When the National Portrait Gallery (NPG) opened in Canberra last December, more thoughtfulness was evident in its bookshop than the hang. The volumes are arranged by subject and in alphabetical order: the images accord to no principle beyond décor. Here are five writers; there, four scientists. The randomness of the whole embodies a culture of distraction. The root of this muddle is an evasion of whether the Gallery is to be guided by aesthetics or museology. The want of clarity is compounded by concern among staff not to be identified with a history museum.

Beyond these peculiarities, the objection to a portrait gallery for Australia is immanent in its reason for being. The enterprise began in 1992 as a travelling exhibition of ‘Uncommon Australians’, which I dissected in the September 1992 issue of 24 Hours under the headline ‘An Exhibition of Uncommon Snobbery’. My summation was that the undertaking combined ‘bad history and inadequate psychology with inferior art’. Nothing has improved.