WEBVTT
Kind: captions
Language: en

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The journey to being a director is a strange set of –  I was going to say accidents, but chances.

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It's always difficult, when you're
the first of anything. One of the announcements

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of me was "58-year-old mother of four takes
top job" and I thought "Blow". What has a mother

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of four got to do with this job?"

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The whole institution had been started by
James Mollison. He'd done a wonderful job,

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I have to say. But they'd known nothing else.
For a long time they were just in a little

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warehouse at Fyshwick, having a marvellous
time. Every time a new painting came in they'd

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crack a bottle of champagne. I couldn't emulate
that.

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I felt very strongly that the Natioal Gallery
in Canberra had to be known across the land.

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And we would be known across the land if we
put on events that attracted attention. So

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that's why I became known as – in a pejorative
way – Betty Blockbuster. Some of the curators

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were wanting to just speak to other curators.
I wanted to speak to the population at large.

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And I was thinking well what we can't buy
we can borrow. We couldn't buy a whole lot

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of Rubens and Caravaggios and Carraccis etc...
but we could borrow them. And that first exhibition

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we put on, 'Rubens and the Italian Renaissance',
was such an outstanding success that that

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won a lot of them over.

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So I remember standing in the galleries and
some really loutish-looking lads, you know,

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of about 19 or 20 with, you know, with their
sort of bands, and "Cor..." they said, "this

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is pretty good isn't it?" you know and I thought
"Great." That's got those boys in. They would

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never set foot in a gallery otherwise.

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My success in everything I've done has relied
on me spotting the people that can thrive

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and then giving them all the assistance and
support and praise that I possibly can. Their

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success was my success. I floated up to the
top with them.