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Art historian Terry Smith explores how Emily Kame Kngwarreye’s work operates between the evolution of Indigenous and non-Indigenous art in Australia. He draws comparisons with the achievements of contemporary European artists.

Art historian Ian McLean offers a view based on the Australian post-colonial experience, arguing that Emily Kame Kngwarreye’s form of modernism is different from international modernism in both source and history.

The art of Emily Kame Kngwarreye and the use of cultural rituals to demonstrate Aboriginal modernity is explored by curator Sally Butler. She also compares Emily’s art practices to 1970s and 1980s modernist design techniques.

Museum director and Emily Kame Kngwarreye exhibition curator Akira Tatehata explores the ironies of ‘the impossible modernist’ from another cultural space, as a Japanese man steeped in his own culture and an international art curator and academic.

Curator Martha Sear discusses objects in the National Historical Collection that once belonged to Sir George Reid, a key figure in Australia’s Federation-era political history. Reid’s story features in the Australian Journeys gallery.

Oral historian Alistair Thomson explores the experience of migration to Australia in the 1950s and 1960s, through the eyes and life stories of four British women, during his time as a Director’s Fellow at the National Museum of Australia.

Historian John Maynard leads an informal discussion with some of the original political activists from the Indigenous protests of the 1920s and 1930s, as part of the National Museum’s celebration of the 70th anniversary of the 1938 Day of Mourning.

Curator Alison Mercieca tells the story of the Macassan trepang, or sea slug, industry. She considers the places connected by the Macassan voyagers from Indonesia and looks at the archaeological traces left on the Arnhem Land coast.

Curator Rebecca Nason discusses two Staffordshire figurines of nineteenth-century Irish nationalist, parliamentarian and convict William Smith O’Brien. His story is told in the Australian Journeys gallery.

Historian Darrell Lewis discusses his research on ‘the outback archive,’ unorthodox historical records from pre-European times to the present, concentrating on marked water tanks and trees along the Murranji Track in the Northern Territory.