Actually, as I learned when I arrived at the Gallery foyer, she hadn't quite finished, since she'd failed to find the Varilaku exhibition of Pacific arts from the Solomon Islands, tucked away in a corner of the gallery she'd failed to notice.
A spell in the foyer while she headed in that direction gave me a chance to make a slight reduction in the tapping backlog, and from there it was off to the National Portrait Gallery, which didn't have a whole lot of interest for Madam, but I found plenty to look at wandering through the gallery while she took a spell.
The Portrait Gallery's remit is, on the surface, rather limited, to explore the identity, history, creativity and culture of the Australian people through portraiture, but what's on display in the gallery delivers a number of reminders about people you may have heard of along the way but forgotten alongside the portraits showing more obvious candidates.
To Madam most of those names would have been meaningless, so it's hardly surprising she found the Gallery interesting but largely incomprehensible. It might have been different if she'd been with someone who was in a position to take the time and energy to explain who the people were, which would have entailed a lot of back story filling, or had the time and inclination to read the detailed biographical notes beside each portrait without having someone at hand who was inclined to take a glance at most of what was there without hanging around to read and reflect. Which is, I think, the main point. To get the most out of the Gallery you either need a fair degree of background knowledge or the time to stop and read the detail you're unfamiliar with, which may entail repeat visits (which wasn't, of course, an option available to us). More...
