But it was the feeling of a golden opportunity missed that appears to have disturbed the art loving expats and Australians visiting London for the show rather than the status given to 1880s bling in heavily carved gilded frames that dampened spirits.
The first major survey of Australian art in 50 years could have shown the art of a nation to its best advantage.
Just as Australia was being trounced by the Poms at cricket there seemed to be the chance in the patchy marketplace that Australia might win the Arts ashes.
But the best players have not been called to the arts sports field and if the survey can be read as a match, it has been lost.
Some harsh words have been uttered, even at the Australian end. This is especially so as competing in art in Australia can be as frenetic as competing in sports with so many prizes around. The irony of the whole affair is that the show was organised, shaped and directed by that very British of institutions, The Royal Academy.
The fading aboriginal art market in particular was in need of a bit of attention from the glitterati.
A few side compliments have been paid in the many words written by London's most influential critics about what at times has seemed Australia's most international art form.
But Aboriginal Australia appears best seen in the work of colonial artists picturing them locked behind golden frames than their own art in this patchy show.
The modest representation of Australia's once hottest artists, Emily Kyngwarrye and Rover Thomas are lost in the show.
If ever there were evidence that Australians regard Australian art as wallpaper it is in the cluttered hang of this over filled show.
Australians have tended to paint their walls rather than paper them like the British and show too much second rate art.
The art art now in the Royal Academy in Mayfair hangs from the ceiling and covers the floor like Persian carpets in this show.
One contemporary work even incorporates a Persian carpet with a burnt hole in it.
The damp mood that has gripped Aussie art lovers has not been helped by the high profile damp pictures in the show.
Australia is anything but a sun-drenched country. Instead the land, sea and cityscapes show a continent battered by monsoons, rain and blistering storms.
It is not that the vision is too harsh but because the work does not have the guts expected of a frontier land by the British critics.
The most dramatic composition in the show, Tom Robert's A Breakaway, has been criticised as too soft. With titles like allegro con brio how could other works in the show come from Australia, they understandably ask.
Costs of transporting works from possibly a multitude of venues to do the kind of job art lovers talk of must surely have been a factor in the limited number of chef d'oeuvres involved.
The expenses have been kept low by accessing works that are close to the heart of the director of the director of the National Gallery, Mr Ron Radford under whose aegis the show has been largely gathered together.
South Australia, where he was a state gallery director for many years, is well represented. There has certainly been a determined attempt at national coverage which must be a leading driver in the company's charter.
Fortuitously Mr Radford has purchased many of the top works in Australia institutional collections and is therefore in a good position to borrow them.
One easily missed is a big piece of rough hewn wood which was part of an Aboriginal dwelling and is in the dark side display of bark painting.
Bravo for the inclusion of Nadubi Spirit Woman by an unknown artist from Western Arnhem Land.
This is on loan from the South Australian Museum just a few yards from Radford's former offices in South Australia.
This is one of the foundation pieces of Australian Aboriginal bark paintings and is virtually a piece of timber from a dwelling.
It emerges as a pivotal work in the display, a most welcome inclusion in the show and a pointer to the importance of barks in the Aboriginal bark painting.
White Australian artists emerge as too clever by half. In an aspirational society, they took the main chance, painting their masters taking the dogs for walks in their grounds of their mock British country houses and looking very much the lords of the manor.
Wool and then gold put Australians in the worlds top 200 rich list. That is why we have the roomful of gold framed pictures painted by artists described almost pejoratively by the mounters as the "so called" Australian Impressionists.
Lid-dipping by Australian artists to their patrons continued even with the modernists who produced nice drawing room pictures of olive groves for apartment living that was in vogue in the 1920s and 1930s.
In a small country with few souls of like mind to talk to it was no surprise that artists toned down their work.
No Waldemar Janusczcz emerged to speak of works dripping like a shower of golden diarrea as the current Sunday Times accused John Olsen of. He would have had nowhere to run to.
It was in the more populated1940s that Australians were to turn shrivelled up bodies tucker or an old pram abandoned on the show.
The Australian silver mounted emu eggs paying homage to the Victorian interior came in for some abusive Press treatment.
Perhaps more impressive objects of this genre that must surely have been available would have made the point. They emphasised how luxurious and consumerist Australian art tended to be, especially in the great era of the Australian magnate, the late 19th century,
Artists were in it for the money and behind tariff walls that protected all Australians and found it hard to live the life a la Boheme Down Under.
