Kevin McCloud

One is a...

Wim Boiservijn oil, it's called The Hunter.

It was painted before Wim Boiservijn started painting vases of flowers, which didn't interest me.

But I have two of his pictures, that one, which was in the first three, and the other one is two gorgeous old Aboriginal people sitting at a bus stop.

Mm.

And the third painting we bought then, our third work, was by Guy Gray Smith.

It's a lithograph.

And those three, as I say, they're still in the collection and very precious.

There's over 4,000 works.

One of those works is the set of the Banks Floral Legion, which is 780 works, I think.

So there's about 5,000 works all up.

yes we do we've made since 1958 about just over 14 000 loans some paintings of course are more in demand than others at the moment we've got quite a lot of works by emily nawari in the tate modern in london we had some emily works in japan recently

Several years ago, we sent a lot of works to Japan for a very big Emily exhibition.

The Europeans are very interested in Australian Indigenous art.

I've got a lot of batiks, say, from the community that Emily came from in Utopia.

They've been exhibited all over the place.

It's a compact exhibition because they fit into two big boxes.

I actually took them to China once and I was presented with five Chinese people who didn't speak English and I was me with no Chinese at all.

But they were exhibited in a deconsecrated Taoist temple and I had never hung an exhibition before.

I didn't know what I was doing.