Four Decades of Australian Art
When people think about Rockhampton, they are usually thinking about flooding, beef, or the fact that it is somewhere on the way between Brisbane and Mackay. The quality and breadth of its collection of Australian art probably is not even on their radar. It could have something to do with the Central Queensland attitude of not needing to be too boastful. Yes, we have a world-class collection of significant works of art by some of the greatest Australian artists to date, but we are not going to make a big song and dance about it. Until now that is.
The Rockhampton Art Gallery holds an unusually good collection for a regional centre. It is not the parochial smattering expected from an institution outside of a major metropolitan centre. Generally, if a smaller centre states that it holds a work from an established artist, it is usually just a working sketch, or an insignificant piece. Yet the small city of Rockhampton, a city of only just over 80,000 residents,1 can amass a collection featuring major works by some of the best known Australian artists, including Jeffrey Smart, John Brack, Fred Williams, Margaret Olley, John Olsen, Sidney Nolan, Arthur Boyd, and Grace Cossington Smith. It is quite clear that the title of the exhibition refers not only to the cream of the Rockhampton Art Gallery’s permanent collection, but the cream of almost half a century of Australian artistic practice as a whole.
The question that springs to mind is how did ‘Rocky’ do it? How does a regional Queensland gallery manage to build an important $14 million collection since the 1960s?2
Rex Pilbeam is not a name widely known outside