Melbourne 1956, Eric Westbrook: Melbourne 1956 at the NGV

Director's Foreword
Eric Westbrook
Christopher Heathcote

The award to Melbourne of the 1956 Olympic Games changed the city in spirit and in face. From its great days in the nineteenth century when it was the 'Marvellous Melbourne', it had gradually sunk through financial crises, war and the Depression into apathetic self-distrust, especially in relation to Sydney. Melburnians made, and seemed to encourage people from other places to make, sad jokes about the weather, the river, the trams and the antiquated liquor laws; only football remained unique and glorious, and so became a state religion, waited for and celebrated every Saturday in winter. Then, after the first moments of disbelief, when it realised that the eyes of a great part of the world were upon it, the city began to feel that it might be glorious again.

I had been in the city briefly in the previous year when I was interviewed for the post of Director of the National Gallery of Victoria. On that visit, I had been occupied with professional engagements and hardly saw a cross-section of society, but when I took up my duties on 1 January 1956 in the lull of high summer, I had time to look and listen. From the people I met, especially the artists, I learned enough of 'Miserable Melbourne' to sense and appreciate the changes that were emerging.

Waiting for me was a letter from the Organising Committee for the Games telling me that I had been added to the Fine Arts Sub-committee on which my predecessor Sir Daryl Lindsay still sat. At my first meeting I found that many of the major decisions had already been made. Paintings, prints and drawings were to be shown at the Gallery, but sculpture was to be divorced from them and be married to architecture at Wilson Hall at the University of Melbourne, as if it its only function was to decorate buildings. It had also been decided that the exhibitions were to be national and historical. With my limited knowledge of Australian art I could hardly argue with the former, but from what I had seen and was seeing in Melbourne, I believed that the aim should have been to put on a contemporary exhibition, not—as Bernard Smith suggested in the guide to the exhibitions— '[to tell] the story of a beginning'. It was interesting that the sculpture, unlike the paintings, was predominantly by living artists. The display of Aboriginal art would be confined to traditional work, which was all that was available at the time.

It was pleasing, of course, that some of the younger artists (Brack, Nolan and Arthur Boyd) were to be included, but I was sure with some more diligent visiting of studios and lofts, more talking to the young painters and sculptors—as was done later when the new building opened with The Field (artists are always the first to know the new talents)—a more exciting exhibition could have been mounted and a real basis for discussion could have opened up, more in keeping with the wave of optimism inspired by the Games.

Meanwhile, on the streets different faces were seen and different languages heard, as officials and administrators came in advance of the athletes to set up their Melbourne headquarters. The local people responded as if they felt their responsibility as hosts, and several of my friends told me of their astonishment at being addressed by policemen as 'Sir'.

The big social occasion for our guests was to be the government reception at the Gallery. One morning, soon after I arrived, I was told by my secretary that a group of men were going through the building measuring the rooms and questioning the attendants. I went down to find an elegantly dressed young man standing in the middle of a circle of acolytes giving orders that obviously related to some re-arrangement of the galleries. I introduced myself and, in return, was handed a card announcing the presenter as the 'Organising Secretary' for the Games and bearing a name which then was unknown to me but which, some years later, Australia would recognise as that of a prominent and controversial politician. I asked politely what he and his team were doing and he answered, less politely, that he was arranging 'this place' for the reception. As I approached, I had heard him talking about bars and tables, flowers and plants, making sweeping gestures towards our major pictures. Impatiently, I was told that he would be 'moving things around'. As calmly as I could, I said that he would do nothing of the kind without the permission of the Trustees, and that I was sure that they would agree with me that our major works would stay where they were and not be hidden by potted palms.

It was perhaps fortunate that, at that time, the Gallery was empty of visitors, as our exchange became heated and, finally, I asked 'Organising Secretary' and his followers to leave, adding that the Trustees and I would expect an official request for any changes to the arrangements of the Gallery. In the event, we received nothing and it was not until much later that I was called upon by a pleasant man from the City Council who said that it was his job to make the arrangements for catering and 'decorations', and with whom we were able to come to an amicable agreement whereby none of the collection was hidden or put in danger.

The reception was a great success, especially for the Gallery, as the then President of the International Olympic Committee was Mr Avery Brundage, a distinguished American collector of Asian art who publicly praised the collection and admitted that the fine pair of Chinese tomb carvings would have gone to him if we had not bought them first through the Felton Bequest. The only sour faces I met during that splendid evening were those of the 'Organising Secretary' and one of my senior colleagues who pronounced the occasion as 'too arty'.

During the Games, I took parties of competitors and officials round the Gallery. They were polite and attentive, but it was clear that some of the visitors, especially those from communist countries, were puzzled and sometimes shocked by the contemporary works. The task of trying to convince them that these were not decadent or a fraud was complicated, of course, by having to speak through interpreters.

The only really difficult moment came not with one of these works, but when I was speaking to a group of Russians and we arrived at Tiepolo's The Banquet of Cleopatra. Thinking to quicken their interest, I informed them that this great picture had once been in the Hermitage Museum in Leningrad (now St Petersburg), from which it had been sold to Melbourne. Immediately this fact was translated, the political officer who accompanied their team everywhere jumped in front of me and spoke passionately in Russian for several minutes. When I asked the obviously embarrassed interpreter what had been the reason for this speech, he said that there must be some mistake as the Soviet people loved their cultural treasures. Before I could reply, the party was led away by its minder and I had to pick up the thread in front of a work that had once been owned by an English aristocrat. But I still feel that somewhere in the course of the oration I had been branded a liar.

From the lighting of the Olympic torch to the end, when by a stroke of genius the competitors marched round the stadium not in national teams but mixed groups from every country, the Games themselves were magnificent. In spite of the newspaper headlines reporting the ugly Suez Crisis and the heroic Hungarian resistance, Melbourne felt that it had added something important to an understanding between peoples and could once again lay claim to that long-lost adjective 'Marvellous'.