Art Gallery of South Australia

Stand for a moment on North Terrace and listen. Trams hum past behind you, and leaves move in the plane trees along the footpath. Ahead, a pale classical front rises with columns and a broad flight of steps. Cross that threshold and the air changes. It is cooler and quieter. Footsteps soften on the floors, and voices drop without anyone asking them to. This is the Art Gallery of South Australia, and for well over a century it has been one of the places where this city comes to look closely.

First, look at the street itself. North Terrace is Adelaide's cultural boulevard. Within a short walk you have the State Library, the South Australian Museum and the old sandstone buildings of the University of Adelaide. The gallery sits in that line of public institutions, shoulder to shoulder with its neighbours. Nobody placed it here by accident. Colonial Adelaide was a planned city, and its founders wanted learning and culture to sit on the main avenue — not tucked away down a side street.

The gallery's story begins in 1881. That year it opened in modest rooms inside the public library building, under the name National Gallery of South Australia. Two young royal visitors, the grandsons of Queen Victoria, performed the opening. One of them, Prince George, would later become King George the Fifth. So a future king helped launch this collection when it was only a handful of rooms and a few dozen works of art.

The building in front of you came later. It opened in 1900, and much of the money came from the estate of Sir Thomas Elder. Elder was a wealthy pastoralist and businessman, and he left large bequests to cultural causes in the colony. His name still marks the Elder Wing. The gallery took its present name, the Art Gallery of South Australia, in 1967. Over the decades new wings have extended it, but the old classical front still faces the street.

Here is the first thing many visitors miss. Today the collection holds tens of thousands of works. That makes it one of the largest public art collections in Australia. Only a fraction can be on the walls at any one time. So the rooms you walk through today are a selection, and they change. Come back in a year and you may meet a different set of paintings and objects in familiar spaces.

The heart of the building, for many people, is Australian art. In the Elder Wing the paintings are often hung in the old salon style. That means frames are stacked close together, high up the walls, almost from floor to ceiling. It can feel crowded at first. But this is how nineteenth century audiences saw art, and it rewards slow looking. Your eye moves from a portrait to a landscape to a still life, and connections start to appear.

Look out for a painting by Tom Roberts called A break away! It shows a drover on horseback racing to stop thirsty sheep that rush towards water in a dry landscape. Dust rises and hooves strike the ground. Roberts was one of the painters of the Heidelberg School. That group of artists in the late nineteenth century tried to paint Australian light and land on their own terms, not through European eyes. Stand back from the canvas and you can almost feel the heat.

South Australia also has its own painters. Hans Heysen lived in the Adelaide Hills, and he spent his life painting the great river red gums and the dry ranges further north. His trees have pale, twisting trunks that seem to glow in the sun. If you drive into the hills after your visit, you will recognise those same trees by the roadside. That is the second surprise here. Many of the landscapes on these walls lie only an hour or two away from where you stand.

The gallery is also home to a major collection of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander art. Australia's First Peoples have made art on this continent for tens of thousands of years, on rock, bark, bodies and sand. Here you can see both older works and new ones. The gallery runs a festival called Tarnanthi, which focuses on contemporary Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander art. The word comes from the language of the Kaurna people, the traditional owners of the Adelaide plains. It carries the idea of something emerging, like the first light of day.

Beyond Australia, the rooms travel widely. You can find European painting and sculpture, decorative arts, and works from across Asia. There are ceramics, metalwork, furniture and textiles. Some visitors walk straight to the big canvases and miss the smaller cases. Slow down near the decorative arts. A glazed bowl or a carved chair often tells you as much about daily life in another century as any grand painting does.

The gallery also looks forward. It presents the Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art, a regular survey of new work by living artists. During a Biennial, installations may fill whole rooms. You might find sound, video or sculpture in spaces that usually hold quiet oil paintings. The contrast between old and new is part of the experience. In one room you see a colonial landscape, and in the next an artist answers that same land in a very different voice.

Notice, too, how the building handles light. Older galleries like this one were designed before electric light was common, so many rooms were built to catch daylight from above. Look up at the ceilings as you move between wings. Some spaces feel tall and airy. Others are darker and more intimate, to protect fragile works on paper and textiles. The building guides your mood without you quite noticing.

Before you leave, pause at the top of the front steps. Behind you are thousands of works, gathered over more than a century by a small colonial city that wanted art on its main street. In front of you, North Terrace carries on with its trams, students and plane trees. As you walk away, look again at the columns and the pale stone. Then look at the light on the street. You may find that you see it a little differently now.