Vew from the chair: Speeches of Richard WL Austin

The exhibition, however, has a wider significance because it tells us something about Australia itself. It is the first Renoir retrospective exhibition internationally in ten years; the paintings come from seven countries in addition to Australia--Canada, Denmark, France, Britain, Japan, Spain and the United States; it is presented, as I have said, by a Japanese company; it is sponsored by a Singaporean airline; it has been put together by an English curator, John House, from the Courtauld Institute; and it is being opened by the Director of one of the world's greatest galleries, the National Gallery in London, Neil Macgregor, who, I suspect, is himself a Scot. If Australia were, as some people would have us believe, a banana republic, a country without an identity of its own, a country at the Z end of the world-if I may gentrify a rather more fundamental word-this exhibition would never have come within sight of the horizon and there would be no team of distinguished visitors here in Brisbane this evening. What this exhibition says is that there is no need for us to entertain self-doubts or feelings of inferiority in terms of culture, identity or geography. It says that we should feel proud to be Australians and that the denigrators should stay silent! After all, the Antipodes does not refer only to people and places in the Southern Hemisphere. It simply means those on the opposite side of the world. So it is especially fitting that this exhibition should be opened by an antipodean from the U.K., whence we have derived no small part of our culture and tradition. Mr Macgregor is here not only as the Director of the National Gallery. He is an art historian of considerable distinction. He has had academic training in French and German at New College, Oxford; in philosophy at the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris; in law at the University of Edinburgh; and in seventeenth- and nineteenth– century art at the Courtauld Institute. He has been Editor of the Burlington Magazine and he has an Honorary Doctorate from the University of York-a record that it would be hard to better. Last year he delivered the Gertrude Langer Lecture in this Gallery and said, amongst other memorable things, that the purpose of public pictures was to offer refreshment as well as education. I feel sure that we will all be refreshed tonight. 25 Speech to introduce the Hon. Dean Wells, Minister for the Arts, at the dinner held in honour of the opening of 'Renoir: Master Impressionist' at Denison's Restaurant, the Sheraton Brisbane Hotel and Towers, 29 July 1994 It is always a pleasure to have the task of introducing the Hon. Dean Wells, the Minister for the Arts, because it is so easy to say nice things about him, both in his capacity as Minister and personally. He has been a good friend of the Gallery from the beginning of his tenure of office, and he is now, I like to think, a friend of mine as well. As many of you will know, I have, for some time, been trying to persuade him to become 'the Mitterand of the South' by providing us with an extension to the Gallery, 94