Australian aboriginal art is hot. “Thirty years ago Aboriginal work was hardly recognized as art. Painted tree bark and ritual stone and wood objects, spears and clubs tended to be lumped together with stuffed koalas and wallabies in the ethnographic sections of Australian museums; Aboriginal art was never displayed in the same spaces as work by white artists. Less than 20 years ago you could barely give it away. People just didn’t take art made by Aboriginal painters seriously. But at our sales in July we’ll have people from all over the world bidding hundreds of thousands of dollars for art you could have bought for hundreds in the 1970’s. We’re estimating a total sale value of more than $3 million.”