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For many people in Australia, Nick first came to prominence as curator of that 1979 biennale. It was a groundbreaking exhibition, arguably the most important Sydney biennale to date. Nick's deft curatorial skill revealed to us here in Australia not only how an inquisitive mind sensitive to the Zeitgeist can build a compelling bridge between art and its audience, but the local and international importance of presenting Australian art in a global context ...

In the course of curating three biennales, Nick developed a global knowledge of contemporary art and a wide circle of artist friends and acquaintances across Australia and abroad. These were brought to bear on his curatorial program at IDG. It was a coup for the University of New South Wales's College of Fine Arts (COFA) to secure him as a lecturer on the fledgling Art Administration program in 1989, and subsequently to expand his role to include directorship of the gallery in 1991, the year of his fiftieth birthday. On taking up that role Nick set to work organising an exhibition of drawings by George Baldessin, an artist he believed had been overlooked in his own time. This was quickly followed by an exhibition of current Australian painters simply named 'Seven' (1992), and the following year 'Confrontations', featuring seven sculptors ...

The last exhibitions Nick was involved in, perhaps with a subconscious understanding that time was limited, returned to the art and issues that resonated with personal significance. The first was 'Larrikins in London: An Australian Presence in 1960s London' (2003). The experience of London's cultural revolution of the 1960s was a defining one for Nick. He was a larrikin himself, as revealed by the Tatler photographs of his twenty-first birthday party in 1962, featuring Nick in full drag, sporting make-up and pearls. At the time, he worked in the London art world, briefly came to Australia to marry in 1965, then returned to London before being appointed director of Bear Lane Gallery in Oxford in 1967. He remained in England (later as senior arts adviser to the Milton Keynes Development Corporation) for another ten years before moving to Australia permanently with his young family in 1977. He wrote of the 1960s in London: 'Ideas were the currency of the day. It was an ideal place to be at a formative stage of your life, if you were open, inquisitive and half alert ... I owe sixties London an eternal debt of gratitude, not least for forging the experiences that led to many lasting friendships.' ...

The last exhibition he curated, again with Pegus, was 'Colour in Art: Revisiting 1919', which explored the continuing impact of Roland Wakelin and Roy de Maistre's 1919 exhibition of the same name. Here, too, Nick was fascinated not only by the early painters' experimental approaches to art, but by the links that could be traced through to current practitioners. He admired all forms of experimentation and often referred to IDG as a 'laboratory'. Long before the notion of 'curator-as-creator' gained parlance in the international art world, Nick had invited practising artists to curate for IDG, welcoming the alternative and non-conformist approaches they brought to exhibition-making. Ian Burn, A. D. S. Donaldson, Tony Oliver, Mike Parr, Peter Pinson, Sam Schoenbaum and many others were invited to participate as curators over the years ...

This article appears in excerpted form. You can read the entire article in Art & Australia's Winter 2010 issue.