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Canberra, ACT 2600, Australia
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Magna Carta
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On this day eight hundred years ago at Runnymede near Windsor, King John signed Magna Carta.
Banksia and grevillea
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Portraits can render honour to remarkable men and women, but there are other ways.
Cocky McGrath
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The long life and few words of a vice-regal cockatoo
Longest reign
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Queen Elizabeth II is now the longest-reigning British sovereign
Missing Persons
Thomas Woolner in Australia
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Desperately seeking Woolner medallions
Waterloo and Mrs. Moore
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Beyond the centenary of the ANZAC landings at Gallipoli, a number of other notable anniversaries converge this year. Waterloo deserves a little focussed consideration, for in the decades following 1815 numerous Waterloo and Peninsular War veterans came to Australia.
Angkor Wat
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Nothing quite prepares the first-time visitor to Cambodia for the scale and grandeur of the monuments of the ancient Khmer civilisation of Angkor.
Happy New Year
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This year (in March) we will celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the formal establishment of the National Portrait Gallery. In the life of institutions, twenty years is not a long time.
Remembering Ursula
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I first knew Dr. Hoff when in 1986, long after retiring from the National Gallery of Victoria, she taught a graduate seminar on Rembrandt.
The personal and the historical
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Where do we draw a line between the personal and the historical? Although she died in Melbourne in 1975, when I was not quite eleven years old, I have the vividest memories of my maternal grandmother Helen Borthwick.
The consolations of religion
A bushranger meets his maker, 6 January 1826
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James McCabe provides proof that hanging wasn’t necessarily a fate reserved for the perpetrators of murder and other deeds of darkest hue.
Indexing, the art of
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The first index I created was for my first book, and, to my astonishment, that was almost twenty-five years ago.
Lord Kitchener
Imperial strategist
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Once central to military strategy and venerated in patriotic households, Lord Kitchener is now largely forgotten.
Not perspiring, but glowing.
The cultural history of radiance.
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Angus Trumble explores the creative manifestations of radiance.
Very fine and very like
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When did notions of very fine and very like become separate qualities of a portrait? And what happens to 'very like' in the age of photographic portraiture?
The Bath Butterfly
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The caricaturist and engraver James Gillray's biting satires about Sir Joseph Banks.