Vew from the chair: Speeches of Richard WL Austin

a decade-sat down together at the same table in this Gallery and-what's more– in amity. Had it not been for the trauma of the election, there might have been two Ministers for the Arts as well. All of us here tonight, with the exception of Ted-because, of course, his decade of significant achievement is yet to come, and I am sure it will'-have played some part in making the Gallery what it is today and in creating what the Courier-Mail recently described as a 'golden period' in its history. When I wrote to the Minister to tender my resignation, I said that the Centenary Year seemed an appropriate moment for me to retire, so that new ideas and more youthful vigour could carry the Gallery into its next one hundred years. In that letter, I reminded him, as one classicist to another, of the words that the Emperor Augustus had used about Rome, 'I inherited it brick and left it marble', and I suggested that, metaphorically, I could say the same about the Gallery. I hastened to add, however, lest he accuse me of a degree of arrogance to which I did not aspire, that I claimed little credit for this metamorphosis. It had come about, I said, and I now say it again, as the result of a felicitous combination of circumstances-a succession of sympathetic and supportive Ministers, sound and helpful fellow Trustees, and a dedicated and efficient staff headed by an innovative Director and a scholarly Deputy, all of them building, let it not be forgotten, upon the efforts of those who had gone before. For much of what has come to fruition in the last eight years, and for which my regime has been praised, had its genesis in the preceding decade, when Ken Goodwin, Lawrie Daws and Bill Palmer were already on the Board and Bruce Watson was already running the Foundation. That they -are all here tonight gives me great pleasure and so also does the presence of Ian Callinan, who made a_ significant contribution during the three years he was Trustee. His unexpected and cavalier removal from the Board did the Gallery a significant disservice and caused me much personal pain at the time, until I realised I had been appointed Chairman in exactly the same unexpected and cavalier fashion. On both occasions, it was simply a case of Queensland being Queensland. Indeed, Queensland, like the past, is another country. They do things differently there. It did not take me long to discover this after I arrived as a migrant from the deep south. Although I did not have to take a dictation test before being admitted-that remarkable piece of legislation designed to prevent foreigners, no matter how deserving, from sharing our bucolic bliss, was no longer on the Statute book-I did have to master a new vocabulary. I discovered that a Moreton Bay bug was not something you squashed, that a collie was not a sheep dog, or a bronco a horse, and that King Wally was not the nickname of the Governor of the day. I found a whole declension of strange nouns ending in 'ie' or 'y'. As well as 'collie', there was 'cossie', 'mozzie', 'pollie', 'possie', 'muddie', 'frillie', 'mushie', 'blowie', 'brekkie', 'cardie' and 'surfie', to name but a few, and a 'tilly' in one part of the State was a 'ute' in another. There was another declension of equally strange nouns ending in 'a'-'ekka', 'Gabba' and 'barra', all then unknown to me. Then there was Humpty Dumpty language, where the meaning was the opposite of the words used. Thus, 'Don't you worry about that', really meant that the matter was 174