How a prominent Aboriginal activist’s vision was shaped by a visit to Hong Kong

Long before she was one of Australia’s most prominent Aboriginal activists and public intellectuals, Marcia Langton was a teenage tourist who fell in love with Hong Kong – so much so that she stayed for six months. Langton arrived in the city in 1971 while she was on a years-long journey around Asia to escape the racism that pervaded her life in her home state of Queensland. The trip transformed her. Unencumbered by the daily discrimination she faced at home, she had the freedom to think about race, culture and community in ways that still inform her work today. In Hong Kong, Langton was delighted to discover that people were curious about her heritage, rather than dismissive. “I was the subject of great fascination,” she says. “Wherever I went, people would gather around and stare at me, and I would try to talk to them. I’d make a few friends, be offered food [and] invited to sit down.” At first, Langton lived in Kowloon, but she struggled with the extreme urban density and regular police raids in the area. “The police would come to shut down what they regarded as illegal stalls,” she recalls. “Everyone would run for their lives down laneways. I didn’t want to live among that.” She soon built a calmer life for herself on Lantau Island, where she made her living selling batik paintings. “People in my village were tremendously friendly and interested in the outside world. They’d ask me about Australia,” she says. “The villagers would take me on small ferries to markets on other islands, where sometimes there would be traditional Cantonese opera performances. They were wonderful people – they taught me how to make dumplings.” Cross-cultural education has since become a core part of Langton’s work: she is currently associate provost at the University of Melbourne and is responsible for developing indigenous teaching and research across the institution. Her most recent project is “65,000 Years: A Short History of Australian Art”, an exhibition she has co-curated with Judith Ryan and Shanysa McConville at the Potter Museum of Art, the university’s flagship art gallery. The show is the inaugural exhibition in the museum’s refurbished building, marking its reopening after seven years of renovations. The exhibition features more than 400 works and aims to “give a full picture of the immense diversity of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander art traditions”, says Langton. As its title suggests, the show consistently points to both the millennia-long histories of these traditions and white Australia’s relatively recent acceptance of them. For much of Australia’s colonial history, Aboriginal art was only shown in anthropological museums, not in galleries. This only changed in the 1970s, when a handful of people began championing contemporary Aboriginal artists and studying the long art history of the continent. The exhibition does not shy away from tackling dark chapters of discrimination against Aboriginal people, or the university’s role in that history. One gallery features a series of artistic responses to eugenicist experiments on Aboriginal people, as well as a video in which Langton reveals that the university was still buying the remains of Aboriginal people into the 1950s. In 2003, the remains of all Aboriginal people in the university’s collections were sent to the Melbourne Museum for repatriation. “When I fell upon documents [in the university’s archive] such as receipts for petrol from George Murray Black, who was digging up Aboriginal graves in northern Victoria and ended up with a collection of 15,000 ancestral remains, I had to address the topic,” says Langton. But there are moments of joy, too. Photographs by Naomi Hobson show Aboriginal teenagers today in moments of contemplation, discovery and play. One room is filled with mesmerising paintings from artists based in Australia’s central deserts, including a sprawling and intricate new work commissioned from Maringka Burton and Betty Muffler. Muffler is a traditional healer and artist who recently exhibited seven large-scale paintings at Art Basel Hong Kong. Muffler’s presence at that fair was indicative of the increasing international interest in Aboriginal art. An exhibition dedicated to Emily Kam Kngwarray – whose works are included in “65,000 Years” – opens at Tate Modern in London in July, and in October, a major exhibition of indigenous Australian art begins touring the US. Although Australia is now celebrating Aboriginal art at home and abroad, Langton thinks the country still has a long way to go when it comes to indigenous rights. “In Taiwan, there is constitutional recognition of indigenous peoples,” she says. “They are far in advance of Australia in recognising those rights.” Langton has long sought to build relationships with indigenous leaders – and advocates for First Nations culture – around Asia. Back in 2011, she worked with Zhao Xiaoping to co-curate the exhibition “Trepang: China and the Story of Macassan-Aboriginal Trade” at the Capital Museum in Beijing. In 2023, she played a key role in arranging for Akawyan Pakawyan, an indigenous elder from Taiwan, to give the University of Melbourne’s annual Narrm Oration about indigenous affairs. Now, Langton is co-editing a second volume in the university’s Indigenous Knowledge series of books. It will feature First Nations writers from around the world and is due to come out in 2026. “One of the great concerns we have here at the University of Melbourne is to move beyond what’s become a shallow paradigm, really, of indigenous studies being the province of Australia, the United States, Canada and New Zealand,” she says. “There are hundreds of millions of other indigenous people around the globe, including in the region Australia sits in, the Asia-Pacific.” “65,000 Years: A Short History of Australian Art”, Potter Museum of Art, Melbourne, Australia. Until November 22, 2025

How a prominent Aboriginal activist’s vision was shaped by a visit to Hong Kong

Marcia Langton talks about being ‘of great fascination’ and her new exhibition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander art in Australia