Adrian Newstead OAM

Write the history of contemporary Australian Aboriginal art from the dealer's side of the room and Adrian Newstead's name turns up on most of the pages. He opened Cooee Art Gallery in Paddington in October 1981, at a moment when the Western Desert painting movement was barely a decade old and most commercial galleries in Australia still would not touch the work. Forty-five years on, he remains one of the most experienced, most cited and at times most outspoken figures in the field.

He has hung more than 400 exhibitions across four continents: Tokyo, Lyon, Lausanne, Paris, New York, Boston, Seattle, Santa Fe, Vancouver, São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro among them.* He has placed works by Emily Kame Kngwarreye, Rover Thomas, Tommy Watson, Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri and dozens of other important Indigenous artists into major private and public collections in Australia, the United States and Europe. He served as Head of Aboriginal Art at Lawson-Menzies auctions, Managing Director of Australia's leading art auction house Deutscher-Menzies, and Founding President of what is now the Aboriginal Art Association of Australia. In 2014 he published the field's most candid insider history, The Dealer is the Devil, and in 2016 he was awarded the Medal of the Order of Australia for service to the museum and galleries sector.

Today Adrian leads Newstead Art, the independent gallery, consultancy and auction house he established at 31 Lamrock Avenue, Bondi Beach, after selling Cooee Art in March 2023. Newstead Art is the culmination of everything that came before it: the relationships, the eye, the institutional memory and the connoisseurship of a long career. It is where collectors come to buy significant Aboriginal art, to obtain authoritative valuations, to consign works for auction, and to commission the kind of specialist advice that only comes from a career of this depth.

Adrian Rodney Newstead was born in 1948. He came of age in the late 1960s and early 1970s in a Sydney shaped by anti-Vietnam protest, land rights activism and the broader Australian counterculture. His earliest professional training was in agricultural science, and one of his first jobs involved studying what we would now call climate change: taking core samples from the Barren Grounds peat swamp on the New South Wales south coast, carbon-dating the sediment layers, and reading a 10,000-year climate record under a microscope.

It was an unlikely apprenticeship for a future gallerist, but it left traces. Adrian's writing and conversation have always carried a scientist's appetite for evidence and chronology, paired with a deep ecological attention to landscape. He has spoken in interviews about the way Aboriginal painting is too often framed simply as landscape, when in truth it is something far more layered: a record of relationship between people and Country, made and remade through ceremony, kinship and law.

After working in extension services for the NSW Department of Agriculture and as an ABC country radio journalist, he developed a particular interest in third-world development issues and spent several years working as a freelance journalist, travelling throughout Asia and the Pacific. After travelling on to Europe, he worked on a kibbutz in Israel, putting his knowledge of agriculture to good use growing cotton and bananas. Returning to Australia in the late 1970s, he started a restaurant and his first art gallery in Mount Victoria, the small Blue Mountains town two hours west of Sydney. Here he met and became firm friends with the artist Michael Ramsden, his wife Jenny Kee and her fellow fashion designer Linda Jackson, the Australian novelist Jill Neville and her brother, the counterculture enfant terrible Richard Neville, and his former girlfriend Louise Ferrier, along with Jill's close friend Anne Cayzer. Soon, running a small shop and gallery in partnership with Ferrier called the Coo-ee Emporium, he was dedicated to sourcing and promoting handmade Australian craft and art, a deliberate alternative to the mass-manufactured tourist tat that dominated Sydney's souvenir trade.

In the early 1980s, paintings in ochre on eucalyptus bark, generically referred to as bark paintings, were still considered by many to be the epitome of Aboriginal fine art. Newstead was immediately drawn to them when sourcing art and craft for sale, because of his interest in deep ecology.

