Bridge set to put Arthur Boyd’s Bundanon on the map
Hopes are high that the striking new addition to Arthur Boyd’s Bundanon home will become a cultural drawcard.
Bundanon’s The Bridge pops up on a poster in my local shopping centre. The word’s out that Melbourne architect Kerstin Thompson’s trestle bridge-inspired structure, a bold addition to Arthur Boyd’s old place near Nowra on the NSW south coast, is open for business. It slides into my social-media feeds too. The marketing campaign is in full swing ahead of the “reimagined” Bundanon’s official opening, which was scheduled for this weekend until the weather gods intervened. About $34m has been spent turning Arthur and Yvonne Boyd’s 1993 gift to the nation into a compelling cultural drawcard.
I already feel oddly familiar with the building, also housing a cafe and creative learning centre, even before arriving at the 1000ha site. I wind down a forested slope, almost licked by bushfire during that nerve-jangling 2019-20 Black Summer when Bundanon’s $46.5m art collection comprising about 4000 items (including 1448 Arthur Boyd works) was hastily evacuated to safe storage in Sydney (it will trickle back to the site over coming months, with the secure storage area visible to visitors). From this vantage point, I spy The Bridge on the slope opposite. I continue on to drop my luggage at the door, but as I zip past The Bridge’s spindly footings my mouth drops open.
For here’s the thing I never gleaned from the promotional images. The Bridge is immense. I’ve read the dimensions – 160m long by 9m wide – but the enormity didn’t sink in. It’s like a giant artist has thrown down a charcoal stick and here it is, firmly wedged across a gully, casting a colossal shadow.
The Bridge joins a collection of existing buildings that include cottages and the Glenn Murcutt-designed Education Centre. Lurking at the river end is another addition from Thompson. The Art Museum is a fireproof, partially subterranean gallery so unobtrusive you barely notice it upon arrival. The inaugural exhibition, From Impulse to Action (showing until June 12), focuses on drawing (to the dismay of some early visitors who publicly bemoaned that Boyd’s landscape paintings weren’t on show). “The Homestead’s open and that’s got plenty of paintings in it,” says Sophie O’Brien, head of curatorial and learning.
Bundanon, so little known most people think you’re talking about Bundanoon in the Southern Highlands, is almost the last place in Australia you’d expect to find a high-art drawcard. The Shoalhaven region’s demographics are changing but it still has many low-income households, with Nowra-Bomaderry being a pocket where people live in significant hardship. Nowra, the nearest big town, isn’t regarded as a cultural beacon, although that’s changing too, with an excellent mural trail that includes Boyd’s image on a newsagency’s rear wall. Last year’s opening of Ngununggula, Southern Highlands Regional Gallery in Bowral, 70-minutes north of Bundanon, means art aficionados can now embark on a rip-roaring weekend away.
Bundanon’s chief executive, Rachel Kent, has lofty ambitions for the facility, and hopes it will become an international art destination on par with Japan’s art islands in the Seto Inland Sea, Denmark’s Louisiana Museum of Modern Art near Copenhagen and Dia Beacon in upstate New York. It’s an undeniably high goal, yet it makes the museum’s location less important; indeed, the journey becomes part of the experience. Certainly, the effort required to reach the site – a 2½-hour drive from Sydney, a little longer from Canberra, and you pretty much need wheels to reach it – didn’t stop 700 people from flocking during the (re)opening weekend in late January. So many guests have booked into The Bridge’s 32 almost monastic guestrooms (two-night packages are available only on select dates) you can’t get a reservation until August.
The accommodation, which features ceilings and walls painted in the exact shades of teal blue and olive green Boyd fancied for his Shoalhaven landscapes, face either the forest or the river. I recommend the latter. I set my alarm for sunrise but snap awake half an hour earlier to find my window filled with a sherbet-orange sky. In the few minutes it takes to yank on clothes and shoes, that sky-canvas softens to a wash of pastels.
I head outside to savour the pre-dawn peace, with wombats and kangaroos dotted around the grounds. Hot-footing it down to the jetty, I find mist still hovering over the water. To make the most of the pretty morning and these extraordinary surrounds, I gobble a quick breakfast in the communal dining space where dinners are also served and head back out with the paper, brush and watercolour pencils I brought, hoping to channel an iota of Boyd’s talent.
The low sun highlights the dewy lawn and a few tiny mushrooms. It’s also burning off the mist so I quickly set up on the jetty, filling a curl of bark with river water in which to dip my brush. The fish are jumpin’ (Summertime is playing on repeat in my head), the whipbirds are calling, kookaburras laughing and insects clicking. A powerboat buzzes into view, towing a waterskier who waves as he glides through my otherwise idyllic scene. If they wanted, Bundanon staff could probably travel to work like this.
Before I know it, it’s time to pack my things, check out and head to the Homestead and Boyd’s Studio, a 20-minute drive away down a dirt road. From the colonial sandstone homestead’s lawn, which sits above a sprawling riparian zone, I spy one of Boyd’s favourite subjects: the monolithic Pulpit Rock. Bundanon collections manager, Jen Thompson, gives a potted history of the site. She reveals that when Boyd first visited in December 1971 and set up to work by the river, it was so hot his paint dripped into the sand.
My Bundanon experience concludes, fittingly, in Boyd’s timber-lined studio, filled with half-finished canvases, squeezed-out paint tubes, buckets, tins, brushes and palette knives. Inhale and there’s still a hint of turpentine. Perhaps most poignantly, a grey jumper and a wide-brimmed hat – items so precious they too were evacuated when bushfires came close – rest on a cane chair. It’s as though Boyd, renowned as the most generous of hosts, simply stepped out of the frame for a moment.
In the know
The First Nations-led Impulse Festival, due to take place this weekend, has been cancelled because of heavy rainfall. Full refunds will be issued for tickets. When the centre does open, visitors can take the 90-minute Bundanon Built architecture tour included with museum entry ($18 adults, $12 concession, next tour dates are April 9 and June 4). The Bridge embodies Bundanon’s net-zero ambitions, with breezeways and cross-ventilation part of passive temperature management, solar power, black water treatment and the harvesting and storage of rainwater. A Tesla charger will be installed in coming months. The Discover Bundanon two-night accommodation package (BYO toiletries), which includes meals and two art tours, costs $1320 for one person and $1650 for two. Year-round, the Art Museum is open Wednesday to Sunday (10am-5pm; the Homestead and studio are open weekends only from 10am-4pm.
Katrina Lobley was a guest of Bundanon.