Artists came out to Australia - the pre-Raphaelite Thomas Woolner comes first to mind - to dig for gold and only gave it up when the prospects lessened in favour of painting or in Woolner's case sculpting.
There are few of the artists represented whose work could be seen regularly a century ago in the hangs of the Royal Academy's summer shows.
The interest in the works of many artists who showed and are now regarded as second rate would mostly be followers of Sir Arthur Streeton - would underline the almost demeaning past role of the Academy in Australian art
Sir Edgar Bertram Mackennal, who created a scandal with the allegedly erotic base of his key work Circe when it was shown at the Academy, does not find a place despite creating a major incident in ithe academy's art history. This is the second time he has not featured in an academy show this year although he is seemingly a natural.
He could not be found in last year's big sculpture show there.
The new Menzies consumer society is brilliantly satirised by a cartoon-like depiction by John Brack of a family peering out of a late Art Deco period car.
The critics have understandably kow-towed to Sidney Nolan and I think he comes out most incisively in his depiction of a greedy manager and of a polluting mine and at his cheekiest in his painting of a rear view of a horse with Ned Kelly as the rider.
The figure morphs into a kind of Delphic god and has been used as the poster of the exhibition. It underlines the worrying status of animal rear views in Australian art.
These were surely so reassuring to wealthy cattle men. They could see their wealthy beasts on their lounge room walls wandering off to the sunset to the milking stations.
The contemporary scene is very contorted with some unexpected inclusions. John Beard is among them.
The presence of this internationally noted artist is boosted by a show at the Fine Art Society's rooms in New Bond Street. London dealers especially those with Australian connections have been a little slow to jump on the band wagon presented by the show.
The auction houses which now dominate the market, particularly Christie's, have reacted quite differently moving their major Australian auction from South Kensington to their King Street headquarters in King Street St James for the occasion.
If the auction fires it will be in the hot seat for any finds that emerge as a result. There are still a few great pictures that might be found which are now whereabouts unknown.They oddly include Found by Frederick McCubbin which is the twin to Lost, a painting of a little girl lost in the bush,
Although there is little room for sculpture, a place has been found for Tombstone Garden by Kathy Temin, which is a trio of large synthetic wool balls.
It's title suggests a more incisive view of Australia although that is its subject, not Australia which begins to emerge at the end as something akin to it.
The antiquarian end of the art world , and its past stock, was solidly represented by Mr Tim McCormick and Mr John Hawkins.
These two dealers at different times sold one of the earliest known views of Sydney, a picture which is in the exhibition.
Both McCormick and Hawkins insisted there was nothing to worry about by the question mark that had appeared on the room label of the work against the name of the painter Thomas Watling on its room notice.
Attribution of works of that period cannot always be water tight, but like the NZ painting by Alexander Gilfillan in an auction up the street at Christie's who else could it be by?
Hawkins, a British born dealer who has lived in Australia since 1967, and has played a part in several battles relating to battles over the export of cultural heritage, seems determined to play a role in the latest transaction - even if it involves taking a big low interest loan from a bank.
Hawkins visited two paintings by the early 19th century artist George Stubbs on show at the National Maritime Museum in London.
The museum is trying to save the paintings, traditionally thought to show a dingo and a kangaroo.
The National Gallery of Australia in Canberra has mounted a bid to buy these for £5.5 million which the National Maritime Museum has to match.
He is looking at a deal which would place them alternatively in a museum in the UK and in Australia.
Non-UK residents can buy banned heritage works like these if their prices top those manageable by British institutions and they keep them in Britaiin.
Now a Tasmanian, Mr Hawkins suggests the native dog or dingo supposedly pictured in one of the works and painted from skins taken from the Australian mainland by Sir Joseph Banks might be a Tasmanian devil which somehow strayed.
The Banks expedition did not go to Tasmania.
And while this is not impossible I prefer to think the creature looks more like a corgi that would be at home in Buckingham Palace.
Acquisition of the pictures would accordingly make up for the loss to the Tate Gallery in the 1970s of A Pair of Foxhounds by Stubbs which came to light in Australia and were offered in Sydney for $5000 in the 1979, and bought by the Tate for £120,000.
