THE newest exhibition upstairs at the Canberra Museum and Gallery, “Sidney Nolan and St Kilda: Memory and Modernism”, is a mixture of nostalgia and scholarship.

Reflecting CMAG’s intent to show different facets of the Nolan Collection, which it manages on behalf of the Australian government, the show features paintings, photos and records from the Foundation collection with four loans from the Heide Museum of Modern Art in Melbourne.

In a delightful twist bound to be popular with kids and their parents, the foyer holds Queenie the elephant from the Civic Merry-Go-Round, the very same carousel that Nolan rode on as a child in St Kilda, relocated to Canberra in 1974. 

The decision made in the wake of the 2003 bushfires, when the collection was housed in a purpose-built gallery at Lanyon, was fraught with heartbreak, with Nolan’s widow Mary drawn into the controversy, as the Lanyon location in the bush – now almost a suburb – seemed a perfect match to the “Ned Kelly” series and the other works there.

It wasn’t just the bushfires. There was the problem of visitation, with sometimes as few as 50 people visiting in a quarter.

But since relocating the collection first downstairs and then upstairs at CMAG, curator Virginia Rigney says it’s become possible to do children’s programs related to Nolan and to stage regular changeovers, providing exhibitions that will appeal to a broader audience and to bring to light information about the artist in new research and responses from contemporary artists.

When we caught up, Rigney was about to take off for a residency at the Boyd property, Bundanon, where she hoped to find connections between Nolan and Arthur Boyd, the brother of his wife Mary.

“Nolan is a gift to any curator,” Rigney says. “There were so many paths in his career because he was such a traveller, mentally and physically.” 

This accounts for the variety in his subjects, from the Aussie digger to Dante’s “Inferno” to Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring” as well as the more familiar themes of bush Australia. 

At the same time, she says, “there’s no point in making him the white man on the pedestal, as he had issues with women… it is possible to have a critical perspective.”

This exhibition is the first cab off the rank in the new approach. 

When people think about Nolan’s foundations, she says, they think about Wimmera or Kelly country, but it was St Kilda, where he grew up and sought pleasure in the water and fun park, that was the most foundational.

In the show, film footage from the National Film and Sound Archive shows the rides he could have taken during his childhood. 

“It’s all about movement and that exhilaration for me, he’s a very physical artist,” Rigney says, shown in his images of the Big Dipper, which are matched with some Albert Tucker photos of Luna Park.

In the four loans from the Heide Museum of Modern Art in Melbourne, the connection is made between Nolan and the other artists with whom he worked. He had not been to art school and followed his own instincts, but he knew the art world, seen in his black Matisse-like outlines in earlier work and in the ways he turned St Kilda, circa 1942, into the south of France, where he longed to go. 

With the onset of World War II, his plans to travel to Paris were dashed and, stationed in the Victorian wheat belt, he painted both that landscape and the re-imagined fantastical landscapes of the Ferris wheel, the Big Dipper and the pier, which are captured in this show. 

“Sidney Nolan and St Kilda: Memory and Modernism”, CMAG until March 13.