What Dark Emu did for thinking around indigenous land management; 65,000 Years does for Australian art Edited by Marcia Langton AO and Judith Ryan AM, 65,000 Years: A Short History of Australian Art foregrounds Indigenous perspectives on the art history of Australia. 65,000 Years proclaims that Indigenous Australian art - the world's longest continuing art tradition - began many millennia before the British invasion of Australia. It is the body of traditions that shaped the Australian continent as we know it today in social, economic and environmental terms, but it has only been recognised in the literature of Australian art from the 1980s. Featuring new writing by over twenty leading thinkers across generations and disciplines, this landmark publication is richly illustrated with over 300 cultural objects and works of art across time periods, forms and techniques, regions and language groups. 65,000 Years celebrates the complex philosophy and powerful aesthetic embodied in these works and addresses this art history in the context of Australia's colonial history of invasion, dispossession, ethnocide and racist scientific experimentation.