Like many great buildings that survive fire, drastic reconstruction, and changing aesthetic taste, the Exhibition Building suffered years of neglect. For decades its Trustees viewed it simply as a business operation. When it was listed in the Australian Heritage Commission’s Register of the National Estate in 1975, they resisted all attempts ‘to impose heritage controls over its future development’. But in 1982 the Cain Labor Government reconstructed the Trust into one that respected the Exhibition Building’s architectural and historic significance. Allan Willingham, architect and historian, was invited to provide a conservation analysis. It provided the grounds for a comprehensive rehabilitation project that continued for ten years, made possi­ble by a State annual grant of $540,000 and an unforeseen boom from 1985 in the exhibition industry. Under its last three chairmen of Exhibition Trustees, Free­man Strickland, Linton Lethlean and Cyril Edmunds, the Exhibition Building was restored to something of its former glory.

Willingham tells the story of the designing of the Building by Joseph Reed and Frederick Barnes and its building by David Mitchell, noting their famous evocation of Brunelleschi’s dome for the Cathedral of Florence in an Australian setting. Willingham advances the view that it is Australia’s finest example of the Rundbogenstil (the round arch style) fashionable in Germanic Europe for public buildings during the second quarter of the nineteenth century. That may be so but in terms of its general massing effect, its centralised dome, stilted arch porticos, and lateral cupolas, it always reminds me of the monumental Mogul architecture of Delhi, Agra, and Lahore.

John Cornell discusses the history of its mural decoration. John Mather was given the initial contract which he executed in the taste of the ‘Aesthetic Movement’ then fashionable in Britain. Little of Mather’s work has survived however. Willingham, following a close examination of what has survived of the successive decorative schemes of 1880, 1888, and 1901, recommended that it was the last, provided by John Ross Anderson for the opening of the First Commonwealth Parliament, that should be replenished and conserved. That is what we have today.

John Maidment tells how J.G. Fincham built the organ, then said to be one of the world’s largest, at his works in Richmond. It was but one of more than 150 built for Australia and New Zealand prior to his death in 1910. He also tells of its sorry end. By 1957, when it was in a ruined state, the Victorian Chamber of Manufacturers were clamouring for its removal. The sole surviving pipe is now stored in the basement. It is well to remember that taste first exalts and then destroys. It takes more than taste to preserve a great building or a great organ.

The book is full of quaint stories. The Hochgurtel Fountain still stands before the southern portico displaying its folksy classicism – a mix of Donatello and gumnut babies. Dunstan records how a Bulletin journalist noticed among its amoretti, ‘a boy with a bucket of Murray Cod spurting out Yan Yean to the great edification of an old Triton and his two daughters who expose themselves unnecessarily on the rocks below’.

Seven essays are devoted to the International Exhibition of 1880–81. An audience of seven-thousand-odd listened enraptured to the Victoria cantata, the words by John Meaden, an amateur poet of Collingwood, the music by Leon Caron of Paris. Among thousands of works, both local and international, in the blockbuster art show was Lefebvre’s Chloe, later destined to animate the smutty conversation at Young and Jacksons for generations. Like the building, unlike the organ, she has survived. Less than ten years later the institutional high jinks took place all over again for the Centennial exhibition of 1889 with more architecture, more music, and more art. In 1901 the Building was deemed the obvious place to announce the achievement of Federation.

Dunstan and his collaborators have done their level best to provide a multi­layered account of the Exhibition Building’s contribution to Victoria’s culture, both elitist and popular. Anyone who was anybody, from Edward VIII (that potential polluter of the blood royal but then hailed as the ‘Digger Prince’) to William Booth, founder of the Salvation Army, puts in an appearance. The book sags a bit at times as it records the derring-do of so many of the worthies who danced their moment on this sacred site. But what else could these writers do? This is institutional history. Not an unseemly word spoken out of place. Predictably, women play a comparatively minor role – except as performers and ladies-in-waiting. But that historic show the First Australian Exhibition of Woman’s Work was held there in 1907, and in 1988 Judy Chicago displayed her Dinner Party there.

