I would like to thank the following people for their generous feedback on this work: Dr Kylie Message, Professor Howard Morphy, Pip Deveson, Dr Rossella Ragazzi, Alison French, Anna Edmundson and the anonymous peer reviewers. This paper is a rewritten version of Chapter 1 of Writing on ‘Aboriginal art’ 1802–1929: a critical and cultural analysis of the construction of a category, Unpublished PhD thesis (2005). It also includes two paragraphs from a previously published review of The New McCulloch’s Encyclopaedia of Australian Art for the Australian Book Review (no. 296, November 2007, pp. 20–1).