In the macho culture of a shared house in Carlton, before I got married, I developed an interest in the arts. One night I had saved enough money—two pounds—to go to the Tivoli Theatre—to sit in the gods, the last seat right at the top of the auditorium, to see this tiny little lady June Bronhill singing ‘Vilja’ from The Merry Widow. I sat there transfixed. I was eighteen years old, and captured by this moment. It was a critical turning point in my life, setting me on a path of appreciating the arts. When you spend half the available money you’ve got for the week on the one theatre ticket and you still have got the worst seat in the house but you enjoy it, you remember it. I can still see the spotlight just on her face, and I am so far away and this great big voice fills the theatre. I was very moved by her performance.
This interest came to the fore after my near-disastrous business experiences in the 1980s and helped to set me on a new path. For the next fifteen years I poured all my excess energy into arts organizations, becoming chairman of the Melbourne International Arts Festival and the National Gallery of Australia, president of the Museums Board of Victoria, and director of Melbourne’s Playbox Theatre and of Opera Australia. I loved working for each of these bodies, on an honorary basis. I owe them, they don’t owe me. They all saved me money because it meant I wasn’t going to get involved in businesses I knew nothing about and go broke. In 2009 I was appointed Chairman of the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, as good an orchestra as any in the world. I expect to have quite a few wonderful years with them.
I have no skill at painting, music or dance. Sometimes I sing in the shower, but you don’t want to hear it. My dancing days might have passed me by. I am no frustrated performer. I admire artists and what they do. Many times I have switched on ABC Classic FM on my drives home from work or sat in theatres and concert halls and been staggered by the transformative power of a piece of music. I have been privileged to meet many artists and speak about their work. I am a very good listener and I have learned a lot. My involvement with the arts has been so fulfilling.
It was not designed as a substitute for artistic applause. I brought useful skills and knowledge to the arts from business. And I approached it in a business-like way. While I found many of the performances I attended sublimely beautiful and highly entertaining, the action in the foyers and function rooms was less so. ‘When other people start talking to the walls at functions, I go home early,’ I told the Australian in 2001. I added: ‘If there’s something I need to be at for twelve minutes, I won’t be there for sixty.’
The reason for my involvement in the arts is simple: I believe I can help in an area I love. But there are those who question my motivations. In 2001 in the Australian, an unnamed person suggested I wore arts memberships ‘the way other people wear epaulettes’; that is, for show. I responded that my involvement wasn’t complicated, that it was a simple pleasure. Power? As I see it, there’s a lot of power attached to a role in the arts. But it’s not unusual for people in the arts to question others’ motivations.
The reality is that arts organizations need hard-headed managers, and Australia increasingly has this type in charge. These days, if you haven’t got the business background to run arts organizations, you had better get them academically. Me? I don’t have formal qualifications, but I have well over forty years of business experience, which has translated well.
But no amount of business experience would ever have prepared me for Odetta.
The nightmare on Swanston Street began pleasantly enough: drinks with various Victorian dignitaries before a concert at the Melbourne Town Hall by the feted Odetta, the American singer, guitarist and human-rights activist.
As chairman of the Melbourne International Arts Festival I was privileged to see many different types of performer. My life in the arts has been rich and rewarding, and I’ve seen many great moments in concert halls in Victoria that have taken my breath away. But my most graphic and cringeworthy memory is the night the ‘Voice of the Civil Rights Movement’, as she is known, came to town in 1995.
Odetta was an important figure in American folk music in the 1950s and 1960s and was said to have influenced politically aware performers like Bob Dylan and Joan Baez. But at the Melbourne Town Hall in 1995, in front of 1760 people in a sold-out show, Odetta’s influence extended more to inspiring a powerful handful of Victorians to march out of her show in protest at her antics.
We’d gathered in the first few seats. In our group was Premier Jeff Kennett, his wife Felicity, Treasurer Alan Stockdale and his wife Doreen, Melbourne Festival chief Ian Roberts and his wife Lynne, and Bevelly and me.
Odetta strolled out, looked disconnected, tuned her guitar endlessly, looked up at the ceiling, fiddled with a few chords. People shuffled around in their seats.
‘Well,’ she said eventually in her southern drawl, ‘nice to be here.’ She was laid back to the point of being catatonic.
It was getting seriously awkward. She tuned her guitar a bit more, then rambled for ten to fifteen minutes, a mad drivel. She started songs without finishing them. At one point she shared a few bars of ‘Twinkle Twinkle Little Star’. People were shifting nervously in their seats.
Then things got really bad. Odetta began a blistering tirade about politicians: what a worthless bunch of arseholes they were, they were the same the world over, not one of them worth a pinch of crap. Our little group stared stony-faced up at the stage, immobilized.
Except for Felicity Kennett. The Premier’s wife had had enough and leapt out of her seat. ‘I don’t have to listen to this.’ And stormed out. The Premier jumped up and chased her. ‘Flick! Flick!’