Viewed (a trifle uncharitably perhaps) this could be read as ‘Pippa Passes’ history – ‘God’s in his heaven: all’s right with the world.’ But it had to be written and the record will be better for it. The illustrations are magnificent, so much so that they offer constant distraction from the text.

Dunstan’s inaugural metaphor – an Australian icon on a sacred site – is worth taking seriously. Icons though sacred are under constant threat from those who fear or detest their spirituality. During the 1940s there was a powerful move in the City Council to destroy the Building and erect – yes, you’ve guessed it – a New Melbourne Town Hall on its site. The roof leaked, it was a fire hazard, and generations of young people had nightmare memories of their final examinations there. Architects influenced by modernism (the once venerated International Style) had no love of the place. It was a Victorian white elephant. Two of Melbourne’s most distinguished architects, Frederick Romberg and Best Overend said it had ‘outlived its usefulness’.

But icons develop mysterious capacities to accumulate highly-charged communal sentiment that protect them from the vagaries of taste, even the now slightly soiled high modernist taste that once ruled the aesthetic roost. What is pertinent at the moment is that from 1881 the annexes and other clutter constructed about the Exhibition Building, to suit one insistent need after another, are all now demolished or marked for demolition. But the building survives. An icon, it seems, develops a kind of sacred aura around its curtilage, an aura destructive of neighbouring foreign bodies. A healthy human body does much the same thing. An icon needs space to express the historic sacredness of its site. So temporary buildings are demolished while the icon remains.

The New Museum of Victoria will have to survive such a challenge to its existence if built within the curtilage of the Exhibition Building’s site. We have been told with supreme self-confidence by its marketeers (even before it is built) that the new Museum will be a masterpiece of twenty-first-century architecture admired by all in contrast to its old-fashioned, colonial neighbour.

But it’s not the Exhibition Building but the projected new Museum that will become progressively old-fashioned as the years pass. All great buildings have to survive a period of obloquy before they become historic icons. The new Museum is bound to suffer a fate similar to that of the Exhibition Building and sink into unfashionableness. I can imagine some future museum director around 2050 arguing that his building, now overstuffed with precious artefacts and no longer able to fulfil its expanded educational programme, has outlived its usefulness. It demands, he will tell posterity, more space than the Carlton Gardens can provide to showcase its gems in a truly contemporary way – not in the quaint old-fashioned manner of the 1990s. He will argue that he has no desire to encroach any more on the Gardens. That the original decision was made in haste to satisfy short-term problems. Better that the building be demolished and a more suitable site found.

A fantasy? The high-rise Commonwealth Offices built less than a generation ago, opposite the main front of the Exhibition Building in Victoria Parade, widely known as the ‘green latrine’ have been demolished, the Gas and Fuel Buildings are coming down at the moment, and the new Melbourne City Council are wisely considering the demolition of that other modern planning disaster the unworkable City Square.

Our premier, Mr Kennett, who is also minister for the arts, would be well advised to lend an honest ear to the cogent arguments recently advanced by such experts as Miles Lewis and Trevor Huggard against the location of the Museum in the Carlton Gardens. The decision has already developed a great deal of public hostility and is likely to develop more during the period of construction. The Museum is unlikely to experience a happy life in that location. As its architecture becomes increasingly unfashionable (like the City Square and the ‘green latrine’) an increasing clamour for its demolition may arise. It could become known as Kennett’s folly.

Given its own site and a proper ambience (such as Federation Square) rather than the threatening historic aura of a building that is bound to grow greater in public esteem as long as it survives, the new Museum might have a chance to gain the affection of the unborn. But that cannot be taken for granted.

And the Exhibition Building? What of its future now in Museum hands? If the Australian people do decide within the next few years (given the opportunity to decide) that Australia become a Republic what better place to celebrate the event than the Exhibition Building. Unlike any other building in the country it possesses both the historical associations necessary for such an event and the space to hold thousands. That it is the Royal Exhibition Building should be no impediment. Indeed it could be an advantage. The British monarchy takes such events in its stride. Few institutions know better how to move from precedent to precedent. Sydney has the Olympics. Melbourne should be given the announcement of the Republic, the next big event on the national agenda, and on an appropriate sacred site.