What changed everything next was a request from a major Sydney shopping mall to find an Aboriginal dancer for a NADOC* week celebration. Having by now bought Louise Ferrier out of the business, he was ready to be initiated into the world of Aboriginal art and culture. He met his future business partner, the Aboriginal entrepreneur Joe Croft, who at that time was the senior Indigenous bureaucrat in the Art and Culture section of the Federal Department of Aboriginal Affairs. Joe managed David Gulpilil, Australia's foremost Aboriginal dancer, performer and actor of his generation. It was Joe Croft who introduced Adrian to many of Australia's most important Indigenous artists, performers and politicians, including Charles Perkins and Kevin Gilbert, who were instrumental in the 1969 Freedom Ride and the Aboriginal Tent Embassy, Bob Maza, Eric Willmot, Justine Saunders, Lillian Crombie, Faye Nelson, Burnum Burnum, and one of the most respected Aboriginal leaders of the New South Wales south coast, the last fully initiated Yuin Elder, Guboo Ted Thomas.

It is a line Adrian has repeated often in the decades since, and it remains the founding instruction of his career. In October 1981, the Coo-ee Emporium became Cooee Aboriginal Art Gallery in Paddington. He married Anne Cayzer in 1983, and Anne, herself a research scientist by training, went on to become an integral partner in the business, and remains so today at Newstead Art.

Adrian and Anne's partnership with Joe Croft** was the first of its nature in the history of the Australian Aboriginal art movement.

The decade and a half that followed the founding of Cooee Art was the formative period of Adrian's professional life. It was also a period in which the entire Aboriginal art market was being built, by a small number of people working across enormous distances with very few institutional structures to support them.

In 1982, Adrian held the first exhibition of Tiwi craft at the original Coo-ee Emporium premises. A year later he organised what is recorded as the first dedicated exhibition of Tiwi art in a southern capital. From there he and Anne began making the long trips north and west that would define the next thirty years: to the Tiwi Islands, to Lajamanu in the Tanami, to Balgo Hills on the edge of the Great Sandy Desert, to the Spinifex People in the Great Victoria Desert, to the Western Torres Strait, and eventually to Warmun, the Kimberley, Maningrida, Arnhem Land and Utopia.

With the prominent Aboriginal identity Joe Croft as their business partner, the gallery's focus narrowed and deepened. Aboriginal art became its primary interest. Over the following decade Cooee mounted more than a hundred exhibitions of Aboriginal art at home and overseas.

Before the 1980s, Aboriginal art was an esoteric interest, confined to those who shared an ethnographic curiosity. The entire market was worth only $900,000 in 1970, but it grew steadily through the decade that followed to $2.5 million. The 1980s and early 1990s were the years in which the international market for Aboriginal art first emerged. Americans were the earliest serious buyers. By the end of the decade, the small handful of specialist galleries in Australia, Cooee among them, were selling perhaps eighty per cent of their stock overseas. Cooee's early exhibition program in Tokyo, Lyon, Lausanne, Paris, New York and the American west coast was, in part, a response to that imbalance.

The dealer described in Newstead's insider history of the Aboriginal art trade, The Dealer is the Devil, during those early years is someone learning on the road. The book opens with one of the most quoted anecdotes in Australian art writing: a drive from Sydney to the Kimberley with a car full of prints by Rover Thomas, Queenie McKenzie, Jack Britten, Hector Jandanay and the children of Warmun, to be signed by the artists. The car was stolen on the way. Four boxes of prints were eventually recovered. Some, incredibly, were found floating in, and on the floor of, the Mary River — retrieved, dried, and brought back into circulation.

