1 day ago
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September 13, 2025 — 12:00am
Before we go behind the scenes, here’s the scene. It’s a sharp spring morning, blue sky and crisp air, the kind of morning that has you forgiving Melbourne for its capricious capers with weather. We’re out the door of the StandardX Hotel in Fitzroy, an inner suburb with soul. They could have built the hotel on one of the main streets, but instead tucked it away down the side, sandwiched by wedding-cake sized terrace houses and apartments that once were warehouses.
Already immersed in the city’s urban culture, we’re about to go deeper with Cultural Attractions of Australia – a collection of curated, behind-the-scenes experiences for travellers to experience Australian culture with some depth. First up for us is the National Gallery of Victoria and its Indigenous Australian collection.
A brief ride in the taxi and we’re at Federation Square, into the gallery ahead of the usual opening hours for a tour with Michael Gentle, NGV curator for Australian and First Nations art. We’re in an exhibition space called Wurrdha Marra, meaning “many mobs” in Wurundjeri.
The stories are tens of thousands of years old, but most of the mediums here for telling them – the paint and the canvas – weren’t used until European contact. “This gallery is showcasing that Aboriginal art can be anything it wants to be,” Gentle says.
“Anything made by an Aboriginal artist is Aboriginal art, but it is up to the artist if they want to identify as Aboriginal [some reject the ‘label’].”
He leads us to Destiny Deacon’s work, an artist the NGV describes as “one of Australia’s boldest and most acclaimed contemporary artists”. From Deacon comes the term BLAK, and here we see her work Blak lik mi where she “turns the colonial gaze back on the coloniser”.
We move on to the massive artwork by Emily Kam Kngwarray – Anwerlarr anganenty (Big Yam Dreaming) – white lines dancing across the canvas. “She is 100 per cent Australia’s most important contemporary artist,” Gentle says.
The NGV describes this as an “audacious monochrome work, painted continuously over two days in her penultimate year, [it] recalls her batiks of 1977–88 in which fluid lines derived from women’s awely ceremonies prevail over dots”.
Then we’re in the Bark Salon, a collection of 182 works (just a sixth of the NGV’s collection) spanning six decades in the making and hung here from floor to ceiling – “they tell many stories, but there’s always a connection to country,” Gentle says.
Entry to the gallery is free, and the interpretive notes good, but this expert tour with Michael Gentle reveals so much more about the artists and their art, and all this with the space to ourselves, before it opens to the public.
Something they won’t see comes next – we’re across the river to NGV International and into the Conservation Department – the biggest in the Southern Hemisphere with 30 staff and vast, quiet spaces for them to pursue their work.
Their tool kits are astonishing – among them are dental devices, microscopes and tiny brushes used by Japanese papermakers. They might search as far as Rajasthan to collect pigments and tools to restore the Royal Collection of paintings held here.
Conservator Carl Villis is at work on a 16th-century canvas, Romantic Landscape with Mercury and Argus, by Salvator Rosa. He explains that restoration embraces the natural life of the artwork, so it looks like a repair hasn’t even been done – “it’s almost like replacing lost pixels”.
It isn’t quite as simple as being good with your hands and fond of art – many of the conservators have both fine art and science degrees. The former to know and understand the artist they might be working with, the latter so they know the intricacies of the materials involved.
Back in the gallery proper, we stop for some high tea and sparkling wine – it’s still morning, but an alternative here with the NGV and Cultural Attractions of Australia would be a private evening tour of the NGV’s international collection, followed by dinner in the gallery, alongside one of its masterpieces – Giambattista Tiepolo’s The Banquet of Cleopatra.
We’ve no more time for Cleopatra, though. We’re out of the NGV and back in Melbourne’s sunshine to turn our focus to an equally important cultural institution for this city – the Melbourne Cricket Ground (MCG). The stadium is well-known for hosting huge crowds at AFL, cricket, rugby and soccer matches, but it also contains a major museum and a remarkable collection of sporting memorabilia.
Host stadium for the 1956 Olympics, we’re behind the scenes again, deep under the stands to admire the Keeper’s Collection. The Sports Museum above us has just 2 per cent of the total collection. Down here, in the archives and stores, I’m standing in front of some gymnastic equipment from the 1956 Games and tempted by a podium from the 2006 Commonwealth Games.
There are Melbourne Cups on the shelf, giant Olympic rings from 1956, plastic-wrapped and propped up in the storeroom. The conservators here also have their challenges – there’s a 1956 Olympic road racing cycle, but the rubber on its thin tyres is starting to perish. No such problem for the shirt of our youngest Australian Olympian, 13-year-old Ian Johnston, who coxed the men’s rowing pairs in Rome, 1960.
Moving upstairs to the Australian Sports Museum, we see the suit Cathy Freeman wore when she won gold in Sydney 2000, and a glass case that has hundreds of the 40,000-odd letters of encouragement sent to Ian Thorpe at those same Olympics.
You get a green and gold sweatband as part of your entry, and it’ll recall your results as you take on some of Australia’s greatest athletes (virtually) kicking the footy, climbing or surfing. You can even hear the Warnie story from (an unfortunately virtual) Shane Warne.
Up a few levels, and we’re now in the Melbourne Cricket Club – one of Australia’s oldest and largest sports clubs. Popular? The MCC has about 100,000 full and restricted members and almost 200,000 on the waiting list.
Into the MCC library and one of the club’s volunteer librarians shows us the oldest book in their collection – a dictionary dated to 1611 that actually has a mention of cricket.
Our MCG Premium Access tour also takes us on to the actual turf of the MCG oval; something a standard tour won’t permit. Here you can let your sporting dreams loose, be it hitting a six for a win in The Ashes or an after-the-siren goal in the AFL grand final.
These are unusually deep tours that CAOA organise - I wonder if they can add either of those moments to the itinerary?
THE DETAILS
TOUR
The National Gallery of Victoria’s “First Nations Art from the NGV Collection: Gallery and Conservation Experience”, includes the Conservation experience, a bespoke tour of First Nations art and design, led by an NGV curator, or a curated NGV International tour, from $2000 a person, for a minimum two and a maximum 10 guests.
At the Melbourne Cricket Ground, the “MCG Keepers Collection Tour”, includes a 45-minute walkthrough of the Australian Sports Museum Collections with a member of the museum team, from $175 a person; the “MCG Premium Access Tour”, includes access to the MCG’s turf and cricket viewing rooms and the Melbourne Cricket Club, from $175 a person, for a minimum two and a maximum 10 guests.
See culturalattractionsofaustralia.com
STAY
The StandardX Hotel is at 62 Rose Street, Fitzroy. Rooms from $195. See standardx.com
The writer was a guest of Cultural Attractions of Australia.
Not all artworks and exhibits mentioned are on permanent display.
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