Stockers jumped up, thinking, ‘There goes the boss. I’d better go.’
His wife Doreen tapped me on the shoulder. ‘Sorry, Harold, I think we’re going.’
The night had gone to hell. I looked over at Robbo, there were only four in our group left. ‘Do you think you can get her to sing?’
The following year, Dudley Moore, or the Sex Thimble as he was sometimes known, toured as part of the festival and provided another buttock-clenching evening.
Moore’s reputation for being a thirsty thespian preceded him, which meant a staff member of the festival was assigned to Dudley as an ‘assistant’—largely to keep a watch on him and make sure he turned up reasonably sober.
At Hamer Hall 2500 people had gathered to see Dudley play the piano and tell some humorous stories. But Dud was not on his game this night, and we all suspected it was because he had, in the words of Sir Les Patterson, had a few (‘Who hasn’t, for Christ’s sake?’ asked Sir Les).
Everyone was expecting he would do jokes as well as play the piano, because he is known as a jazz pianist. He played and played and didn’t say a word. And then, when Dud did talk, we wished he hadn’t, as he launched into a story about New Zealanders being charged with having sex with sheep.
Slurring his words, he described the detail of the sex act between the New Zealander and the sheep, whereupon the foreman of the jury says: ‘I knew a sheep like that.’
In the crowd were Victoria’s Governor and then Foreign Minister Gareth Evans. They joined the other 2498 people in sitting in complete silence. Agony.
What we didn’t know was that Dudley was suffering from a terminal degenerative brain disorder, which was formally diagnosed in 1999. He was a charming and enormously entertaining person, and he was becoming very ill. It didn’t make that evening any easier to bear.
The great American singer Roberta Flack toured with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra in 2009. She performed magnificently. But what the appreciative audience didn’t know was that she had an interesting request. Ms Flack insisted she be referred to as the Magic Lady.
Sadly, despite my preparation, our encounter never happened. Ms Flack might have been killing us softly with her demands, but it was better than being openly tortured by Odetta and Dudley.
It just said to me that people in the arts sometimes exist in headspaces the rest of us can only wonder at. And then we hear their voices, or their talent with an instrument, or we watch them act or dance superbly, and you’re transported and exhilarated. If they want to be called the Magic Lady, it’s no skin off my nose. Ms Flack was performing in Australia during the 2009 Victorian bushfires. She was so moved by what happened that she rang the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra and offered to perform a concert with all proceeds going to victims of the fires. What a magic lady, indeed.
It’s hard to turn down—on the spot—$100 million in exchange for a painting. But as president of the National Gallery of Australia I did, in a heartbeat. And I would do it again.
In 1973 Prime Minister Gough Whitlam made a huge decision to buy a painting called Blue Poles, by celebrated American abstract painter Jackson Pollock. Gough was a renaissance man, a lover of the arts. Gough might have known that there was going to be an outcry about the purchase, but he couldn’t know then that it would be one of the most famous—infamous to many—decisions the Whitlam Government made.
Blue Poles was bought for $A1.3 million. In 1973 that was an enormous amount of money, especially to buy a picture that no one could understand. ‘Blue Poles makes public see red’ screamed a headline in the Age. To many the purchase was a bold and brave statement at a time when Australia was breaking out of the staid conservatism of the Menzies era. To many others, it was a symbol of the profligacy of an irresponsible government.
Gough told me many years later that several things in his early years really shook him. One was the controversy that followed his decision to swap his government car from a Holden to a Mercedes, because he couldn’t fit into the Holden. He was easy prey there—the dilettante spurning the Aussie car for the European. He was a fish in the bucket for his hunters. And the other episode that rocked Gough was the reaction to the purchase of Blue Poles. He just couldn’t understand why people couldn’t appreciate it.
Appreciation of the work came slowly. By the time I became the fourth chairman of the gallery in 1994, not only was Blue Poles accepted by Australians but also it had become the gallery’s centrepiece and main drawcard. It was a very important painting, and in the art world it put Canberra on the world stage.
One day in 1995, Baillieu Myer, a member of the gallery’s board and a good friend, received a phone call. It was from Paul Allen, who happened to be Bill Gates’s partner, the other half of Microsoft, and one of America’s richest men. Allen said he didn’t want to act out of place, but would the gallery consider an offer to buy Blue Poles. The offer was $US100 million, as well as a replacement, another Pollock, of which he owned several.
When the offer was brought to me, naturally I said no on the spot. And I didn’t think much more about it because I knew that the nation had slowly come to love this work. It would be like selling Phar Lap.
