Sure, there’s the more than 3500 portraits, of everyone from Nobel Laureates and movie stars to colonial call-girls, sporting greats and (Australian-born) European royalty. Even the most unschooled visitor is bound to find something to captivate them.

But this has a lot do to with the captions accompanying each portrait; the National Portrait Gallery's are particularly concise, giving just enough titillating detail to invite you, should you wish, to look longer and ask questions.

It could well be the best job in the world - writing all those captions for all those portraits. It’s also challenging to encapsulate the life of an eminent Australian into roughly 200 words, especially when you’ve done the often painstaking research required to have enough information to distil.

For Sarah Engledow, who has done this exact job for the past 19 years, that’s all part of the fun.

“You know what you're looking for - you're looking for a human presence in every one of the works here,” she says.

“Different modes of art will convey that differently, and it's very exciting when people realise, ‘I've looked at all kinds of art, dating from the 18th century to yesterday and it was fine, there was nothing to be scared of’.”

Engledow considers herself something of an outsider when it comes to the world of fine art and history - she studied neither at university - although she admits that, after 19 years, her claim not to know anything about art is “getting old”.

It’s true, though, that when she first saw the gallery’s job advertised back in 1999, she thought she had a pretty slim chance of getting it.

At the time, she had two young children and was in the middle of a PhD in literature, for which her scholarship funding had just run out.

“The gallery had a contact officer, who I rang. And I said, ‘Look, I don't know whether to put in an application, I don't anything about art, I've never studied history, I don't know anything about education’,” she says.

“And he said, ‘What do you think you've got going for you?’ I listed the prizes I'd won at university and stuff, and he said, ‘Put in an application’.”

The interview, as she recalls it, got off to "a farcical start", when she realised the person she had spoken so casually and openly on the phone to was in fact Andrew Sayers, the gallery’s first director.

“That was a blushful moment, and also he was so good looking I couldn't stop laughing,” she says.

Fortunately, the interview had a written component, which she breezed through. She got the job, and the rest is, quite literally, history - and lots of it.

For anyone who knows her, Engledow’s own biography on the gallery’s website is a masterclass in both concision and expansiveness, a characterful flourish listing her contributions to the gallery - more than 70 articles on portraiture, many acquisition proposals, the curating of several much-loved exhibitions - alongside her personal quirks, equally numerous.

She may not have studied art or history, but she did, at one stage, spend a couple of years studying archaeology at the Australian National University. Why, she doesn’t know.

“I hate the outdoors, and I hate getting dirty,” she says.

In hindsight, it was “perversity, sheer perversity” that she didn’t just study English, which she was good at. Instead, she dropped out and - after an eye-opening stint in the public service, which she compared to working in an "American frat house movie, with nudey calendars and people chain-smoking at their desks" - she enrolled at the Canberra Institute of Technology to study fashion.

An exceptionally well-dressed woman, fashion has always been Engledow's great love. After completing the two-year course - her first-ever qualification - she set up her own business.

“I made wedding dresses in the 80s - mile upon mile of taffeta, puffs, lace insertions,” she says, dreamily.

“Some of them were a great success, some of them were abject failures. One split on the day of the wedding, and that was a very dark, dark period. You wouldn't see the funny side.”

Also among her biographical details is what is perhaps the most surprising aspect of Engledow’s own history - that she dislikes travel, and does it as rarely as possible. What it doesn’t specify, though, is that it’s her deep love of Canberra, rather than fear of the unknown, that keeps her at home.

On those rare occasions - for work, usually, or to visit one of her sons - she’s “got on that plane with just such a sense of doom and foreboding, leaving Canberra”.

Born and bred here, she grew up mostly in Deakin. When she first moved out of home, to nearby Hughes, her mother, stricken, said to her, “Don’t worry - it won’t be forever”. In fact, she has been in the suburb ever since, where she has brought up her two sons, Hugh and Ed, read books - almost never anything new, or that she hasn’t read before - and tended to her garden.

“You're considered a very insufficient individual if you haven't travelled, but it does strike me that a lot of my friends who travel try to go to places where the people they're mixing with have never been further than the next village,” she says.

“People want to go to Mongolia, or they want to go to little villages in Asia where no one's ever been anywhere because we all value that kind of slow responsiveness to the seasons. Well, that's the way we've lived in Canberra, going to Fyshwick market and getting quinces in the autumn.

“I've got these routines that I relish, and I'd rather stay in Canberra for the rest of my life than throw up overseas once.”

And although one of her first overseas trips completely proved her point - during a six-month stint in Glasgow, she broke her ankle on the cobblestones while reading and walking at the same time - the fact remains that her life here is, and always has been, lovely.

She’s as Canberra as they come; her father, Lou Engledow, was a senior public servant, including a stint as secretary of the Department of the Capital Territory in the 1970s.

“We were very involved in Canberra activities - Canberra was always our family hobby as well as where we lived,” she says.

Her mother, Val, was a homemaker, although Engledow wishes there were a better word for it.

“My mum didn't work outside the house - she made our lives beautiful.

All the loveliness of our life was down to her.”

But her dislike of travel could also be tied to an almost lifelong sense of foreboding. Engledow is the youngest of three, with two older brothers. The eldest, Steve, was killed in a car accident, which happened while he was driving home from a work Christmas party in 1974. Young Sarah was just 11, considered the wrong age to be taken to see him in hospital as he lay on life support. Nor did she attend the funeral after he died on New Year’s Eve.

“I cannot bear Christmas and New Year to this day, and have spent my life expecting the worst to happen, and happen suddenly,” she says.

And so, she stays home, and instead finds a life journey that has left her open to all sorts of sources of pleasure and entertainment, from her peculiar reading habits - she reads James Joyce’s Ulysses at least one a year, but dislikes most new literature - to her constant discoveries in the art world, in which, to herself at least, she’ll always be a novice.

“One thing that I have really enjoyed is conveying my excitement at finding out things about art, to other people who don't know anything about art,” she says.

“I think maybe you lose track of that if you study it at university, you forget how ignorant most people are about the most basic aspects of art, so it's very exciting to learn it and share it straight away.”