I was watching the other visitors to the gallery. And felt kind of envious of all the people carrying cameras, wearing comfortable shoes and moving about more slowly than the rest of us. These are the holidayers. The lucky ones whose everyday lives have been interrupted with freedom and all those light feelings that go with being anonymous in an unfamiliar city.

I caught the tram home. Changed out of my favourite vintage boots, whose soles have worn so shiny as to warrant a cautious don't-slip gait on certain surfaces. Laced up my light-weight, water-proof, ugly-but-practical walking shoes (reserved for travelling), grabbed my camera and went back.

St Kilda Road, with its parade of elm trees leading to the Shrine looked kinda impressive. And the gallery, rubbing shoulders with the Arts Centre and the VCA, marked the city as an arty one. It was 2pm, so I joined a tour of the permanent collection. Doing tours of my hometown seemed like a no-go…like asking how to use the toaster. But the collections' walls and walls of works, their incredible span of histories and art movements, and their layers and layers of meaning became almost navigable when viewed with a guide.

I took photos, which made an occasion of the occasion. I bought a postcard from the shop and scrawled 'Wish you were here' to my boyfriend (who I saw this morning but he wouldn't mind knowing that I was thinking of him). And I put my hand in the water wall, which only children and travellers can get away with.

by guest: Eleni

I surrendered. Instead of trying to avoid other visitors - sidestepping around the walls from painting to painting at different speeds as someone caught up or hanging back til the person at the next painting moved off - I viewed the other onlookers as part of the works. It brought a whole new context to the experience, which was less earnest than the usual visit.

In the darkened Antiquities room, a cleaner uncovered some bygone treasure, brushing away fingerprints with the deftness of an archaeologist. I stepped over bodies in the Great Hall; these prostrate figures worshipping Leonard French's glass ceiling had an Alice in Wonderland effect, like the room had been turned 90-degrees. Out in the Grollo Equiset Garden, I noticed a woman breastfeeding her son. I don't think she realised she was next to a sculpture of a woman breastfeeding. Nearby, a gallery attendant looked as though he had defiantly turned his back on his girlfriend - a giant seated bronze statue.

Back inside, Yayoi Kusama's Tender are the stairs to heaven installation - a neon ladder with mirrors at either end so that it appears to be neverending - gains gravitas with a small circle of onlookers quizzically peering up then down, as though wondering in which direction they'll eventually head. Even the people rendered hundreds of years ago, in the 17th and 18th Century section, seem self-consciously aware of their onlookers' gaze: holding that polite pose until the lights in the gallery go out and they can once more peel off that wig and those knickerbockers.

Instead of suspending disbelief, much like what's required from audiences of traditional theatre, viewing the whole shebang - other people and all - brought a lighthearted context to the works at NGV:I, more like contemporary theatre I guess. I loved the experience. But refrained from applauding.

I guess I could be described as bookish. And a city girl - I've lived my whole 24 years in Melbourne, minus those six weeks after uni I spent in Europe. So, I guess it's no surprise that the sum total of my experience of Australian Aboriginal culture is academic.

I know that walking through the NGV's Aboriginal art collection doesn't qualify me as an expert, but it helped me to better understand aspects of Aboriginal culture. In the landscape paintings I saw a complex relationship with the land: mapping humans' place in it and the spirits' place. In the forest of funerary hollow logs I saw an inkling of a cultural practice that I didn't know existed. And I marvelled at the rarrk (cross-hatching) designs peculiar to a region of Arnhem Land that looked like the elaborate pattern the sinews of muscle make. And in the contemporary section, I saw our colonial past through Aboriginal eyes.

I also saw a whole lot of meaning that wasn't available to me, either deliberately - as under Aboriginal law the meaning is restricted and not for public consumption - or unintentionally - through lack of opportunities for interaction with Aboriginal people and culture. Nevertheless, the collection is the closest I've come to a dialogue with Australian Aboriginality. And it's an experience I'll relish.

By guest: LJ

How much time is enough time to spend looking at a painting? I've come to the NGV:I for the first time since it reopened after being renovated in 2003. (Have I been that busy, that more than four years have passed between visits?!) I'm standing in front of Jorg Immendorf's Electric Painting. It's an enormous, almost garish, work that hangs hard left of a doorway. Walking in to the Contemporary Art Collection room, I had to look behind me to see it. With just a cursory glance at its Teutonic totems and flaming Fuhrer, I probably would have kept walking away from it. But it's one of the few things I recognise about the Gallery, having written about the painting for an exercise while at photography college more than a decade ago.

So, how long should I spend with it? Nothing I wrote about it is coming to mind. I read the blurb provided by the Gallery, which gives it a time (1985) and a place (Germany). I look again at the painting segment by segment collecting pieces of visual information. There is no seat in this room and I'm standing in the thoroughfare; here comes the Gallery attendant again. Am I spending too long?

I think of the time that went into this painting. Not just the physical craft of rendering the work, but the time in composing it: in Immendorf's mind and on his practice sketches. And the time he spent living in a divided Germany, studying painting (under Joseph Beuys), the hundreds of paintings he painted before this one that were necessary stages in his getting to here.

