Stone the crows

Tim Richards enjoys chance meetings with apes and aliens at a sculpture park where reality gives way to fantasy.

I've only recently watched the movie Rise of the Planet of the Apes, so I'm understandably unnerved to discover a giant bust of a chimpanzee in bushland on the edge of Melbourne's suburban sprawl.

A minute before, I was strolling across neat lawns behind the McClelland Gallery, admiring a gold-faced statue of Dame Joan Sutherland and some neoclassical statues that were rescued from the 19th-century Federal Coffee Palace before its demolition. Now I'm following a narrow track through native trees and things have taken a more primal turn.

Not that there's an ape-supremacist plot at work; the giant chimp, White Ape, is the 2005 work of sculptor Lisa Roet. It's one of many large pieces installed in the gardens and bush surrounding the 40-year-old gallery, east of Frankston.

It's a surprise to discover the diversity of the sculpture trail's landscape. I'd expected artworks placed neatly within well-tended gardens and McClelland does have that on offer but the back of the gallery's grounds is a place where wild things grow and sculptures are at first half-glimpsed through eucalyptus leaves.

The untended nature of this area adds a frisson to the art encounters; rather than the landscape being neutral, it becomes a powerful part of the experience.

As I move on through the trees, my Planet of the Apes experience continues. Further along the path are what look like two transplanted chunks of city streetscape, bearing a no-standing sign, traffic lights and a slice of kerb beneath the gumtrees. If Charlton Heston came riding in on a horse at this point, I wouldn't be surprised. Or maybe he could bestride the rhino statue I find around the next bend.

The remainder of the bush track gives up more sculpture secrets one by one: a high shelf bearing enormous plastic utensils, a group of stylised horses drinking from a trough, a leaning corrugated-iron tank that contains a camera obscura, and a vast circular labyrinth of low stone walls.

As the path heads back to the lawns, I pass a giant, rusty alien figure and other items that seem to have escaped from a science-fiction future, including a set of giant white egg-like spheres.