"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 century. The Aborigines are constantly present to varying degrees in the art and the consciousness of European Australians throughout the history of modern Australia, and so appear in many of the chapters of this book."-- Provided by publisher