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... Following the generic titles of the first two editions - 'The Inaugural Biennale of Sydney' (1973) and 'Recent International Forms in Art' (1976) - Nick obviously took it by the scruff of the neck with the third biennale, 'European Dialogue' (1979). It was a show very much of its time, a reaction against pervasive American influence. With the clarity his distant origins had given him, Nick could see, smell and kick the lumpen conservatism of the establishment. For him Europe was not bland Euramerica but a real, chewy, living, conflicted continent that included Eastern Europe and the Balkans as well as Switzerland, Great Britain, Germany, the Netherlands, France, Italy and Spain. Two Australian artists from that show figure large in the current 17th BoS - Aleks Danko and Robert MacPherson - as does Nick's definitive idea that Australian art must be strongly expressed within an international context by the significant presence of Indigenous culture...

Nick's third BoS, 'From the Southern Cross: A View of World Art c. 1940-1988', was more consciously a 'museum' show in that it set out a historical view of the state and development of art from the perspective of the South Pacific. Organised in association with the Australian Bicentennial Authority, shown in Sydney at the Art Gallery of New South Wales and Pier 2/3, and in Melbourne at the National Gallery of Victoria, this was an opportunity to bring major international works to Australia for the first time...

Nick had been working with Djon Mundine at Ramingining in north-east Arnhem Land to ensure that The Aboriginal memorial, 1987-88 - two hundred newly painted hollow log bone coffins now in the collection of the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra - was an incontrovertible statement at the heart of the biennale. As a result, what could so easily have become an uncritical celebration of colonial 'success' was brought down to earth by the inclusion of a major collective artwork that honoured the memories of the over 'several hundred thousand Aboriginals [who] &ellip; died at the hands of white invaders.'

'The Beauty of Distance' contains 110 hollow-log coffins (­larrakitj) recently assembled for the Kerry Stokes Collection. Nick showed The Aboriginal memorial not only because of what it represented but also because it comprised the work of forty-three artists that was good in itself, in the same way that these more recent works were selected not out of any conscious desire to echo the 1988 BoS, but because of their quality as contemporary art ...

This article appears in excerpted form. You can read the entire article in Art & Australia's Winter 2010 issue.