Il grande quadro

On 9 May 1901, some 12,000 people packed the Royal Exhibition Building in Melbourne to watch the opening of the first Parliament of a newly federated Australia. The six colonies had become one nation only months earlier, and Tom Roberts was commissioned to record the ceremony. His contract set an almost impossible condition: the finished canvas had to contain at least 250 recognisable portraits, from the Duke of Cornwall down through governors and members. Roberts spent two and a half years on it, chasing sitters for individual likenesses and working on a canvas over 5 metres wide. That is how it earned its nickname, the Big Picture. Look into the crowd and it becomes a gallery of faces, each one a person who was actually in that hall the day the country began governing itself.