Reviewed by Sasha Grishin.

The announcement of an allocation of $50 million by the Turnbull government for a permanent aquatic monument celebrating the 250th anniversary of Captain Cook’s landing at Botany Bay caught many in the Australian arts community by surprise.

On April 29, 1770, the British may have claimed to have ‘discovered’ Australia and on January 26, 1788, Arthur Phillip and the First Fleet may have settled an ‘unoccupied’ continent at Sydney Cove, but this is only one version of history. It is male, Anglo-centric and fundamentally flawed.

The National Portrait Gallery has launched a show that fundamentally challenges this construct of history.

The history of Australia advanced in this exhibition is female, multicultural and pluralistic. The curators of the exhibition, Sarah Engledow and Christine Clark, have selected 10 contemporary Australian women artists to tell their stories about what it is to be Australian or at least to call Australia home.

The selected artists are Shirley Purdie, Linde Ivimey, Bern Emmerichs, Leah King-Smith, Nusra Latif Qureshi, Nicola Dickson, Pamela See (Xue Mei-Leng), Fiona McMonagle, Valerie Kirk and Carol McGregor.

What emerges from this ‘herstory of Australia’ is a polyphony of voices: Indigenous and migrant, Asian and European, veteran and emerging. There are relatively few ‘straight’ paintings, but there are painted ceramics, painted coconut shells and painted slabs of slate, paper cut-outs, heaps of manipulated photographs, banners, woven tapestries, bone, fur and skin sculptures, printed wallpaper and stitched and painted possum skins.

If one can speak of a message emerging from the exhibition, it is that Australia has many histories, many competing narratives, some of which are quite ancient and pre-date British settlement. The dominant narrative - where Cook and Arthur Phillip play the central role - belongs to the realm of tooth fairies. In other words, this is great for those who believe in them, but it is best not tested against empirical evidence.

Shirley Purdie is a high-profile Indigenous artist working at Warmun in Western Australia and is represented by a large number of her signature highly textured colourful acrylic painted panels commemorating ancient sacred places in the life of her people.

In the exhibition wall text, she is quoted as saying, “When you paint you can remember that country … Good to put it in painting, your country, so kids can know and understand. When the old people die, young people can read the stories from the paintings". A wall of her paintings acts as a statement of affirmation about the land and belonging.

Brisbane-based artist Leah King-Smith, of the Bigambul people, creates what she terms “photography dreaming”, which is basically the layering of photographs of her Aboriginal (Bigambul) mother, Pearl King, taken by her father, Tom King, with images of other realities.

She employs her father’s actual negatives so that her mother becomes the fabric of Bigambul Country on which is superimposed her mother’s many roles, dreams and aspirations. To complement this, the source photographs are also reproduced unmanipulated and in small format and accompanied by handwritten interpretations by the artist’s sister, Philippa King, whom she describes as the family historian.

Linde Ivimey, a Melbourne-based sculptor, commemorates her trip to Antarctica in 2011 with what could be termed a sculptural installation composed of bones and skins.

She has morphed four scientists linked to Antarctica - Kate Kiefer, Marilyn Ball, Dana Bergstrom and Jack Egerton, plus herself and companion Zoe - into Antarctic creatures.

The creatures include an albatross, a leopard seal, a killer whale and a penguin. The intricacy involved in crafting each figure from bones, teeth, dyed and natural fabrics constructed over a steel armature does create a sense of characterful presence. It is a curious and quirky narrative about passionate human characters that go local.

Valerie Kirk, a fabric artist from Scotland who has made Canberra home for many decades, explores in her tapestries and very delicate paintings on slate the migrant experience.

The metaphor she employs of salmon swimming upstream to spawn for the physical and psychological relocation between countries is effective and memorable.

Fiona McMonagle, an Irish-born Melbourne-based artist, confronts Britain’s child migrant scheme where children were separated from their parents and ended up in orphanages in Australia where they were frequently abused. Her poster-size banners are some of the most alarming and troubling pieces in the exhibition.

Carol McGregor, a Wathaurung woman based in Brisbane, weaves a whole history of her people in her amazing possum skin cloaks, while Bern Emmerichs, a Melbourne-based ceramic artist, taking the Rajah quilt as her inspiration, gives voice to the convicts who travelled to Van Diemen’s Land in her ceramic portraits and painted plates.

So fine is a powerful exhibition that gathers an array of distinctly female narratives concerning what it means to be an Australian, especially if you are not a white male from England.