Adrian's curatorial work has always run in parallel with his commercial practice, and has been largely a not-for-profit promotional activity, funded by his business, to advance the Indigenous art movement as a whole. Beginning in the late 1980s, and for the following fifteen years, he became the most prominent publisher of Aboriginal fine art limited edition prints. Between 1992 and 1996 he co-curated and coordinated New Tracks Old Land, a touring survey of contemporary Indigenous prints that visited eight venues across North America and twenty-five across Australia. In conjunction with the launch of the Australian tour, a symposium was hosted by Northern Editions, then established at Charles Sturt University in Darwin, and held at the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory. More than 150 artists and their art centre representatives from across Arnhem Land and Tropical Far North Queensland attended. At the following venue, the Araluen Art Centre in Alice Springs, another symposium was held for artists and communities in the Eastern, Central and Western Deserts. The exhibition introduced national and international audiences to the depth of Aboriginal printmaking. With financial assistance from the Federal Government's Small Business Network Scheme, Newstead co-opted several galleries* to create the commercial framework that became the Australian Art Print Network, established in 1996. Adrian served on the board from 1996 to 2012.

In 1996, Adrian was appointed an Approved Government Valuer under the Federal Cultural Gifts Program, a status he has held continuously to the present day. This appointment places Adrian among a very small number of practitioners in Australia formally qualified to value Aboriginal art for tax-deductible donation to public collections. It is the credential most often cited by the lawyers, accountants, estate administrators and insurers who engage him for formal valuation work.

In preparation for the 2000 Sydney Olympic Games, Adrian instigated a partnership between Cooee Gallery, the Australian Art Print Network and Japingka Gallery to create an Indigenous Art Precinct in the arcade leading into World Square in the centre of the Sydney CBD. Throughout the Olympics, six retail spaces included the Yuwayi Gallery, a 300 square metre exhibition space, a print gallery and artist studios. Several remote community art centres participated, including Bula Bula Arts from Ramingining in Arnhem Land, the Warmun Art Centre, and Warlukurlangu Artists at Yuendumu with ten visiting artists from Lajamanu, alongside Arnhem Land artists painting each day in the studios.

The following year, former Prime Minister Gough Whitlam, Governor of NSW Marie Bashir and the Federal Minister for Aboriginal Affairs launched the first commercial exhibition of the art of the Spinifex People in the Yuwayi Gallery at World Square.

Other major touring exhibitions followed. Yilpinji: Love Magic and Ceremony toured Australia, the United States and Europe between 2002 and 2003. Gelam Nguzu Kazi, the first major survey of Western Torres Strait Islander art, toured Australia and the United States from 2000 to 2004.

In 2014, to coincide with the second oldest Biennale in the world, the São Paulo Art Biennial, Adrian's project Heroic Narrative, a collection of Aboriginal artworks from the Central and Western Deserts, formed part of a festival of Australian art, wine and food sponsored by Qantas, QBE and Monash University.

At the same time, the exhibition Black Art White Walls, curated by the prominent Aboriginal artist and curator Djon Mundine, drew on artworks from Adrian and Anne Newstead's own private collection of more than thirty years. After officially opening at the Grace Cossington Smith Gallery in Sydney's northern suburbs, and following a two-year Australian tour of regional galleries, it became the backbone of the larger international touring exhibition O Tempo Dos Sonhos, the Time of Dreams, which toured venues throughout Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay over the following decade.

In 2016, following the success and interest generated by the Heroic Narrative exhibition in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, Adrian organised O Tempo dos Sonhos, the first major touring exhibition of Australian Aboriginal art in South America, curated with Djon Mundine OAM and the Brazilian curator Clay D'Paula. The exhibition toured from 2016 to 2021, opening the South American market to contemporary Aboriginal painting. More than one million visitors were recorded during its eight-venue tour.

In 1998, Adrian was a founding member of the Australian Indigenous Art Trade Association, known as Art.Trade, the body that would evolve into the Aboriginal Art Association of Australia, of which he is today Honorary Patron and current President. He served as Art.Trade's inaugural National President from 1998 to 2000 and again from 2001 to 2002. After almost thirty years of service to the Indigenous art industry, he took over the Presidency once more to steady the ship after a particularly turbulent period that saw the APY art centre collective expelled from the Indigenous Art Code following the White Hands on Black Art scandal.

