Building on from its ancient Indigenous art, music and dance is a robust, richly layered modern arts landscape. It’s one that has given the world writers like Patrick White, Peter Carey, Kate Grenville and Richard Flanagan, musicians Nick Cave, Sia, Troy Sivan and Birds of Tokyo, film director Peter Weir and actors Geoffrey Rush, Cate Blanchett and Nicole Kidman.

Australia’s visual arts scene is equally impressive, if lesser known abroad. While Austrian-born Eugene von Guérard is arguably the country’s most important colonial landscape painter, it was Swiss-born plein air painter Louis Buvelot who inspired the homegrown Heidelberg School art movement of the late 19th century. Founded in Melbourne and dubbed ‘Australian Impressionism’, the movement’s key figures include Frederick McCubbin, Tom Roberts and Arthur Streeton.