Willie wagtail in the Garden of Australian Dreams, Canberra

Next in my Canberra Birds artwork series: Willie wagtail in the Garden of Australian Dreams, Canberra. On a rainy day, a willie wagtail perches on a metal pole in the central courtyard of the National Museum of Australia in Canberra. Through the raindrops, we see distant people holding umbrellas exploring the Garden of Australian Dreams, the dramatic central area of the NMA. In the background are the orange loop in the forecourt of the National Museum, as well as the iconic Telstra Tower on nearby Black Mountain.

Image detail: Willie wagtail in the Garden of Australian Dreams, Canberra

The bird: willie wagtail

Willie wagtails are small insect-eating birds with a black and white colour scheme. They belong to the fantail genus, and are found almost everywhere on the Australian mainland.

The most distinctive feature of the willie wagtail is its large tail, which it ‘wags’ in a pivoting motion as it stands observing its surroundings. As the following videos show:

They are defensive of their territory, and will often harrass other birds with a chatty angry call:

The birds are often seen perching atop of posts, fenches and other prominent sites. This was a key feature of the bird that I wanted to capture in my scene.

The location: the Garden of Australian Dreams at the National Museum of Australia

My scene is pictured in the central courtyard of the National Museum of Australia in Canberra, which is named the Garden of Australian Dreams.

Opened in 2001, the National Museum of Australia encompasses the Acton Peninsula next to Lake Burley Griffin in Canberra. Unlike the other monumental buildings across the lake, the NMA has a sprawling, informal design which is aimed at embodying the outdoor and indoor features of Australian life.

Above: view of the Garden of Australian Dreams, with the NMA's loop in the background. Credit: ArchivesACT

Above: panorama of the courtyard of the National Museum of Australia. Credit: Alpha

Australia has multiple threads of history, from all of the waves of cultures who have lived in this country. The design of the building and its landscaping aimed to represent the these stories being “tangled together”, with the building acting as a ‘knot’ in the middle of multiple paths.

A great video on this page explains many of the design elements of the Garden of Australian Dreams. More information about the general design of the building are explained in this video.

The Garden is the same size as the centre of Australia’s famed Melbourne Cricket Ground stadium, and features a landscaped design representing a map of Central Australia and the Northern Territory. The map on the ground shows an overlay of many different features, including highways, Aboriginal land areas, vegetation maps, as well as the barometric pressure of the weather on Australia Day 1998. There is also a sonic art installation within the courtyard space.

I sympathise with those who hate the design of the NMA, but I find myself admiring it more and more as I learn about design decisions that are baked into the plans. For example, the long rust-coloured runway that extends from the building towards nearby Black Mountain, looks like a huge ribbon that has been haphazardly unrolled. In fact, this path charts a straight line named the “Uluru Axis”: it charts a straight line that connects the iconic monolith in Central Australia (the spiritual centre of Australia), with Parliament House (the decision-making centre of modern Australia).

Above: aerial view of the National Museum of Australia. The ‘map of Northern Territory’ feature of the Garden of Australian Dreams is visible from this top-down perspective, as is the red triangle / line of the “Uluru Axis”. Photo credit: Percita Dittmar

My motivation for the scene

I conceived of the scene during a particularly wet period of Canberra’s history. So much rain was falling that the Territory’s maintenance crews were struggling to fix all of the potholes that were forming on the roads across town.

To me, it seemed that the central courtyard of the National Museum would be a peaceful scene to set a rainy scene. It would be an internal view of the building that would be unfamiliar to many people, but decipherable by the presence of the prominent orange loop that marks the NMA. I visited the Garden of Australian Dreams on a rainy day in late 2022 and roamed around taking dozens of reference photos, as I hunted for a view that would work for my scene.

In the end, the scene that composed is a blend of various elements, rearranged to work visually. I made the fallen eucalyptus tree much larger than it is in reality, to make it seem a bit more supernatural. Similarly, the size of the orange loop and the Telstra Tower in my scene are much more prominent than their true sizes.

It was a fun exercise trying a rainy scene, in stark constrast to the bright and cheerful choices of my original eight Canberra Birds scenes. I was very inspired by the mood created by David Pope’s rainy Rudd Street illustration, which features the Skywhales floating between the buildings, as an iconic red light rail travels down Northbourne Avenue in central Canberra. A knockout of an illustration.

Postcards, greeting cards, art prints

Support my work by buying this artwork as a postcard, greeting card or signed and numbered art print from my online store.
Visit the Willie wagtail in the Garden of Australian Dreams product range category, or use the following links for these items on my web store:

• Greeting card – Galahs at Canberra Balloon Spectacular (11.7 x 18.2 cm size) – also available in four-pack and eight-pack bundles of greeting cards
• Postcard – Galahs at Canberra Balloon Spectacular (A6 size) – also available in four-pack and eight-pack bundles of postcards
• Art print – Galahs at Canberra Balloon Spectacular (various sizes, pigment ink prints on archival paper)