From a distance, the geometric, rust-hued floodbridge fits right into the rutted, valleyed landscape that defines this bend in the Shoalhaven River.
It looks, for all the world, like a rough sketch of a bridge by Arthur Boyd, the painter who once owned and worked on this large tract of land on the NSW south coast.
And Boyd was all about landscape - not just painting it, although his landscapes are among the best known works in the Australian art canon.
The artist's retreat and wildlife sanctuary the Boyd family gifted to the Australian people in 1993, six years before Boyd's death, has always been a wild place, prone to floods and fires.
By the time the Boyds were living there in the 1970s and 80s, Arthur was one of the country's most famous and prolific artists, and one of a legendary clan. His grandparents, Arthur Merric Boyd and Emma Minnie Boyd, had been painters, and their children - Merric, Penleigh, Martin and Helen, would all be artists as well. Merric and his wife Doris brought up a ceramicist, a sculptor and three painters, one of whom was Arthur. His sister, Mary, also a painter, would marry artist John Perceval, and later Sidney Nolan.
Arthur's wife, Yvonne, was herself an accomplished painter, and their own three children all followed suit.
Art was a profession, a calling, a way of life and, in many ways, an obligation.
"We [the Boyds] all had a faith in creativity, and that implied continuity," Boyd once said.
"Creativity was a family vocation: you were sent these talents, so you should use them."
Boyd died 23 years ago, at the age of 79, and his wife, Yvonne, in 2016 at the age of 93. The pair had travelled and lived in various countries and cities, dividing their time between London, Melbourne and the Shoalhaven riverbend they called home.
By the time they, along with their three children, made the decision to give the 1100-hectare property as a gift, along with a vast collection of Boyd's artworks, they were still as devoted to the landscape as possible, even as they moved back and forth from Melbourne.
Just two years ago, during the horror Black Summer, fires came within a kilometre of destroying both the landscape and its buildings, and one of the most important art collections in the country's history.
This landscape, both wild and welcoming, was already undergoing a transformation when curators and volunteers rushed to pack up the $46 million collection - featuring works by Boyd and his extended family of artists, as well as works by Sidney Nolan, Brett Whitely, Joy Hester and Charles Blackman - and drive them off to Sydney, away from the flames.
During Boyd's time, there were floods, storms and fires - it was an ancient land to be respected, if not feared.
Today, the bridge he once sketched from his own mind - an act, perhaps, of wishful thinking - is an unintentional reality.
Look closer and you'll see that it's actually a remarkable architectural feat - a 160-metre long row of breeze-filled, solar-panelled rooms, built over the gully through which floodwaters will now flow straight down to the river. Created by renowned architect Kerstin Thompson, the bridge is designed to fit right into the landscape, while encouraging the visitor to marvel at what's around it.
There's a rainwater tank built in somewhere underneath, the built-in restaurant is serving a paddock-to-plate menu, and the views, needless to say, are spectacular.
Directly beside it is a cutting-edge art gallery, built directly into a hillside, and also dreamed up by Thompson to be about as fire and flood-proof as it's possible for a building to be. Only the front of the building is fully visible, but the 500-square-metre space is both a museum and a storage facility for the 4000 items in the Boyd collection.
The $33 million facility, funded by both the state and federal governments, is designed to keep the artworks safe and thermally stable, as well as provide a fire shelter for staff at the site.
It's a site, says Bundanon chief executive Rachel Kent, that will draw an entirely new audience from around the country, to enjoy and absorb Boyd's work, and the landscape that inspired him for decades.
Head curator Sophie O'Brien says Boyd's work is indelibly linked to the landscape, one that's both dramatic and aloof.
"I think it's very alive to nature in the broadest sense - neither kind nor cruel, but very present," she says.
And now, with the opening of the Bridge and the art museum to the public, Arthur Boyd and his ethos is almost everywhere you look.
It's something of which O'Brien - an Australian visionary with a stellar international career behind her - is acutely aware.
"There's lots of footage of him in his studio, and also just on the beach - you see him painting ... and he's got handfuls of paints, it's a very embodied experience," she says.
"So I feel like he was really physically engaged with this place, not just with the art making, but with the place itself.
"When the river would flood, he'd talk about the thunder, the Wagnerian thunder, the water and things like that. So it was a very embodied and visceral place for him ... a very dramatic landscape."
She's speaking just moments before the doors to the new museum are due to open to the public for the first time. The inaugural exhibition, From Impulse to Action, is a show of experimental works, with 12 new commissions by contemporary Australian artists working in a range of disciplines.
And, in the spirit of the place, Boyd's works are interwoven throughout the raw and energetic new works of choreography, film, photography, performance, weaving and sound.
