I was recently showing a friend from New Zealand through the Australian collection at the National Gallery of Victoria and we came, of course, to Tom Roberts’ Shearing the Rams (1888-90). You have to get there eventually because everything in the collection and its arrangement on the walls points you that way. The work is visible — and intentionally so — as you step into the first of the rooms devoted to Australian art, past the depictions of Tasmanian Aboriginal people by Robert Dowling, through the room dedicated to early colonial landscape and into the room featuring a selection of work by Melbourne-based landscape artists from around the time of Roberts’ masterpiece.