Theresa Thompson hits the road to explore Australia - in London

It is big, needless to say.. 200 works to cover 200 years of history. From an 1884 bark painting from Arnhem Land, the earliest exhibit, to a 2007 video of a man on a motorbike white-lining with arms outspread through a ‘sacred Aboriginal landscape’, the Royal Academy’s exhibition looks back at the story of Australia in art and forward to its future.

It’s a story told mostly through landscape. Using paintings, prints and drawings, photography, watercolours and multimedia, most never before seen in the UK, from the National Gallery of Australia and other key public collections, it reveals in interesting and eye-catching ways the social and cultural evolution of a nation.

The story begins with early settlers’ works showing their homesteads and close-by land, the inroads they’d made, the gardens they’d begun to fashion from the unforgiving terrain, on to images of growing towns and cities, bridge building and mining, and stockmen racing to head off thirst-crazed sheep from drowning in the river.

Then, trained artists arrive after the 1851 Gold Rush, initially from Europe, later home-grown, injecting Romanticism and Australian Impressionism into the mix, looking more outwards at the landscape, giving us views of rivers in flood, scorched desert earth, bushfires and other fearsome phenomena; and later, the appearance of beach scenes and leisure, the flowering of work by women artists, and modernism, ending with contemporary art. From all these — and the dramatic beauty of the art from Aboriginal Australians – this, the first survey of Australian art in the UK in 50 years, is an important and strongly atmospheric show. Shaun Gladwell’s video Approach to Mundi Mundi is an inspired opening to the show.

The man on the motorbike lures us into the landscape. For here is the Australia of the imagination: the big skies and parched expanses, the sense of adventure, daring and difference that is central to this hostile, alluring country. Tempting us in, the next gallery shows the first examples of indigenous art. Though unfathomable to most, the glorious paintings here take us briefly from the otherwise chronological sequence. They take us to the sand hills at Wirrulunga, an ancestral birthing place (Doreen Reid Nakamarra’s painting, 2007), and Darwin where Rover Thomas’ mesmeric Cyclone Tracy, 1991, painted in giant swathes of natural earth pigments records the cyclone that devastated the city on Christmas Eve 1974.

“A rich visual language has existed long on this continent, on bodies in ceremonial gatherings, on surfaces such as rock art, and on objects,” said Francescha Cubillo representing the Aboriginal and Torres Straits Islanders. “Some of our masters are here.”

The exhibition includes works by Aboriginal artists such as Albert Namatjira, and Emily Kame Kngwarreye (see Big Yam Dreaming, 1995); 19th century European immigrant artists such as John Glover and Eugene von Guérard; Australian Impressionists Arthur Streeton, Charles Conder, and Frederick McCubbin (see The Pioneer, 1904, an Australian favourite); and Simryn Gill who represented Australia at this year’s Venice Biennale. Sidney Nolan RA (1917-92) is the best known 20th century Australian artist.

His iconic Ned Kelly series, represented here by four paintings, telling of the outlaw-hero’s flight and arrest, includes the feted 1946 enamel on board painting of Kelly on horseback in his homemade armour, starkly simplified, silhouetted against a brilliant blue sky, golden land, and mirage-like horizon of trees. Nolan said his Ned Kelly series was ‘a story arising out of the bush and ending in the bush’.

He also said that he found ‘the desire to paint the landscape involves a wish to hear more of the stories that take place in the landscape’. ‘Stories that take place in the landscape’ could as well be the exhibition’s subtitle. Australia covers a lot of stories and a lot of ground — as do we visitors — but spare time for the later works too, such as Fiona Foley’s beautiful thought-provoking video, Bliss, Fiona Hall’s sardine cans sculptures, and Fred Williams’ inspired Yellow Landscape where foreground and background merge and perspective becomes redundant as it can in Australia’s seemingly endless flat and featureless interior.

Australia Royal Academy, London Until December 8 royalacademy.org.uk