John Olsen is one of Australia's most recognised artists and at 88 he is also one of the most respected elders of the tribe.

The last major retrospective exhibition of his work was 25 years ago, curated by Deborah Hart from the National Gallery in Canberra; this one has been assembled by David Hurlston from the National Gallery of Victoria and Deborah Edwards from the Art Gallery of New South Wales and sadly Canberra will once more miss out. The show has just opened in Melbourne and in March will travel to Sydney.

In a word, it is brilliant. It is big enough to appear comprehensive, with a selection of work from the past seven decades, including paintings, ceramics, tapestries, drawings, prints and notebooks, yet the compact salon hang, with works arranged thematically and sequentially, makes the exhibition quite manageable. After entering the exhibition and encountering Olsen's confronting, Archibald-winning Janus-faced self-portrait of 2005, we move from his early work, when he was working in the shadow of his teacher John Passmore, through to the first major manifesto painting, Spanish Encounter (1960).

From here Olsen plunged into his "you beaut country" series, which cemented his Australian reputation and gave the name to this exhibition. Olsen explains the vernacular connotations of the series: "The you beaut country – well, that's a world of imagination. It's also a comment on an Australian aesthetic; for example, a hamburger can be beaut, a Leonardo da Vinci, the Mona Lisa can be especially beaut. It's to do with a mental explanation of a feeling. It also says something about the openness of being Australian. I think that adaptability is one of the remarkable things about Australia and Australians – their openness to new ideas and new ways of living – and I think that the term 'you beaut' shares that kind of enthusiasm, that openness. I like that Australia has no fixed identity, it is so capable of change. With the series I also wanted to really come to terms with the experience of a total landscape."

Olsen in his art achieves that peculiar blend of vernacular humour, hedonistic and sensuous pleasure, and the ability to create an image of the Australian landscape that is quintessentially of this place. Fred Williams, another major Australian artist of the same generation who made us see the Australian landscape in a new way, essentially adapted the Cubist grid to deconstruct the landscape elements, as in a still life, to reassemble them within a new, flat modernist structure. The nature of Olsen's innovation is quite different. He adopts an essentially aerial viewpoint and animates the elements in the landscape, so that they move around and tell stories. The artist is emotionally involved in the landscape and the sense of energy and engagement is vividly conveyed to the viewer.

The layout of the exhibition follows Olsen as he travels around Australia exploring different landscapes that change as the personal circumstances of his life alter. In each place, especially in the remarkable Lake Eyre paintings, Olsen establishes an emotional bond and conveys as much information about the appearance of the place as about its spirit and presence. In the paintings at the exhibition, from 1951 to 2016, there is an overwhelming sense of consistency and unity of vision. During the 65 years of engaging with the Australian landscape Olsen has developed a peculiar iconography of marks that makes the work simultaneously idiosyncratically an Olsen and quintessentially Australian. It is a system of mark-making that superbly evokes the radiating intensity of light and the scrappy, jerking and untidy forms of the dried riverbeds, saltpans and fingers of water and vegetation. Frogs, birds and fish complement these landscape paintings. In an Olsen landscape, add water and the whole environment bursts into a festive polyphony of fecundity with waterways teeming with life and jumping with energy. Olsen creates landscapes that are good enough to eat, creating an ambiguity between a culinary feast and a festive topography. These paintings radiate light and energy and a sense of profound spirituality.

Olsen acknowledges some of his early sources: "When I started out, Melbourne was rich with good art – Perceval, Nolan, Boyd and Brack. Nolan's carcasses and Wimmera paintings and Perceval's wonderful land and seascapes were all extraordinary. The way I paint is in some ways similar to Perceval's approach, but Nolan's contribution to Australian landscape painting was his introduction of asymmetry into the composition. European landscape painting is much more symmetrical and doesn't really admit that 'dog's hind leg' element of the Australian landscape – the gum tree". Olsen's rambling, sprawling landscapes, at their best, appear as meditations punctuated with wonderful calligraphic inventions and colouristic outbursts. Throughout his art there is a persistent concern with Zen mysticism and oriental ideas of landscape and mark-making. There is a lyricism and musicality in his art and a singularity of style that makes it so recognisably unique.

While the ranking of artists is for posterity and not for contemporaries and, speaking to Olsen in Melbourne, he was bursting to get back to his studio in Bowral and start work on a new major canvas, an exhibition of this nature does provoke some possible conclusions. Unlike many other artists, Olsen did not cultivate a well-established patch in art, but he explored and created something quite new and fresh – a new vision of the Australian landscape and all of its inhabitants. It is a beautiful, optimistic and joyous vision, which represents a radical departure from earlier ideas of Australia. I suspect there will be future major Olsen exhibitions, but this one, for our generation, will be the definitive Olsen show – a worthy tribute to a great Australian artist.