Australian art is impregnated into its landscape, into rock surfaces and in ceremonial ground designs through ancestral Dreaming narratives and imagery that can be traced back 50,000 years.

Australia, at the Royal Academy of Arts, captures the essence of this rich visual language and spirituality while mapping the country’s rapid changes from the first settlers and colonisation to pioneering nation-building in the 19th century and urbanisation of the 20th century.

More than 200 works make up what is the largest exhibition of Australian art ever mounted in this country, but more so, it’s an emotional journey all wrapped up in an arts-cum-history-cum-geography lesson.

Very deliberately, the exhibition starts with Shaun Gladwell’s film Approach to Mundi Mundi, 2007, following a motorbiker in leathers riding along an empty, endless road surrounded by a dry, red scrubland.

He stretches out his arms and continues the ride without the use of handlebars. He is forward-looking, free, defiant and daring - setting the scene for Australia.

Contemporary indigenous art in the first gallery draws on Australia’s ancient heritage – vast paintings of the vast land in earth pigments – canvases and tree bark paintings alive with swirling brushstrokes, running-stitch daubs and special markings through which knowledge has been passed on through millennia.

“The notion of landscape as your second skin and your country as an extension to your body is central to every aboriginal art form,“ said curator Kathleen Soriano.

“Country is heart, mind and soul, not property, if anything it owns its people. Conflicts over land sit at the centre of the debate for aboriginal people because land is the foundation of their spiritual being.”

Walking under the giant black and white squiggled canvas of Big Yam Dreaming by Emily Kame Kngwarrey (1995) into the ordered Colonial gallery highlights Ms Soriano’s point. The European settlers’ art is restrained by their culture and teachings in 19th century landscape painting.

However, Eugene von Guerard took on a new direction capturing the straggly greenery of the prehistoric Ferntree Gully in the Dandenong Ranges (1857) and his tragic Youyans (Sketch for Bushfire 1859) was the first oil painting of a fire raging across the land with plumes of red and grey smoke filling the sky.

Australia became a Federation of states and territories in 1901. Tommy McRae and William Barack were considered the senior artists of the aboriginal people and their work offers glimpses of their peoples’ struggles as they were moved off their land. Barak’s Corrobbee vividly records an ancient dance ceremony and he wrote to Queen Victoria, asking her to intervene in his peoples’ struggle.

Australian impressionists Arthur Streeton, Charles Conder, Tom Roberts and Frederick McCubbin travelled around the country recording the changing landscape under Australia’s burning sun at the end of the 19th century.

Streeton’s gentle Golden Summer, Eaglemont (1889), was the first painting by an Australian to hang in the Royal Academy encompasses the country in all its loveliness.

Two years later, Fire’s On (1891) with blue skies, quivering light and jagged rocks tumbling as a tunnel is blasted through the Blue Mountains, symbolises the pioneering times and new activity across the continent.

Conder’s Bronte Beach (1888), with carefully placed figures, echoes Japanese art with a dreamy image of a popular beach and a Holiday at Mentone (1888) captures the Australian light which so inspired this group of artists.

Into the 20th century, artists began to shake off the dream-like scenes and show more concern for the wrongs inflicted by settlers on the indigenous people - and saw the landscape as something to be preserved and not taken for granted.

Margaret Preston’s robust modernist works and passion for an Australian ethos led her to travel with the indigenous people.

She paints an experience rather than landscape, restraining her palette to earth colours and drawing on mark-making to create Aboriginal Landscape (1941). Her anger at the indigenous peoples’ plight is powerful in The Explusion (1952), showing an aboriginal couple and their baby finding the gates are locked at the kingdom of Heaven.

Sidney Nolan, who was born in inner-city Melbourne during the depression, was much-influenced by European Modernism. A journey through North West Victoria, on a back of a lorry with fellow soldiers, inspired Kiata (1943), a parallel road and train line running through the flat horizon.

Importantly, this paved the way for the Nelly Kelly series, where legend and land combine. The bushranger with a black modernist square for armour is a powerful symbol – and now an image that is plastered all over London as the exhibition’s icon.

Nolan was one of the first artists to fly vast distances across the country, discovering the red earth of the interior. In 1950 he wrote to fellow artist Albert Tucker: “We had a wonderful trip to the back of beyond, it is the proper Australia, old dignified and coherent...”

The proper Australia - on leaving the Royal Academy visitors will have had the chance to understand exactly what that means.

Australia will be at the Royal Academy of Arts in Piccadilly, London from Saturday, September 21 to Sunday, December 8. For information call 020 7300 8000 or visit www.royalacademy.org.uk