Indigenous art is having a moment. A big one.

Indigenous art is having a moment. A big one. And that's both wonderful and complicated.

Walk into any gallery in a major Australian city right now and you'll find stunning First Nations artwork commanding serious attention — and serious money. The world has woken up to the power, the depth and the extraordinary beauty of the oldest living art tradition on the planet. That recognition is long overdue and genuinely exciting.

But here's where it gets uncomfortable.

An estimated 80% of products available in Australian tourism shops carrying Aboriginal-style designs are inauthentic. Eighty percent. That's not a small problem hiding in a back alley somewhere — that's the mainstream souvenir market, right there at the airport, at the beach, in the gift shops tourists flock to.

One Queensland-based wholesaler was found to have sold over 18,000 boomerangs, bullroarers, didgeridoos and message stones — all made in Indonesia — while the packaging suggested First Nations people were involved in making them. And that's just one case that actually made it to court.

Artificial intelligence is now being used to generate fake Indigenous-style art — trained on the work of real First Nations artists, then used to compete directly against them. One Indigenous artist described it as a "very colonial mindset." Hard to argue with that.

This isn't just about money. Aboriginal art is tied to identity, knowledge and connectedness to ancestors, land and sea Country — cultural expressions passed down through generations. Fake art exploits and distorts that. It interferes with the proper maintenance and transmission of cultural knowledge.

The Australian Government has committed to introducing stand-alone legislation for Indigenous cultural and intellectual property — something advocates have been pushing for decades. It's a start.

Real Indigenous art carries a story. A language. A connection to Country that goes back tens of thousands of years. That's worth knowing — and worth protecting.