It might have been less than two kilometres down the road, but moving Tom Roberts' "enormous" painting showing the opening of the first Australian parliament from present day Parliament House to the National Gallery took seven days and a team of staff.
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The 3.5- by 5.2-metre oil painting, nicknamed the Big Picture, will be the centrepiece of the galley's Roberts retrospective summer blockbuster.
Assistant director of exhibitions and collection services Adam Worrall said the painting's first journey since it was installed in 1988 began at 5:30am last Wednesday.
Staff were forced to work before and after hours over the week to winch the painting from the wall and transport it to its temporary home.
"Our team has been up there since 5:30 in the mornings and working really late at night hiding this picture in different spots in the building [Parliament House] so people wouldn't bump into it as they walked around," Mr Worrall said at the unveiling on Tuesday.
By Thursday night the work had been separated from its equally epic gold gilded frame and had made it as far as the main foyer after 14 people carried it down the grand marble staircases.
But the move hit a snag when staff tried to "stash" the painting in the Great Hall overnight, Mr Worrall said.
"It was too tall to fit through the doors leading into the Great Hall so we had to leave it on its trolley in the foyer where it stayed with the security team on Thursday night before at 5.30am on Friday morning we prepared it for its move outside the doors of Parliament House onto the grand entry," a clearly relieved Worrall said.
"We then put it in a truck and snuck it down here before anyone at Parliament House had arrived."
The Big Picture spans three pieces of canvas stitched together and includes 269 portraits centred around the Duke and Duchess of Cornwall and the Australia's first prime minister Edmund Barton at the opening of parliament in Melbourne on May 9, 1901.
The exhibition's curator Anna Gray said painting it was a "mammoth task" with Roberts spending two-and-a-half years on the job, which earned him 1500 guineas.
"Nobody in the whole of Australia has had the chance to look at it close up at eye level ever before, we've had a chance to look at Roberts' other pictures but never brought together all like this," Ms Gray said at the unveiling.
"I don't know many pictures that have that many people in it.
"For him it was a labour of love … he really wanted to make a painting for the nation."
Roberts made careful notes of the weight, height, age and hat size of each of his sitters, also documenting their country of origin.
Dr Gray said Roberts was "getting on" when he painted the picture and its close detail damaged his eyesight and exhausted him.
"But he recovered himself again and the final work in this exhibition shows his small paintings painted purely for love," she said.
The painting is on permanent loan to Australia from the Queen's Royal Collection in London.
Dr Gray said the painting remained in good condition despite being outside strict gallery conditions at Parliament House.
"I think people will go chasing it back at Parliament House once they've seen it here much more than they have in the past because they will see it and really appreciate what effort Tom made," she said.
Tom Roberts is on from December 4 to March 28, 2016. Tickets on sale through Ticketek.
