Vew from the chair: Speeches of Richard WL Austin

not as the President did, by expelling his Treasury from its building to enable the Richelieu Wing of the Louvre to come into existence, but simply by leaning on our Treasury to provide the necessary funds. For a man of the Minister's ability and charm this should not be difficult. I was interested, therefore, to read in last Tuesday's Courier-Mail that I had, and I quote, 'been into the ear' of the Minister about more space for the Gallery. Frankly, this is an expression I have never heard before-except in relation to earwigs. I suspect the Couriers wordsmith, Toe O'Connor, was not keeping an eye on the linguistics that day. I did flatter myself, however, that I 'had the ear' of the Minister-an expression much used by Baldessare Castiglione in The Courtier, that book on how to make friends and influence people long before Dale Carnegie got the idea, when he started to refer to me as the 'Louis Quatorze of the South'-not, I am glad to say, the Louis Seize-so perhaps there is hope for an extension after all. And now, ladies and gendemen, I have great pleasure in introducing the Minister and asking him to address us, secure in the knowledge that you will 'be all ears' when listening to what he has to say. 26 Speech to introduce Mrs Elizabeth Churcher, AO, Director, National Gallery of Australia, at the opening of 'Fairweather', 30 September 1994 NOTE: THIS EXHIBITION FOCUSED ON THE WORK OF THE MAJOR AUSTRALIAN ARTIST, IAN FAIRWEATHER, WHOSE MOST IMPORTANT WORKS WERE EXECUTED DURING HIS STAY ON BRIBIE ISLAND, NEAR BRISBANE, QUEENSLAND. ORGANISED BY THE QUEENSLAND ART GALLERY, THE EXHIBITION WAS ALSO SHOWN AT THE NATIONAL GALLERY OF VICTORIA AND THE ART GALLERY OF NEW SOUTH WALES. I feel sure that you are all waiting with understandable impatience to hear what Mrs Churcher, the Director of the National Gallery in Canberra, has to say about the exhibition. I shall, therefore, be brief, but I do want to make a few comments before introducing her. When I spoke at the Renoir opening a couple of months ago, I said that great exhibitions needed generous sponsors. This is certainly a great exhibition but it has no generous sponsor. It is, of course, indemnified as usual by the Queensland Government and it has been transported by the Commonwealth Department of Administrative Services, and I thank both these entities for their help; but sadly, and I think surprisingly, none of the Australian companies that we approached was prepared to sponsor it. We had to fall back on our own in-house sponsor, the Exhibitions Development Fund, which, as most of you will know, was created with Japanese money-an ironical situation, one might be forgiven for thinking, for such a quintessentially Australian exhibition as this one. 95