and tearing them. These processes expand and challenge common perceptions of the role of photography while speaking to the artist’s complex relationship with his spiritual homelands.

Jenna Lee is a First Nations Gulumerridjin (Larrakia), Wardaman and KarraJarri Saltwater woman with mixed Japanese, Chinese, Filipino and Anglo-Australian (Irish and Scottish) ancestry. Driven to create work that transforms the scars of colonialism, Lee builds on a foundation of her father’s staunch teachings of culture and her mother’s gentle teachings of paper craft.

Jonathan Jones is a member of the Wiradjuri and Kamilaroi peoples of south-east Australia. He works across a range of mediums, from printmaking and drawing to sculpture and film, utilising everyday materials in minimal repeated forms to explore and interrogate cultural and historical relationships and ideas from Indigenous perspectives and traditions. He is well known for his evocative site-specific installations and interventions into space that use fluorescent light tubes. Jones’ poetic light works also express the artist’s interest in the idea of positive contact and connection, illuminating a bridge between cultures and the spaces of exchange.

Keemon Williams (b.1999) is a queer Meanjin (Brisbane) based artist of Koa, Kuku Yalanji and Meriam Mir descent. He utilizes an array of mediums old and new to expand his relationships with location, personal histories and cultural plasticity. Through practice he forges belonging within all parts of the self.

Lee Darroch is a Yorta Yorta, Mutti Mutti and Boon Wurrung artist, designer, and community cultural worker. Her home base is Gragin, otherwise known as Raymond Island. Lee’s artwork is inspired by the need to continue cultural, artistic and spiritual practices. She practices a number of art forms including possum skin cloak making, pastel drawing, painting, basket weaving, textiles and large-scale sculptures.

Lorraine Connelly-Northley was Born 1962, Swan Hill, Victoria. She lives and works on Waradgerie (Wiradjuri) Country, New South Wales. Waradgerie people. Lorraine Connelly-Northey’s practice is inherently influenced by her western and Indigenous heritage. Crucially, her ongoing use of found materials, such as wire and corrugated iron, creates a transformative tension within her work. Connelly-Northey utilises materials often associated with European settlement and industrialisation of the land, and repurposes them into sculptural works that draw on Indigenous weaving techniques and reference traditional objects, such as coolamons. Through her work Connelly-Northey explores the dynamic nature of her Country and heritage as traditional, progressive, resilient and innovative.

Maree Clarke is a Yorta Yorta / Wamba Wamba / Mutti Mutti / Boonwurrung woman. Maree Clarke is a pivotal figure in the reclamation and promotion of south-east Australian Aboriginal art practices. Her continuing desire to affirm and reconnect with her cultural heritage has seen her revivify traditional possum skin cloaks and contemporary necklace designs using river reeds, kangaroo teeth and echidna quills. Her multimedia installations including photography, sculpture and video further explore the customary ceremonies and rituals of her Ancestors.

Ms D. Yunupiŋu’s deeply personal paintings portray the story of her conception as the spiritual mermaid, a depiction transposed by the artist into a highly distinctive and contemporary aesthetic. Her work stems from a memory she has from a time before she was born, described by the artist as an encounter experienced by her father.

Naminapu Maymuru-White is one of the the first Yolŋu women to be taught to paint miny’tji (sacred creation clan designs), and her works are of historic and continuing significance as a Maŋgalili clan member and contemporary artist in her own right. Her fluid and unrestrained compositions distinguish her as a highly unique and innovative Yolŋu artist.

Robert Andrew is a descendant of the Yawuru people, whose Country is the lands and waters of the Broome area in the Kimberley Region, Western Australia. Andrew’s work investigates the personal and family histories that have been denied or forgotten. His work speaks to the past yet articulates a contemporary relationship to his Country—using technology to make visible the interconnecting spiritual, cultural, physical, and historical relationships with the land, waters, sky, and all living things. Andrew’s work often combines programmable machinery with earth pigments, ochres, rocks and soil to mine historical, cultural and personal events that have been buried and distanced by the dominant paradigms of western culture.

Siena Mayutu Wurmarri Stubbs is a Yolŋu woman of the Gumatj clan of the Yirritja moiety. Her homeland is Buwaka. When Siena was 12, she took up photography on her iPad but was gifted a camera from her aunty. In a short period of time, Siena was an avid photographer and had published her own book of birds. Our Birds: Ŋilimurruŋgu Wäyin Malanynha is the result of that inspiration.

Sophie Gerhard is Curator of Australian Art and First Nations Art at the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV). Her curatorial practice and research centres around unpacking colonial Australia’s contemporary identity through art and exhibitions. Sophie has written extensively around this topic and has presented numerous public programs nationally and internationally. Her recent exhibitions have included Watercolour Country: 100 works from Hermannsburg, WHO ARE YOU: Australian Portraiture and She-oak and Sunlight: Australian Impressionism.

The late Ms. D. (Djerrkngu) Yunupiŋu (also known as Eunice) was a highly respected Yolŋu elder and celebrated Yolŋu artist based in Yirrkala in the Northern Territory whose extraordinary paintings were created using a unique combination of natural earth pigments with reclaimed toner ink from discarded printer cartridges.

Tony Armstrong grew up in rural NSW and is a proud Gamilaroi man. He played AFL for Adelaide, Collingwood and Sydney, where he played alongside one of the Aboriginal men who inspired him as a child, Adam Goodes. In 2019 Tony became the first Indigenous person to call live action Aussie Rules Football on commercial radio. He also appeared on the Marngrook Footy Show and became a regular panellist on the online panel show The Colour of Your Jumper. In 2020, Tony became the co-host of the Indigenous comedy football chat show Yokayi Footy for NITV, SBS On Demand and via the AFL channels. He then co-hosted ABC Melbourne breakfast radio with Sammy J. In the same year, he joined the ABC, presenting sport on the ABC News channel, commentating for Grandstand AFL on ABC Sport and hosting the 2020 summer series of Offsiders. In 2021, the ABC announced Tony as the full-time sports presenter on News Breakfast and it was for his work on this show, that he won the Graham Kennedy Award for Most Popular New Talent at the 2022 Logie Awards. He followed this up with the Bert Newton Award for Most Popular Presenter for his work in A Dog’s World with Tony Armstrong and ABC News Breakfast at the 2023 Logie Awards. In 2024, Tony was nominated fror a Gold Logie for Most Popular Personality on Australian Television. His other television credits include hosting Monday’s Experts, Tony Armstrong’s Extraordinary Things and Great Australian Stuff for the ABC as well as regular appearances on The Weekly with Charlie Pickering, The Yearly, The Project and Fox Footy. Tony has also been a guest on several Play School specials and is the voice of Mr Flip on ABC Kids Reef School.

Yhonnie Scarce is a Kokatha and Nukunu artist who employs the medium of glass to dazzling effect, weighing in on the colonial trauma and displacement of Aboriginal peoples. Born in Woomera SA, she holds a Master of Fine Arts from Monash University and her works are held in major public collections across the country. In Scarce’s practice, glass becomes a political and aesthetic lens through which to filter the opaque narratives and transparent truths of Australian history.

First Peoples Art & Design From Australia offers an inspiring and creative professional learning opportunity for teachers of all levels and subjects. First Peoples Art & Design From Australia meets the following AITSL standards:

A certificate of professional learning is available on request.