For the opening weekend of Colony: Australia 1770-1861 and Colony: Frontier Wars the NGV is hosting a series of talks and performances on Saturday 17th March.

See the website: https://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/program-series/colony-opening-weekend/

COLONY: AUSTRALIA 1770–1861

Drawing from public and private collections across the country, Colony: Australia 1770–1861 brings together the most important examples of art and design produced during this period and surveys the key settlements and development of life and culture in the colonies. Importantly, the exhibition acknowledges the impact of European settlement on Indigenous communities.

COLONY: FRONTIER WARS

Colony: Frontier Wars explores the period of colonisation in Australia from 1788 onwards and its often devastating effects on First Peoples. The period, that was to many the discovery of a ‘wondrous’ southern continent, was to others an invasion of homelands occupied for many millennia. This powerful exhibition reveals some of what Aboriginal people have experienced as a continuing consequence of colonisation, through works of art.

10:30am Book Launch: Colony

11:30am Colonial Encounter: Resistance and Resurgence
Speaker Prof Lynette Russell, Professor of Indigenous Studies, Monash Indigenous Studies Centre, Monash University

1pm A Useful Branch of the Profession: Portrait Artists in Colonial Australia
Speaker Joanna Gilmour, Curator, National Portrait Gallery

2pm Unseen Art of the First Fleet
Speaker Louise Anemaat, Executive Director, Library and Information Services, State Library of New South Wales

3pm Terra Australis to Australia: Mapping and Imaging This Land
Speaker Nat Williams, Curator, National Library of Australia

3.30pm Visitors Expect a Prison but Behold a Palace
Speaker Richard Neville, Mitchell Librarian and Director, Education and Scholarship, State Library of New South Wales

4pm Artist Talk
Speaker Jonathon Jones, Wiradjuri/Kamilaroi artist and curator

ANAM at NGV: Peter Sculthorpe’s Quamby
4.30pm