Winton - The Boy Behind the Curtain

A s you approach the National Gallery of Victoria, along a boulevard jangling with trams in downtown Melbourne, its easy to see why former director Patrick McCaughey called it the Kremlin of St Kilda Road. Its a massive rectangular block whose blue stone walls have something of the penitentiary about them, and in a quarter teeming with tourists and commuters it manages to retain a perpetual and sinister remoteness. There are no windows. The only break in the mass is a portal arch so tiny it could be a mouse-hole from a Tom and Jerry cartoon. Only when you step through that arch do you see the buildings inner skin. Theres no portcullis here. All that stands between you and Australias greatest art collection is a falling sheet of water.

The water wall has been disarming pedestrians and delighting children since the museums unveiling in 1968. Today, on a hot morning in the summer holidays, kids linger to feel the current sluice through their fingers. Its a treat to watch them. It takes me back.

You could say the NGV and I got off to an awkward start. When I first visited, nearly half a century ago, the new building on St Kilda Road had been open less than a year; it was Melbournes fresh civic triumph, a trophy the citys burghers and bohemians could share and dispute over. But I was of neither tribe. I arrived at her door sweaty and barefoot, a scruffy nine-year-old interloper from the western frontier.

I grew up in a hardy, utilitarian environment, where nobody you knew had ever finished school, where practical skills were valued and beauty, art and language were mere frippery. It seemed there was a cultural moat between me and the speculative dreamworld I later learnt to call art. But there were larger barriers to contend with distance chief among them. Perth was popularly considered the most isolated city in the world. The real Australia, the one we saw on TV and in magazines, lay elsewhere, somewhere beyond the heat haze of the treeless plain. It was hard not to feel that everything you knew was inconsequential.

Feeling overlooked, even spurned by the eastern states, which make up two-thirds of the landmass, westerners like us suffered the prickly anxiety felt by provincials the world over. We dreamt of making the great crossing to the Other Side, if only to confirm it wasnt all it was cracked up to be. The trip across the Nullarbor was a rite of passage. When my family made the trek in the summer of 1969, a drive longer than that from London to Moscow, there wasnt even a sealed road linking Us to Them.

The privations of that journey, the juddering corrugations and choking dust, were a test of character, but we were sure our ordeals would not be in vain. Keen for us to experience the great world beyond, my parents had taken us out of school early. There was, they said, so much to see and do and learn, and Melbourne was a town where things happened. Wed visit the hallowed stands of the Melbourne Cricket Ground, walk the streets where cop shows like Homicide and Division 4 were recorded in glorious black-and-white, and finally, most importantly, wed tarry in the shadow of the Sidney Myer Music Bowl, where only a year or two earlier the legendary Seekers had played a homecoming concert to two hundred thousand fans, the largest audience in Australias history.

It took more than a week to reach Melbourne. We knocked the dust from our clothes and worked our way through the sites of pilgrimage and, though no one would admit it, our hearts were sinking. The place looked ordinary. The trams were jaunty in their anachronistic way, but nothing about Melbourne appeared any more potent or Australian than the places we knew. The MCG was just an empty hulk. The scene of The Seekers triumph, without our white-bread troubadours to enliven it, didnt have much to excite a nine-year-old either. Even Mum and Dad seemed a tad underwhelmed, but they lingered dutifully at the foot of the stage as we kids chased up the freshly mown amphitheatre toward the final stop on the itinerary.

Mum had shown me pictures of the brand-new museum whose massive stained-glass ceiling and groovy water wall had featured in magazines and newspapers. By all accounts the place was terribly modern. But that hot day, footsore as we were, its chief promise was water. We bolted through the parkland from the Music Bowl to the fortress on St Kilda Road, and there, for a moment, we stood awed before the gallerys moat-like fountain pools. Then, like the heathens we were, we dunked our feet and splashed about and were happier than wed been all day. To me the water was special relief. Id stubbed both big toes and the flapping scabs were a nuisance. Even before our parents arrived, adults were sooling us out of the water. Dunking, they said, was disrespectful. Didnt we know this was art?

Once wed dried off on the hot pavement, we knew better than to touch the tantalizing sheets of the water wall that lay like a shimmering curtain between the portal arch and the mysteries within. We fell into line and followed our parents through the arch. We were on our best behaviour. Mum gobbed on her thumb and cleaned our faces, but when we presented ourselves at the ticket office, we learned that we would not be admitted. Barefoot supplicants were not welcome in the temple of art.

Mum was shamed. We kids were mortified. But there was worse to come, because Dad was irritated and determined to press the point. Fine for him, safely shod in his rubber thongs, but for the rest of us, shrunk back into a knot of ignominy, it was awful. After trying several dud approaches including the point that, thanks to our recent wading, at least our feet were clean he made a breakthrough. He told the attendant we were from Queensland and suddenly all resistance ceased. It seemed that for yokels from the tropic north theyd make allowances. We were in!

It was a victory nearly wasted: I was so embarrassed I could barely absorb what lay before me. And this is how I came to be acquainted with Henry Moore. For many minutes I lurked behind his