The discourses of Aboriginality and their historical and ideological effects became a major narrative in the exhibitions of contemporary art in Australia during the 1980s. This narrative did not follow a smooth linear development from mid twentieth-century Aboriginalism, but erupted after a sustained period (more than two decades) of official indifference to Aboriginal discourses, including Aboriginal art. Today it is easy to forget how little Aboriginal art was appreciated even fifteen years ago.

If the inclusion of Aboriginal art in institutional exhibitions of contemporary art in the early 1980s signalled a radical shift in Australian culture, it initially was tentative, and reflected the prejudice of two decades of neglect and indifference. Indeed, even the impact of mid twentieth-century Aboriginalism had been peripheral on art institutions, despite the genuine interest in Aboriginal art by a broad range of artists and other people. In 1976 Daniel Thomas complained that Tony Tuckson's ‘beautiful exhibition “Australian Aboriginal Art”, which toured all State art galleries of Australia in 1960–1, is still the only serious show of its kind’. Thus, the success of the Aboriginal art movement in the 1980s was experienced by art institutions as a disruption to their traditions. When Aboriginal art was exhibited in survey exhibitions of contemporary art, it sat awkwardly in the venue and in the catalogue essays. Vivien Johnson's comment on the 1986 Sydney Biennale was generally true of all such occasions: ‘it was the radical incommensurability of artistic strategies with all the other exhibitors which most characterised the contemporary practice of Aboriginal art’.