Last week, artists and curators from Western Australia joined Canberra-based academics to workshop an exhibition on the stock route's indigenous history. The exhibition is scheduled to open in 2010 at the National Museum.

Project manager Carly Davenport Acker, of FORM, the organisation behind the endeavour, said the exhibition would incorporate a variety of artworks, photographs and multimedia exhibits.

''We're going to be developing a show that's quite different and has never been done before. We have so much social and cultural context and so much amazing art,'' she said.

Eighty-nine artists from nine Western Australia art centres have contributed works.

Curator Terry Murray, of Fitzroy Crossing, said it was time to tell the Aboriginal history of the stock route.

''This project we're doing, they've heard the European, the white man way of telling the story,'' he said.

''All these paintings of the Canning stock route are about Aboriginal history. We want to give the wider Australian and international audience a strong message of what really happened... We want them to take home the good and the bad, the sad and the happy some kind of emotion. We want them to look and understand.''

Ms Davenport Acker said the founding of the stock route saw a mass exodus from the desert.

''The impact when [the Canning stock route] was actually put in... was diabolical. The oral histories that have been recorded capture lots of views and experiences of absolute disruption in people's lives,'' she said.

An ANU-based anthropologist who is working on the project, John Carty, said the exhibition would be a hybrid of fine art and social history.

''This exhibition is saying that behind all these great, beautiful paintings there are extraordinary perspectives on Australian history,'' he said.

''They're not just pretty paintings they're indigenous historians and intellectuals who have thought about our history and have different perspectives of it and express it through painting. This show is honouring the historical and intellectual aspect of Aboriginal art.''