The purpose of Art.Trade, and of the AAAA after it, has always been to act as a collective voice for Aboriginal artists and the people who work with them: to promote the artists and their work, to provide a central point of reference for collectors, institutions and the public, and to speak publicly on the issues affecting the trade in Indigenous art.

Art.Trade's first major role in advocating for artists and remote community organisations came in the lead-up to the Sydney Olympic Games. With pressure mounting to fight bogus products flooding the souvenir market during the Olympics, a misguided centralised authenticity scheme was promoted by the National Aboriginal Arts Advocacy Association with Federal Government backing. The proposed scheme would have undermined the labelling, branding and independence of remote art centres, and the association assisted them in their fight against it.

Since that time, Adrian has been a consistent voice in media commentary on the structure of the Aboriginal art market, including the Resale Royalty Scheme, which he has engaged with critically through its consultation and implementation in Australia.

Other governance roles followed: the Board of the Australian Art Print Network from 1996 to 2012; the Aboriginal Benefits Foundation, which he instigated to support Indigenous artists and their families through health, education and community development work; the Art Consulting Association of Australia, of which he was President from 2011 to 2015; and the AAAA Presidency, a role he assumed once more in 2024 and continues to hold today.

In 2003, Adrian took on the role for which he is best known in the secondary market: Head of the Aboriginal Art Department at Lawson-Menzies in Sydney. He then served as Senior Aboriginal Art Specialist and Managing Director of Deutscher-Menzies through 2007 and 2008.

The Lawson-Menzies years coincided with the most extraordinary commercial moment in Aboriginal art's then short market history. In May 2007, Adrian facilitated the sale of Emily Kame Kngwarreye's Earth's Creation (1994) for $1,056,000, the first work by an Australian female artist to break the million-dollar barrier at auction. In 2017 the same painting sold again, for $2.1 million, through Cooee Art Auctions with Adrian at the helm. Having broken its own record a second time, it remains the highest public price ever achieved for an artwork by any Australian female artist, a position it has held since 2007.

Adrian's twenty-five years as an art auction specialist have given him something no amount of primary-market gallery experience can provide: a working, day-in, day-out knowledge of the secondary market, and a forty-five-year insight into the Indigenous art market that runs from sources in some of the most remote regions of Australia to the saleroom floors of the most sophisticated international auction houses, secondary dealers and consultants. This degree of connoisseurship is unparalleled, and it gives him an in-depth understanding of the oeuvre of the 500 most important artists in the field. It takes in what constitutes real quality, judged by imagery, quality of execution, condition, rarity, beauty and source provenance. It takes in how works move between collectors; how condition reports are written and contested; how to interpret catalogue and code numbers on paintings of unknown history where accompanying documentation has been lost; how pre-sale auction estimates are set; and how a saleroom behaves on the night a work changes hands. That knowledge is the foundation of the auction work Newstead Art does today.

In 2017, with co-owner Mirri Leven, Adrian established Cooee Art Auctions, which became one of the most respected Indigenous fine art auction operations in Australia. Then, in March 2023, at seventy-five years of age, he sold Cooee Art after forty-two years at its helm to Mirri Leven, who changed the trading name of Cooee Art PL to ArtLeven.

In 2014, after six years of writing and a further two editing the manuscript with Ruth Hessey, Adrian published The Dealer is the Devil: An Insider's History of the Aboriginal Art Trade. Published by Brandl and Schlesinger, with a foreword by the curator Djon Mundine OAM, it runs to five hundred pages across sixty-six chapters and reads, in turn, as memoir, road trip, history and political commentary.

Fred Myers, Silver Professor of Anthropology at New York University and one of the foundational scholars of the Western Desert painting movement, described the book as full of crucial history and unparalleled knowledge. Books+Publishing called it a masterpiece of arts writing. It is now used as a reference text in Australian university courses on Indigenous art and cultural policy, and remains in print. Copies are available through Newstead Art.

