Capital and Country exhibition explores the novelty of a nation THIS travelling exhibition, mounted by the National Gallery of Australia and devoted to Australian painting in the years after Federation, begins appropriately with the inauguration of the new Commonwealth of Australia in 1901. There is a vivid oil sketch, probably painted on the spot, by Frederick McCubbin, which records the temporary triumphal arch erected on the Princes Bridge in Melbourne to celebrate the event. Such temporary structures, alluding to the triumphal arches, such as those of Septimius Severus or Constantine, that still survive in Rome and elsewhere, had been erected ever since the Renaissance to mark the visits of kings and emperors to great cities. In this case it was to honour the visit of the duke of Cornwall who, after the death of his father Edward VII - for whom the bridge had been named in 1888 - would become King George V, the ruler of the British Empire during World War I.