Here comes another wave of people. I don't know how many waves that makes. And I don't know how long I've been standing here. But it feels like a long time: I've been to post-war Germany and back. And I guess that's the point: when it comes to time it's quality over quantity that's owed to art.

By guest: Alex D

We went to the gallery with dad these school holidays. I don't think he was really into it though, he asked us heaps of questions: how many fish could we see in that painting? Which room of the house is it in? Did the man in the painting look happy or sad?

My favourite pictures were by a photographer called William Wegman. He dresses up his dog to look like a princess. The dog looked like she liked it. More than my dog Gracie. When I got home and put one of T-shirts on her she kind of froze and her ears drooped.

by guest: Katie Sommer

I may be retired but, for better or worse, I'm not immune to routine. In order to keep my promise of seeing more art, after retiring I allocated Friday as Gallery Day. In three years I've missed many, but kept more. So, I seem to have fallen into frequenting the National Gallery habitually. Admittedly, I tend to stick with the permanent displays - I still marvel that such a range of artworks is available for us to spend as long as we like with and at no cost.

It's getting such that I nod acknowledgement to some of the works, particularly in the Australian collection to which I seem to gravitate. There they all are, reliably marking periods in history, moods and opinions. On any given day I usually linger around one work or body of works: sometimes getting lost in classic portraits in heavy gilt frames, and other days in dot renderings of Dreamtime stories.

Wherever I go inside the gallery changes the world outside. The gallery has the unique ability to de-clutter the mind and realign it. After leaving, the skyline might look fragile and pastel coloured or muted and monochromatic. The streams of commuters filing in and out of Flinders Street Station take on a brown-ish hue, like the salary-folk of Brack's Collins St., 5pm. And they make a certain retiree grateful for his self-imposed routines, rather than the nine-to-five automated-walkway he stepped off a few years ago.

By guest: Kevin Frith

The information panel said something about exploring the close links that existed between colour and music. I was standing in front of a Roland Wakelin painting, a candy-coloured landscape, that hung with a similarly bright Roy de Maistre in the NGV:A's Joseph Brown Collection.

It got me thinking: what links between colour and music? There was the Blues, I guess. As a genre it evoked a 'blue' mood: in the key of flat. There's 'I Can Sing a Rainbow', by...er...was that Kermit? Whoever it was, it evokes a primary-coloured cheerfulness. In contrast to the Rolling Stones' 'Paint it Black', which could be described as dark-sounding.

This merging of the senses is known as synaesthesia. Wakelin and his contemporaries (including Roy de Maistre, Margaret Preston, Grace Cossington Smith - all represented at NGV:A) attempted to represent sound in paint. De Maistre's early experimental works attempted to synchronise the two: attributing a colour (or shade of) to a musical note. Yellow was C, and the scale of C major was called 'yellow major'. Higher octaves were brighter and lower were darker.

With this in mind, I decided to let the two works sing to me. To run the mental dial past the static and tune into some music - there's always some swimming around in my head, albeit pop tunes I picked up by osmosis at the supermarket. The synthscapes of Lemon Jelly sprang immediately to mind: less for the colour reference in the name, and more for their meandering mixes and bright washes. I'm going back with a loaded iPod.

by guest: James Cann

I never walk past the Gallery without making a wish. On the approach from Flinders Street, I find I'm refining the wording (wishes have to said out loud don't you know) while reaching for my change purse by the time I reach Princes Bridge.

The first coin that my fingers fall on is the one I choose. I had to make that the rule. Otherwise it's too tempting to think that the more money I toss into the moat, the more likely the wish is to come true. And thinking like that could have me standing in front of the NGV hurling everything of value that I own into its moat.

The concept of tossing money into water apparently comes from the notion that deities dwell in water, which has forever been a precious resource. The NGV moat's mosaic Angel was moved recently. Deborah Halpern's nine-metre sculpture is still located near water though - alongside the Yarra in Birrarung Marr. Angel had her back to the wall for 15 years, but is now appreciated from all sides.

I never throw money into the Yarra though. Just the NGV's moat. If it's the kind of wish that requires extra concentration, I'll walk through the Gallery to the garden, and cast a wish from the little bridge over the moat.

The NGV has everything I've ever wished for.

by guest: Ginger Lancaster

I went to the National Gallery's Ian Potter Centre and didn't look at a single painting. I looked between them, at the irregular configuration of the negative spaces. I looked beneath them to the floor with its polished grain flowing in one direction. I looked in front of the artworks, at the people moving past them: sometimes pausing, sometimes not. And I looked above them, noticing the zigzag patterns of the lighting tracking across the ceiling. Life started to look two-dimensional, with gallery-goers, words on information panels, pictures, doorways and walls all merging on a single plane.

I lingered in the hallways, between rooms. And admired the deliberate angles, reflective brushed-metal surfaces and warm light pooling in doorways. In the stairwells, a multitude of dots coalesce to form the floor-number '2', and the tube lighting running down the stairs seems to be escaping from the flood of white natural light pouring in through a skylight. The building seems wrapped in a net; any views to the outside are slightly obscured by its kinetic pattern.

I went to look at the gallery, rather than its contents, and applied the same process of scrutiny to the space as I would a single work. Appreciating its disparate components separately, then bringing them all back together again, reveals a modern masterpiece.

by guest: Ngoc Kee