The Dealer is the Devilwas created by editing a 150,000-word biographical section out of a one-million-word manuscript on Adrian's involvement in the Aboriginal art industry and the lives of more than 200 of the most important artists of the movement. That larger work included in-depth profiles of the artists and their careers, market analysis of the performance of their work in the primary and secondary markets, and an extensive how-to-buy-and-sell guide written for those interested in Indigenous art.

The artist profiles, the market analysis, the performance of the artworks, the artists' ranking according to a formula Adrian devised in collaboration with several leading economists and academics, and the works that have sold for the highest prices, were used to create the AIAM100, the Australian Indigenous Art Market Top 100. That research has now been incorporated into this website and can be explored through the Artists pages.

In January 2016, Adrian Newstead was awarded the Medal of the Order of Australia in the Australia Day Honours List, with the citation for service to the museum and galleries sector, particularly through the promotion of Indigenous arts.

In March 2023, after forty-two years at the helm of Cooee Art, Adrian sold the gallery and founded Newstead Art: an independent gallery, art consultancy and auction house at 31 Lamrock Avenue, Bondi Beach, with a second base currently under development at the Château des Deux Amants in Normandy, France.

Newstead Art operates across four areas: acquiring and selling significant Aboriginal artworks through the gallery and by private treaty; curating and managing regular Australian Aboriginal Fine Art Auctions; conducting formal valuations for insurance, probate, family division, sale and Cultural Gifts Program donation; and advising private and institutional collectors on collection strategy, acquisition and long-term development.

Since its 2023 launch, Newstead Art has held three Australian Aboriginal Fine Art Auctions, including one in upstate New York, and has curated several significant retrospective exhibitions, including Syron's War, the 2026 retrospective of the late Biripi and Worimi painter Gordon Syron.

The Château des Deux Amants, a seventeenth-century property on the banks of the Seine, is Newstead Art's European base. It houses a substantial private collection and hosts visits and private viewings for collectors, curators and institutions travelling from across Europe. Adrian and Anne spend part of each year there, building interest in Australian Aboriginal art and continuing relationships with the European collector base that Adrian has cultivated since his earliest international exhibitions in the 1980s.

Newstead Art operates as a small, specialist practice. Every person on the team carries a clearly defined role and a genuine depth of knowledge. For clients, this means direct access to the people actually doing the work.

Newstead Art operates as both a gallery and a private treaty dealer. The gallery maintains a curated stock of significant contemporary and historical Aboriginal art, available for direct purchase. Many of these works are owned by Adrian and Anne Newstead; others are consigned from community art centres, private collections, and independent artists, agents and wholesalers. Private treaty sales, conducted discreetly outside the public auction market, give collectors access to works that rarely reach open sale. Adrian's network spans more than four decades and every region of Aboriginal art production: the Western Desert, Arnhem Land, the Tiwi Islands, the Kimberley, Utopia, the APY Lands, the Torres Strait, and the urban and regional artists working independently across Australia.

Collectors at every level come to Newstead Art for one thing: access. Access to the works, many of which are never publicly listed; to accurate, unvarnished market intelligence; to a dealer whose knowledge of individual artists, regions and periods is unmatched in the Australian market; and to the kind of considered advice that helps a collection add up to something, rather than accumulate at random.

The gallery at Bondi Beach is open for viewing by appointment. For collectors based overseas or interstate, works can be presented privately at the Château des Deux Amants, at Gauchet Fine Art in Geneva, or by correspondence, with full condition reporting, provenance documentation and comparative market analysis provided as a matter of course.

To receive auction catalogues and private-treaty offers before they are listed publicly, ask Adrian to add you to the Newstead Art collector list: adrian@newsteadart.com or +61 412 126 645.

The gallery focuses on works of documented quality and provenance across all periods of the contemporary Aboriginal art market. This includes historically significant works from the formative decades of the Western Desert painting movement; major canvases by the most celebrated artists of the Utopia, Arnhem Land, Tiwi Islands and Kimberley regions; fine art prints by significant printmakers; bark paintings, sculpture and works on paper of museum-grade quality; and emerging works by artists Adrian has followed closely and whose trajectory he can speak to with genuine authority.

