The first episode, Strangers in a Strange Land, tells the story of how Europeans first saw the new land and its people. Convict and colonial artists painted a land ripe for colonisation. They idealised Indigenous people before artists from the Romantic school began to favour majestic panoramic landscapes. They made the landscape look beautiful, but they also made it look European. Only after the 1880s did a home grown school of impressionist painters capture the essence of what Australia really looked like. Their art helped forge the country’s identity.