Lecture 4: The 1960s

If you missed Lecture 4: The 1960s by Professor Ian McLean, in the Drill Hall Gallery’s 2026/27 Lecture Series: Artworks of significance: ideas, history, aesthetics, and cultural context, you can watch the recorded version below or on our Youtube channel. 

Lecture 4: The 1960s
Professor Ian McLean

The early 1960s was a highwater mark for Australian art with Nolan, Drysdale and Boyd gaining recognition in London and in Australia creating a new up-to-date postwar post-Anglo national image. Unseen by the artworld, other developments, not least in Aboriginal Australia but also in a new generation of artists, would set in train a far more radical shakeup of the national idea.

Ian McLean is an Honorary Professorial Fellow and the inaugural Hugh Ramsay Chair of Australian Art History at the University of Melbourne. He has published extensively on relations between Indigenous and European Australian art in articles, book chapters and monographs: Double Nation A History of Australian Art (2023) and Rattling Spears A History of Indigenous Australian Art (2016) and How Aborigines Invented the Idea of Contemporary Art (2011).

Find out more about our 2026/27 Lecture Series: Artworks of significance: ideas, history, aesthetics, and cultural context here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g__cHjtWfyI

Image: Ron Robertson-Swan, Golden breach 1965; Trevor Vickers, Untitled 1968 (remade). Installation in The Field Revisited exhibition 2018, National Gallery of Victoria