Plan a Road Trip to Shoalhaven’s Revamped Bundanon Art Museum, Home to a $40 million Collection of Paintings by Arthur Boyd and His Contemporaries

Four months ago, Bundanon Art Museum reopened its doors to the public with a new, state-of-the-art fire- and flood-resistant gallery. Its second season, Parallel Landscapes, opened last week.

The museum, located on a 1000-hectare property bequeathed to the Australian people by painter Arthur Boyd and his wife Yvonne in 1993, has undergone a major revamp. The government-funded Bundanon Trust – which now manages a $40 million collection of works by Boyd and his family, plus fellow members of the Angry Penguins modernist art clique, including Sidney Nolan, John Perceval and Joy Hester – built a new, partly subterranean gallery to house its artworks and new commissions.

The imposing concrete monolith is joined by the Bridge – a stunning, 160-metre blackbutt timber structure that houses 32 simple, elegant rooms and a 64-seat dining room. The new structures are a few kilometres downriver of the property’s existing 1866 homestead and Boyd’s studio, where the painter lived and worked.

Set on the winding Shoalhaven, a little way inland from Nowra, the museum is one of just eight National Collecting Institutions – landmark galleries, museums and media archives trusted to preserve the country’s most significant and precious cultural works.

Parallel Landscapes is made up of three exhibitions, presented side by side. Arthur Boyd: Landscape of the Soul explores the artist’s lifelong legacy of landscape painting. The Hidden, a new commission by the Bundanon Trust, is an immersive work of sound and imagery by Tim Georgeson and composer William Barton that “resonates with spirits evoked from the natural world”. And The River and the Sea is a survey of paintings by the late Yuin artist Reuben Ernest “Uncle Ben” Brown, an advocate for Indigenous empowerment as well as collaboration between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people.

“We’re bringing together a variety of views of what landscape or country might be,” Bundanon’s head curator, Sophie O’Brien, tells Broadsheet. “I really wanted to put into parallel the idea that landscape … can range from being an appreciative and joyous “en plein air” [open-air] moment to mapping territory. It’s been used in lots of different ways – ownership, advertisement – and we all know landscape painting has had a lot of roles in the way it has played out in culture,” she says.

Landscape of the Soul – curated by Barry Pearce, emeritus curator of Australian art at the Art Gallery of NSW and a friend of Boyd – tells the story of the artist’s way of working, as well as some of his greatest influences, from his home, family and childhood to art, architecture, literature and beyond. It’s also the first time in two years that this collection of landscape paintings has returned to Bundanon, after a national tour. “It’s been our little beacon of Bundanon while we’ve closed, so we’re very happy for it to come back to its new home,” O’Brien says.

To accompany the gallery’s second season, executive chef Doug Innes-Will, who joined Bundanon’s Ramox Cafe in March, has created a signature dish inspired by Boyd’s 1993 painting Peter’s Fish and Crucifixion. “Of course, Shoalhaven is a great place for seafood,” Innes-Will says, “so I’ll just say there’ll be a fair bit of seafood, with one particular element of a fish that links to Boyd’s painting.”

As well as the museum and cafe offerings, a series of public programs is running alongside Parallel Landscapes until November 6. Highlights include an abstract painting workshop by artist Bonnie Porter Greene, and a talk on supporting local First Nations enterprises, journeying towards food sovereignty and caring for Country by local Aboriginal women’s organisation Waminda. Plus, Bundanon Writers Week features guests such as forager Diego Bonetto, author Kate Forsyth and children’s writer Allison Tait.

For visitors who choose to stay at the museum overnight, “It’s pretty magical to wake up and just hear the sounds of the bush and see the river,” O’Brien says. At the moment, guests can stay as part of a package of tours and cultural experiences. “There’s a lot of fantastic silence that goes on here, too.”

Parallel Landscapes runs from July 2 to November 6. Entry is $18. Admission on weekends also includes entry to the homestead site.

bundanon.com.au