National Gallery of Australia

Australia's national gallery opened in Canberra in 1982, but its most famous moment came nine years earlier, before the building even existed. In 1973 the government paid 1.3 million dollars for Jackson Pollock's Blue Poles, a huge poured-paint canvas, and the price set off a real national argument about spending that much public money on American abstraction. The painting is now among the gallery's best-loved works, and worth many times what caused the fuss.

The gallery's deepest identity, though, is Australian. It holds one of the great collections of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander art, and near its entrance stands the Aboriginal Memorial, 200 hollow-log coffins made by artists from Arnhem Land, one for each year of European settlement up to the country's bicentenary in 1988.

The rest spans Australian and international art, from colonial painting to a sculpture garden set among native bushland by the lake.