They're by the likes of Dean Cross, Rochelle Haley, Tina Havelock Stevens, Kate Jones, Jo Lloyd, Emily Parsons-Lord, Izabela Pluta, Uncle Steven Russell & Aunty Phyllis Stewart, Skye Saxon, Vivian Cooper Smith, Shan Turner-Carroll, and Kaitlen Wellington.
It's clear, O'Brien says, that Boyd would have been completely at home.
The Boyds bought Riverdale - the site of the Bridge, the Art Museum, and the award-winning education centre created in the late 1990s by architect Glenn Murcutt - way back in 1974, when there were just a couple of cottages scattered on the floodplain.
Just 15 minutes away by car, down a bumpy dirt track, is Bundanon's second star billing, the family home - the official Bundanon, as it's always been called - bought several years later, in 1979. It's a gracious colonial homestead - large rooms, high ceilings, a kitchen in a separate building out the back, some artists' cottages and, crucially, Boyd's custom-designed studio are all there, exactly as the family left it. Indeed, the Boyd children, Jaime, Polly and Lucy, have all been known to stay there at various times, even as the house is open to weekend visitors to wander through.
And the studio, light-filled and gloriously paint-spattered, has an atmosphere of waiting. Boyd's jumper is draped across the back of a chair, his shoes and hat alongside it (all of these were hurriedly removed, temporarily, during the 2020 Black Summer bushfires). His very last painting is displayed on an easel, and there are works - by him and other members of the family and their social circle, hanging throughout the house.
Boyd was an artist among artists, from the kind of background, O'Brien says, that gives you "the confidence to do whatever you need to do".
"And he had that in spades ... People say he was very quiet and reserved, and quite shy. I'm sure that would have been true. But he also had an inner ethics and politics and universe that was very grounded. And he was very clear about what he believed in...
"I mean, it's radical work for the time, that's the thing ... Looking back at history, it's easy for it sort of to become misty and rose-tinted, but actually, a lot of the things he did were very challenging. His Bride series is challenging in many, many ways and all of the things continue to be. There's a lot of sex and violence and nature and mechanical things."
She has placed suites of Boyd's works, both monochrome and colour, throughout the new exhibition spaces, including the striking costume designs he did for the Royal Ballet's 1963 production of Elektra.
The 12 new artists respond to these works, and the exhibition catalogue is filled with the works in progress.
"It's not so much the drawings, but the drawing practice, and how did he approach drawing, that experimental energetic way of working. So it's really finding artists in lots of different ways who have that same approach to making, which is an experimental one," she says.
"It's one that has an immediacy to the action or an immediacy to a conceptual relationship to drawing in an interesting way. So it was quite a wide net, but I needed to have a diversity of opinion and practice and outcomes.
"I wanted to keep in the spirit of Bundanon. There's the Boyd legacy of his work, and wanting a museum and keeping this a precious place and preserving, but then there's a whole sharing part," O'Brien says.
"Wherever he went, other artists were welcome. And in London, when he moved there, a lot of Australian artists came and stayed with the Boyds and got advice from the Boyds. And it's that same thing, if you're part of a family that completely supports what you're doing. I think it's the same principle.
"You're not self-questioning because you're alone, because nobody else is doing it. You've got this group of people and you can have a really robust conversation about what it is you're doing.
"[He was] endlessly generous with his studio, with his space, with coming to stay here, well before it was Bundanon the organisation. And the residency program is interdisciplinary, so it's theatre and dance and poetry and music, and visual arts, and whatever that means, all of those art forms, there's a space for all of them over at the residency spaces."
So, there's expansiveness and generosity, and, just a short drive away, the quiet domestic setting that gave Boyd and his family such comfort and inspiration.
O'Brien says she feels sure Boyd would approve of the new, reimagined Bundanon. She was, nevertheless, filled with joy when the developments got the stamp of approval from Boyd's son Jamie on a recent visit with his wife Helena (also an artist).
But significantly, Boyd himself appeared to her in a dream - a manifestation, no doubt, of her own instincts and gut feelings.
"I was making the show and I'd had lots of conversations with artists, I was writing the essay ... My co-curator hadn't arrived yet so it was very much a conversation with myself at one point," she says.
"I had this dream where I was surrounded by administration and organisers ... trying to make the site work, and Arthur was just floating in the background and sort of encouraging me to come and look at this, or come and look at this thing, or look there's a kangaroo, he was directing my thoughts around things.
"It was a very gentle and solid and grounded relationship to place that was kind of like an invitation. And it felt very comforting, even if it was just in my own mind - a conversation with Arthur saying that I was [going] in the right direction."
- Bundanon Art Museum and Bridge is now open to the public. Visit bundanon.com.au for details.
- Sally Pryor stayed at The Bridge as a guest of Bundanon Trust.
