Slumbering Sea Mentone

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m8_mento.jpg

 

The

famous 1887 painting, Slumbering Sea,
Mentone,
by Tom
Roberts,

now

on permanent display in the National
Gallery of Victoria.

To

see how the Heidelberg School artist, Tom
Roberts, has captured the feeling of this
place, see Google’s

zoomable high resolution version.
That is part of the Google Cultural
Institute, which is an online display of
the greatest paintings in the major art
galleries of the world. The painting above
is best viewed at that high resolution
hyperlink as it is one of a number that
Google Inc. displays at its gigapixel
level of resolution, which allows viewers
to zoom into individual brush strokes, as
the Institute’s excellent commentary
explains. The painting was privately owned
until the 1980s, when the National Gallery
of Victoria bought it.

The State of Victoria owns both this
masterpiece and, more importantly, the
splendid landscape it depicts, but there
is imminent danger of that landscape –
which is of international cultural and
scientific interest – being grossly marred
and set on the path of ongoing
despoilation by Beaumaris Motor Yacht
Squadron’s proposed power boat storage
against the cliff and on much of the sea.

 

The

constantly eroding, unstable white clay
cliffs in the distance, with the Dandenong
Ranges
seen above them, were sloped back in the
1930s and vegetated, and a basalt block
sea wall was built in front of them.

 

The

Victorian Government, in the 1960s,
let the Beaumaris Motor
Yacht Squadron
fill the
adjacent waters of Port

Phillip Bay, and the public
foreshore here with over a hectare of
rubble waste – despite its long status as
a Permanent Public Recreation Reserve, and to carve a
road down the cliff – to form its private
clubhouse and grounds. BMYS Ltd now has a
21-year

lease of the filled area.

 

The

filled area is an enclave in the Beaumaris Bay Fossil
Site
(Identifier

18053 on the Register of the National
Estate) and was partly excised from
Beach
Park

(a Permanent Public Recreation Reserve
since 1906) by a retrograde 1994

Act of Victoria’s Parliament.
It is at the foot of Ray
Street,
BEAUMARIS.

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