The Old Dart takes Australian art to heart Sidney Nolan's Kelly in armour is the emblem of the London show. THE wild colonial boy has occupied the old imperial capital, with Sidney Nolan's Ned Kelly the hard-to-miss emblem of a landmark survey of Australian art in London. The unmistakable figure of Kelly in armour, from a 1946 painting on loan from Canberra, has been reproduced on posters in Underground stations and on a huge banner outside London's Royal Academy of Arts. The exhibition, called simply Australia, comprises more than 200 paintings, photographs and sculptures from Australian public galleries and has been organised by the Royal Academy and the National Gallery of Australia. It opens with a contemporary version of the rider in the landscape: Shaun Gladwell's helmeted motorcyclist on a ribbon of bitumen in the video piece Approach to Mundi Mundi. Many of the most potent images in Australian art are here, from Frederick McCubbin's The Pioneer and Russell Drysdale's The Drover's Wife to Max Dupain's Sunbaker. Several rooms are devoted to indigenous art, with historic barks by Bardayal Nadjamerrek, Emily Kame Kngwarreye's Big Yam Dreaming and Gordon Bennett's re-telling of British colonialism, Possession Island. The director of exhibitions at the Royal Academy, Kathleen Soriano, said she started thinking about a survey of Australian art on her first visit here in the late 1980s. "I could not understand why I did not know more about some of these artists," she said at a preview of the exhibition yesterday. The artworks were chosen because they depicted the landscape, Ms Soriano said, but the exhibition was intended to be about art history, not a narrative. "When you have an international platform like the Royal Academy of Arts, you really have a duty to broaden the art-historical canon," she said. Australia opens to the public on Saturday and there is an accompanying program of events over the coming months, with speakers including NGA director Ron Radford, author Tim Winton and artists Imants Tillers and Gladwell. A lavish catalogue has been produced, with a welcome from the Prince of Wales, who is patron of the exhibition. About 70 supporters of the NGA and other art figures from Australia were due in London for the opening.