In March l966 , a committee of inquiry , consisting of Daryl Lindsay ( chairman) , Henry Basten, Joseph Burke, Tristan Buesst , Robert Campbell, William Dargie, J. O. Fairfax and Douglas Pratt , presented its report to government on the need for a National Art Gallery in Canberra .
By Art Correspondent Ponsonby Willis
It pointed out the history of public art galleries in each of the states varied . In 1861, the first such gallery had opened in Melbourne , and eight years later became the National Gallery of Victoria.
In New South Wales , in l875, four years after an art academy had been formed by a group of private citizens, a government-sponsored gallery was established in temporary quarters. The first court of the Art Gallery of New South Wales opened in 1897 .
In South Australia , its collection had first been displayed in temporary quarters, opened to the public in 1881 , a National Gallery of South Australia erected in 1900.
The Tasmanian Art Gallery opened in Hobart in l895. Queensland's Art Gallery began in 1895 and at the time of the report was housed in a wing of the Exhibition Building, Brisbane . A small collection of pictures had been displayed for the first time in 1895 at the Museum building ,Perth .
Most of the early art societies had been short lived, the first, in Sydney, influenced by John Skinner Prout. Indifference to the arts was a problem in early days -unlike currently .
The report pointed out an art gallery had been included in the master plan for the capital city of Canberra . Australian architect Walter Burley Griffin, born in America , had allowed for two galleries in his winning plan for Canberra.
From l913 onward there had been little mention of the proposed national gallery because of WWl, the Depression , WWll and post-war priorities .
At the time of the report there was already a Commonwealth National Collection of Art , the Commonwealth Art Advisory Board having been actively buying pictures , consisting of Australian portraits, prints, lithographs, colonial period paintings , Impressionist paintings , academic and modern paintings , sculptures, oil and watercolours of other countries .
There were many hundreds of oils, watercolours, prints , lithographs of the colonial period (Nan Kivell Australiana Collection ) , the Ellis Rowan Collection of 1000 flower drawings , architect , artist , writer Hardy Wilson's drawings and other paintings in the custody of various institutions .
FOOTNOTES : Due to overseas commitments , artist Russell Drysdale, a member of the committee of inquiry, was unable to attend meetings, but made written submissions . The Special Collections section at the Eddie Mabo Memorial Library, James Cook University , Townsville , contains Drysdale artwork and part of his Australiana book collection ... In the list of people who made submissions to the committee were Brian Callan , of Alice Springs, Northern Territory and Mr A. Vigeant , Quebec, Canada .
