Uncommon Australians: The vision of Gordon and Marilyn Darling
13 December 2015 –
21 February 2016
In the late 1980s, on the day that they decided to spend the rest of their lives together, Gordon and Marilyn Darling agreed to pursue a project: the creation of a place that would testify, through portraits, to the ingenuity, intelligence, inquisitiveness and perseverance of individuals who had made a lasting difference to Australia.
In the early 1990s they expressed their vision with an exhibition of portraits they called Uncommon Australians. Over years, their combination of idealism, practical support and persuasive lobbying for an Australian National Portrait Gallery played a crucial part in bringing the institution into being. Now, the National Portrait Gallery’s collection resides in a superb building, its spaces abounding with portraits the Darlings and subsequent benefactors have funded. Uncommon Australians: The Vision of Gordon and Marilyn Darling reveals the National Portrait Gallery’s Founding Patrons as uncommon Australians of the kind they set out to celebrate from the very beginning.