The journey to being a director is a strange set of – I was going to say accidents, but chances. I started off wanting to be an artist but I soon learned that I wasn’t an artist. So the next best thing, of course, is looking at art and trying to communicate my enthusiasm for art.
One of the announcements of me was ’58-year old mother-of-four takes top job’ and I thought, what is a mother-of-four got to do with this job? And it just sort of put me down. But it’s always difficult when you’re the first of anything.
I felt very strongly that the National Gallery in Canberra had to be known across the land and we would be known across the land if we put on events that attracted attention. So that’s why I became known as, in a pejorative way, Betty Blockbuster. And I was thinking well, what we can’t buy we can borrow. And that first exhibition we put on Rubens and the Italian Renaissance was such an outstanding success. Some of the curators were wanting to just speak to other curators; I wanted to speak to the population at large.
But my success in everything I’ve done has relied on me talent spotting, spotting the people that can thrive and then giving them all the assistance and support and praise that I possibly can. So they can operate and enjoy what they’re doing. Their success was my success. I floated up to the top with them.