Newstead Art does not carry what it cannot stand behind. Every work is researched before it enters the gallery, every certificate is verified, and every representation made to a buyer is one the gallery can support with documentation.

Not every significant Aboriginal artwork comes to market through a gallery or an auction house. Many of the most important transactions in this market are conducted privately, between a vendor and a buyer, without a public listing. Newstead Art facilitates private treaty sales on behalf of both vendors looking to sell and collectors looking to acquire works outside the auction environment.

For vendors, private treaty offers discretion, the ability to negotiate price without the pressure of a public saleroom, and access to a buyer network built over more than forty years. For buyers, it offers access to works that would not otherwise be available, often with more detailed provenance documentation than auction can provide and without a buyer's premium on top of the negotiated price. Private treaty enquiries are handled personally by Adrian, and all discussions are conducted in confidence.

Newstead Art runs regular Fine Australian Aboriginal Art Auctions in association with Theodore Bruce, with viewing at the Bondi Beach gallery and live and online bidding available to registered buyers across Australia and internationally. Each auction is meticulously catalogued, with provenance researched and condition reported to the standard of the international fine art market.

Newstead Art is the only Aboriginal art auction house in Australia to publish comparable sale prices alongside every lot, giving bidders a transparent view of where each work sits within the broader market.

Adrian brings to every auction the knowledge he accumulated running Aboriginal art sales at Lawson-Menzies, Deutscher-Menzies, Menzies Art and Cooee Art Auctions across almost twenty-five years. He knows how to estimate accurately, how to write catalogue copy that attracts serious buyers, how to sequence a sale for maximum commercial result, and how to place a work in the context of the artist's body of work and the broader market.

Consignors to Newstead Art benefit from personal attention to their works, from the moment of consignment to the moment of settlement. The condition reports are thorough. The pre-sale marketing, including digital outreach to Newstead Art's established buyer network and specialist art media coverage, is handled with the same professionalism as the auction itself.

For significant single works or collections, Adrian is available to discuss consignment strategy, reserve levels, timing, and the relative merits of auction versus private treaty for the specific works being considered. To register to bid in the next sale, or to receive the catalogue, contact Adrian at adrian@newsteadart.com.

Adrian Newstead has been an Approved Government Valuer under the Federal Cultural Gifts Program since 1996, giving him one of the longest continuous formal valuation records of any Aboriginal art specialist in Australia. He holds accreditation through the Aboriginal Art Association of Australia and the Art Consulting Association of Australia, and he is a member in good standing of the Auctioneers and Valuers Association of Australia.

He has conducted formal written valuations for private collectors, estates, public institutions, insurers, family law proceedings, and tax-deductible donation under the Cultural Gifts Program. His valuation work spans every region and period of the contemporary Aboriginal art market, from pre-contact material and early ethnographic objects through to significant contemporary canvases. Foremost among his many clients have been the Central Land Council, the National Museum of Australia, the National Gallery of Victoria, the National Maritime Museum, the Queensland Gallery of Modern Art, the National Library of Australia and the Australian War Memorial, alongside many other international, national and regional arts institutions.

All valuations are provided as formal written reports, signed in accordance with the relevant professional and statutory standards, and accepted by the Australian Taxation Office, major insurers, the courts and public institutions. The full list of valuation types, current fees and the request form are on the Valuations page.

The Cultural Gifts Program is a Federal Government scheme that allows individuals and organisations to donate culturally significant items, including Aboriginal artworks, to eligible Australian public collections, and to claim a deduction on their taxable income equal to the approved market value of the donation. For collectors holding works of cultural or historical significance, it is the most direct route to placing those works in a public collection where they will be cared for, exhibited and made accessible to future generations.

