The National Picture: The art of Tasmania’s Black War seeks to do just that when it opens on Saturday at the Queen Victoria Art Gallery.

On the final leg of its tour from the National Gallery of Australia, the exhibition was developed in partnership with the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery and draws on significant works from the QVMAG collection.

It also draws on key loans from national collections – including many which have never been exhibited together, and others that have never traveled to Tasmania.

The exhibition will “unflinchingly interrogate” colonial work from informational boards, to large-scale history paintings by Benjamin Duterrau and landscapes by John Glover, made during a brutal moment in the state’s history.

Rare works by Tasmanian Aboriginal people of the time, along with work from contemporary artists like Gordon Bennett and Julie Gough, will show responses to the period then, and how it is still being interpreted today.

“For it all to be brought together in one place is very special,” said Professor Tim Bonyhady, one of the exhibition’s curators.

For City of Launceston director of creative arts and cultural service Tracy Puklowski, museums and galleries needed to be telling difficult stories.

“This part of the state is ready to confront that past,” she said.

Dr Greg Lehman, who also curated the show, has a particular connection.

“It’s not just a history, it’s a family history,” he said.

Co-chair of QVMAG’s Aboriginal Reference Group Dr Aunty Patsy Cameron said the exhibition would allow Tasmanian Aboriginal people to “look into the eyes of their ancestors”. 

“The process of continuing to learn from the past, stems from the existing records of the past, including consideration of who recorded them and why they were recorded,” co-chair David Mangenner Gough said.

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