The story
Parliament House is first of all a working legislature, the seat of Australia's federal parliament, set into Capital Hill in Canberra so that lawns run up over its roof. It was designed by the firm Mitchell, Giurgola and Thorp, led by the Italian-born architect Romaldo Giurgola, and opened on 9 May 1988, 87 years to the day after the first federal parliament was opened in 1901. Its public spaces double as a gallery for the Parliament House Art Collection, more than 6,000 works by Australian artists together with objects from the country's political history.
That first opening is the subject of its best-known painting. Tom Roberts, a leading painter of the Heidelberg School of Australian Impressionism, was commissioned to record the ceremony in Melbourne's Royal Exhibition Building, where Prince George, the future King George V, opened the parliament. Roberts spent two and a half years on it and finished it in London in 1903, with 269 individual portraits on a canvas about 5 metres wide. The Big Picture, as it is known, belongs to the British Royal Collection and has been on loan to the Australian parliament since 1957. In the new building it was given a purpose-built space in the foyer of the Main Committee Room.
In the Great Hall nearby hangs a tapestry about 20 metres wide, woven by hand in Melbourne from a painting by Arthur Boyd, one of Australia's major 20th-century artists, showing the eucalypt forest at Bundanon, his country property in New South Wales.
