Vew from the chair: Speeches of Richard WL Austin

First of all I want to thank Mr Whitney for what he has just said and for the support which the ANZ Bank has provided for this exhibition.' All the galleries in which it is being shown, including the Queensland Art Gallery, are most appreciative of the Bank's generosity. As James Mollison has said in his foreword to the catalogue, 'Without it the exhibition would not have been possible'. The Bank has done a lot for art. It is an honorary life benefactor of the National Gallery of Victoria and its Chief Executive, Will Bailey, is President of that Gallery's Council of Trustees. James Mollison has kindly agreed to open this exhibition tonight and it gives me great pleasure to have the task of introducing him. He is an old friend from my Victorian days and I hold him in high regard, as, indeed, do all those connected with the Australian art world. In this Gallery we always try to get distinguished people to open our exhibitions and I think it is fair to say that we usually succeed. But it is not often that we have an opener as distinguished as James Mollison in terms of the subject matter of the exhibition itself. He, as Director of the National Gallery of Victoria, was responsible for organising the exhibition, and he is looked upon as one of the great authorities on Australian painters, amongst whom Frederick McCubbin lies at the very heart. As most of you will know, James Mollison, before he moved to Victoria, was the first Director of the National Gallery in Canberra and was responsible, almost single-handed, for putting together the great collections from all parts of the world, which now grace its walls. For more than a decade before the Gallery was opened in 1982 by Her Majesty the Queen, he had the challenging and fascinating responsibility of spending on average about $4 million dollars a year on the purchase of significant works of art of all kinds. For all those years his acquisitions were hidden away in a warehouse in the Canberra suburb of Fyshwick and I vividly remember, when I visited him there in the mid 1970s, my astonishment at their variety and quality. He naturally gave Australian art a high priority and the result is now the single most important collection ever assembled, covering as it does not only paintings and sculpture, but also works on paper, prints, photographs and folk art, indeed the whole gamut of visual culture in this country. I have always believed that it is this Australian Collection that will ultimately be regarded as his greatest achievement-monumentum aere perenius-a monument more lasting than bronze, as the Roman poet Horace once said of his own works. And I was interested to see that Robert Hughes, in his speech at the I 0th Anniversary Dinner in Canberra last weekend, made the same point: 'The National Gallery of Australia ought to tell you about Australia first off. And thanks to its policies ... it does, in marvellous depth and detail'. But controversy often takes precedence over other things and when most people think of the National Gallery they think of Blue poles, the painting by Jackson Pollock, which was bought in 1973 for what was then regarded as the enormous sum of $1.3 million, shocking the old guard and delighting the new. It was a measure of James Mollison's courage that he ignored criticism, and of his foresight that his judgment has been amply vindicated by time. Blue poles is now worth ten or fifteen times its purchase price. But if Blue poles was the biggest fish he landed, 82