A Cultural Gifts Program donation requires two independent valuations from valuers approved under the Program. Adrian conducts these valuations regularly and can assist donors in identifying the right institutional home for a work, approaching the receiving institution, and navigating the administrative requirements of the Program. He is approved under the scheme as a valuer of all Australian Aboriginal art and craft, Australian contemporary art, and Australian photography post 1880.

Not every engagement with Newstead Art begins with a specific work to buy, sell or value. Some of the most significant work Adrian does is advisory: helping collectors, institutions, corporations, estates and government bodies understand what they have, what it is worth, what to acquire next, and how to steward a collection over time.

His consultancy works with architects and interior designers under contract to private collectors, institutions and corporations, selecting appropriate artists to undertake public and site-specific works. Examples include a commission from Hassell Architects for site-specific artworks incorporated into wall treatments, furnishings and artworks for the Port Macquarie Base Hospital upgrade and refurbishment (2012), and a commission from The Scots College for a floor design covering the Black Watch Café across the entire ground floor of the John Cunningham Business Centre (2023). Selected projects are featured on this site.

Adrian advises private collectors on the strategic development of their Aboriginal art collections, with particular focus on building provenance, improving the quality and coherence of existing holdings, identifying acquisition opportunities, and positioning collections for long-term value. This work draws on four decades of primary market dealing, deep familiarity with the secondary market, and relationships with art centres, artists' estates, fellow dealers and institutional curators across Australia and internationally. See Collection Advice & Management for the full service.

Corporate collections and institutional acquisitions require a different kind of advisory service, one that balances aesthetic quality with cultural sensitivity, financial accountability and reputational risk management. Adrian has advised corporate and institutional clients on Aboriginal art acquisitions for more than thirty years, across industries including hospitality, finance, property, health and the public sector. Newstead Art can scope, curate and manage an acquisition program from brief to installation.

The administration of an estate that includes significant Aboriginal artworks requires specialist knowledge that most solicitors and accountants do not have. Newstead Art provides a complete service for estate administrators, executors and beneficiaries: formal valuation for probate purposes, advice on the relative merits of auction, private treaty sale and Cultural Gifts Program donation, and assistance with identifying institutional buyers for works of particular cultural significance.

Adrian is regularly engaged as an expert for authentication assessments, insurance disputes, family law proceedings, and cases involving questions of provenance or attribution. His expert opinions are accepted by the courts and major insurers, and are provided as formal written reports that set out the basis for his conclusions in full.

Newstead Art has a long history of curatorial and publishing work alongside its commercial practice. Adrian and his team are available to curate exhibitions, contribute essays and catalogue texts, and advise on exhibition and publication projects relating to Aboriginal art. Institutions, publishers and event producers seeking a specialist contributor of Adrian's standing are welcome to make enquiries. Recent examples include the introductory essay for The Greatest Passion of All: the Jaquie McPhee Collection (2017); the introductory essay for the Burkhardt-Felder Foundation's Beyond Inspiration: Music and Paintings from the Jürg Dähler Collection(2025); the major catalogue essay for the Burkhardt-Felder Foundation's Voyage Across Aboriginal Australia: Founders' Favourites (2022); the essay for the Oceanic Art Society of Australia, The Evolution of the Contemporary Aboriginal Art Market (volume 31, issue 2, 2026); and the introductory essay for the Knoblauch Aboriginal Art Collection, in the context of the history and development of the Aboriginal art movement and the Australian art market.

Most of what is written about buying Aboriginal art is either too cautious to be useful or too promotional to be trusted. After forty-five years in the trade, as a dealer, auctioneer, valuer and founder of the industry's national association, Adrian Newstead has a different view — and has set it out in a series of plain-spoken guides on this site.

All enquiries are handled personally by Adrian Newstead. Whether you are interested in purchasing a work, commissioning a valuation, consigning to auction, or discussing a major advisory project, the best place to start is a direct conversation.