If you had to pick Australia's nation painting, which one would you choose?

And Simberg's wondrous painting in which a wounded angel is being carried to a Helsinki hospital on a stretcher borne by two boys (the mischievous Aussie meme substitutes a sleeping-in-parliament Barnaby Joyce for the angel) is Finland's official National Painting.

The exciting notion of a national painting adds to the long list of Finnish things worth imitating. Australia must get a cultural wriggle-on and choose its own national painting. But what painting should it be?

When in 2006 Helsinki's Ateneum Art Museum asked Finns to choose their national painting, the considerable Finnishness of The Wounded Angel commended it to voters. As well as Simberg (1873-1917) being a treasured Finn, his Angel is set in a still-recognisable public place in Helsinki.

Australia's competitive candidates for national painting will have to be very Australian just as The Wounded Angel is very Finnish. (Although, mischievously, one is tempted to nominate the American artist Jackson Pollock's Blue Poles for the way in which its Whitlam-era purchase for our National Gallery convulsed the nation and stirred up such storms of uniquely Australian philistinism.)

But a thousand serious candidate paintings leap to this cultured columnist's mind.

For me, prime candidates include almost anything from Sidney Nolan's Ned Kelly series, including and especially Steve Hart Dressed As A Girl (1947). Bushranger Hart, sitting sidesaddle and wearing a fetching frock, is framed by an unmistakably Australian sky and bushscape.

But perhaps I am being mischievous here, enjoying the thought of the outrage that would be stoked among uncultured conservative Australians by the thought of our manly nation being represented to the world by a painting of a cross-dressing man.

And so, putting frivolous mischief aside, high on my shortlist for our national painting I have Freda Robertshaw's self-portrait Standing Nude (1944) and Sidney Nolan's Footballer aka Full back, St Kilda (1946).

The national portrait credentials of Footballer are obvious. It is a startlingly fine and radiantly colourful painting by a great Australian. Nolan's portrayed athlete radiates manliness and is framed by the footy-crazed faces of the fans in the crowd behind him. It is a painting about footy-mad Australia and about Australia's very own made-in-Australia code of football.

Freda Robertshaw's self-portrait Standing Nude was one of the memorable hits of one of the National Gallery's recent Know My Name: Australian Women Artists 1900 to Now exhibitions, an NGA "gender equity initiative".

The painting and its history beguiled this columnist then and I have stayed beguiled.

It may at first perturb some conservative Australians to have a painting of a naked woman as our national painting; but this is no ordinary painted nude.

As well as being a very accomplished painting, it seems to be the first female nude self-portrait ever painted in Australia and so is historically important. A battling Robertshaw, required to paint a nude as part of her application for a scholarship and unable to afford to pay a model, painted herself. Goodonher.

Half-smilingly confident, she looks us straight in the eye. I always feel she is challenging me to a competition (perhaps a 50-metre swim, a test of knowledge of Shakespeare's plays, a game of Pétanque) she knows she will win, effortlessly.

And as our national painting, Standing Nude would not bring a deep blush to the national cheek since although unusually frank it is somehow not a bit lubricious.

The NGA's book of the Know My Name exhibition says of Standing Nude: "there is no threatening sensuality on show ... it is nakedness without allure ... Robertshaw's figure can be read as an archetype of Australian womanhood - wholesome and athletic, bronzed under the Australian sun".

And so Standing Nude, painted by a talented but hitherto neglected female Australian battler and portraying an archetype of Australian womanhood, has credentials galore as our national painting.

Yes, Nolan's Footballer, portraying an archetype of Australian manhood, would be a worthy and much-loved national painting.

But the selection of Standing Nude (a painting of a woman by a woman) would be a powerful national gender equity initiative in its own right, appropriate to the progressive, misogyny-banishing times the nation finds itself in since the joyous outcome of May's federal election.

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