This week, the Northern Territory’s new Chief Minister, Lia Finocchiaro announced that Mparntwe’s Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Gallery (ATSIAG) would be halved in size and squeezed on to an existing car park.
She said it would now be a three-storey, 4,000-square-metre building. The original plan was for a four-storey, 7,000sqm building.

But Finocchiaro insisted that the gallery would still be “world class”, adding that the $149-million budget wouldn’t have been sufficient to build the previous Labor government’s proposed “giant brown monstrosity”. Speaking on the ABC Alice Springs Breakfast program, she said, “I think most of your listeners will be happy when the day comes when we stop talking about the damn thing”.

Happy ATSIAG!

The government announced it would also scrap plans for a large forecourt in front of the gallery, explaining that the important thing was for Anzac Oval to be reinstated as a rugby field, with restoration works set to be completed by February next year. There will also be a car park bigger than the gallery.

The government expects the entire precinct will be completed in late 2027 based on their published masterplan.

But the ALP Member for Gwoja and former Arts Minister, Chansey Paech, a key driver of the project, claimed the new gallery design would be too small to attract many visiting exhibitions. And the reality for what was once called the National Aboriginal Art Gallery, is that it will be almost entirely dependent on visiting exhibitions in the absence of its own collection. “What other national institution in Australia or in the world is in front of an oval, across the road from a pub, and next to a car park?”, queried Paech. He did however admit that the initial design would have exceeded the budget by at least $50m, but said extra funds were to be sourced from philanthropists across the country. “We made that very clear,” he said.

On the subject of costings, Ms Finocchiaro said the federal government, which has offered $80m towards the project’s budget, was “fully on board” with the redesign. “It was one of the first things I talked to the Prime Minister about … [in] week two of government,” she told the ABC.

In later news, it would seem that Infrastructure Minister Catherine King has not seen the NT’s new, reduced plans and approved them. And Federal Labor MP Marion Scrymgour has said that a Federal take-over of the Gallery project might be the answer. “The whole point of why the federal government bought into this with the $80 million was that it was going to be an institution that we could all feel proud of,” she told the ABC.

However, there are distinct doubts that the interminable efforts to construct an Aboriginal art gallery will ever go ahead, given that its first Senior Director (non-Indigenous) was appointed in 2021, and is now long since departed. A Senior Director, Indigenous was appointed the following year – fate unknown. Then the NT’s Dept of Infrastructure, Planning And Logistics published plans for the building following a competition won by BVN Architecture based in Sydney and Brisbane. They received a $7.2 million commission to design the NAAG, working with Alice Springs firm Susan Dugdale & Associates providing “local expertise” on Aboriginal culture and design. The result apparently “a giant brown monstrosity”!

In April this year, Warumunga and Luritja woman, Kelli Cole was announced as returning to Mparntwe as Director of Curatorial and Engagement at the National Aboriginal Art Gallery. She was formerly Senior First Nations Curator with the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra.

What will happen to all these people, and the former government’s contracts, I wonder?

As one of its first decisions following its August election victory, the CLP government paused the demolition of Anzac Oval, which had controversially become the previous Labor government’s intended site for the gallery despite pushback from Traditional Owners and others. The project has continually been marred by failed negotiations with TOs, who argue the Anzac Oval setting threatens sacred women’s sites. A “South of the Gap” group has long lobbied for the gallery to be built south of Heavitree Gap in the Desert Knowledge precinct given that much of the art on display at any one time is unlikely to have any connection for the Native Title Holders for Alice Springs, the Lhere Artepe, who represent Arrernte people from the Mparntwe, Antulye and Irlpme estates. As one of them put it, they had “objections to mixing up everyone’s stories like eggs on the country north of the Gap, which is dense with Arrernte sites”.

dli.nt.gov.au/projects/anzac-oval-precinct-master-plan.