In passing I mentioned the offer to a member of the National Gallery of Australia Council, a senior businessman, Michael Chaney. ‘Chairman,’ Chaney said, ‘this is inappropriate. The whole council should discuss this matter.’ So we had a formal meeting about it. On the council was Lyn Williams, widow of the great artist Fred Williams, who had been involved in the gallery since its birth. Lynn was aghast that we should even be raising the subject, and she was quite right. Tony Berg said: ‘Well, we need to look at this as a negotiation. He’s only said $100 million. Maybe there’s more.’ Robert Champion de Crespigny was intrigued. ‘What could we do with $100 million?’ he asked. He mentioned the roof that used to leak. Ros Packer was very strong on the idea of not selling. In the end we decided not to consider selling, which was fortunate for me because I’d already turned down the offer.
Some weeks later I felt I should tell Gough. ‘Harold, lovely to hear from you,’ said Gough. ‘How can I help you?’
‘Gough, let me tell you a story.’
I told him what had happened, then there was a pause from the great man. ‘Thank you, Harold. Might I say I was right. Yet again.’
Getting to know Gough was one of the great legacies of my involvement in the arts. I have been privileged to have spent quite a bit of time with the great man and his wife, and I saw a particularly quixotic side when we invited him to open a major exhibition at the Melbourne Museum in 2002.
The museum had secured a $600 million Italian painting exhibition in conjunction with the National Gallery of Australia called ‘The Italians: Three Centuries of Italian Art’, which brought together more than a hundred works from the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It included masterpieces by Tiepolo, Canaletto and Caravaggio. There was a lot of excitement about Moroni’s magnificent portrait Cavalier in Pink.
I rang Gough and asked whether he would open the exhibition, to which he kindly agreed. At ninety-two Gough was having some trouble walking, so we organized a go-cart to take him around. It came to be known as the Gough Mobile. Gough and Margaret were a bit sensitive about him being photographed riding in the Gough Mobile, and it’s a credit to the media covering the opening that night that they respected our request for them to abstain. The go-cart was a hit with the Whitlams, though.
Gough and Margaret wanted to take it shopping in Collins Street, which would have been quite a sight for shoppers.
Would I have wanted to have been on Collins Street to witness that? Well may you ask …
The most challenging moment of my involvement with the arts was the logistical nightmare of bringing the Kirov Opera, possibly the greatest opera company in the world, to Melbourne to open the 2001 Melbourne International Festival of the Arts, a project under the auspices of festival director Jonathan Mills. The opera had been renamed the Mariinski Theatre, a name that went back to the days of tsarist Russia. It was run by the charismatic conductor Valery Gergiev, a man of enormous influence and status in Russia, sort of a cross between Joan Sutherland and the Australian cricket captain, and who counts Vladimir Putin as a personal friend.
It was a hugely expensive enterprise. And nerve-wracking. We had to ensure the safe arrival of 276 opera members from St Petersburg to Melbourne to perform at the State Theatre. Just before the scheduled flight, the Afghanistan war started, Gergiev became nervous about coming, and there was panic that they might not come to Australia. Gergiev decided not to accept a Qantas flight and wanted his own charter. Qantas was annoyed with us because we were forced to cancel a whole jumbo.
They wouldn’t fly over the Middle East so we negotiated for the charter to go through Vladisvostok. Instead of landing in Manila, the flight landed at an unscheduled airport in the Philippines in Sibu Sibu where, just after take-off, the plane flew through two radio towers at the end of the airstrip. The plane now had four holes in its side and was depressurized. How they kept the flight from turning into a fireball Civil Aviation Safety Authority (CASA) investigators will never know.
We had no idea whether the show would go on. We put it on sale without having signed a contract; we trusted them.
They arrived on the day of the performance. The plane was spotted by air traffic control with holes in the side. They made a full emergency landing at Melbourne airport, where the authorities shut down the rest of the airport and covered the tarmac with foam.
We had every posh type in the country coming. Nobody had seen an opera company in Australia this size. Happily, the company arrived at the State Theatre just in time and put on an acclaimed performance.
But the drama wasn’t over just yet.
Each year the Age newspaper, the festival’s main sponsor, runs its Critics Awards for the best show in the festival. There’s no cash, just recognition. In the Spiegeltent, the paper’s arts editor Ray Gill stood up. ‘The winner is the Frankfurt Ballet.’
I couldn’t believe it. I’d been overwhelmed by the incredible commitment and courage of this great company. I had a rush of blood to the head. Ray had barely changed the envelope from one hand to another when I jumped up and pushed him aside. ‘And I’d like to announce the President’s Award for $25,000—the Mariinski Theatre,’ I said.
Huge round of applause. Everyone in the room, except for a couple of festival administrators, thought the gesture was planned. Actually I made up the figure as I stormed the podium.
The Mariinski had left. We asked how we could get the money to them. They were about to tour the USA and said what they would really need is excellent quality strings for their instruments, which were unavailable in Russia. The late Clifford Hocking, a director of the Harold Mitchell Foundation, helped. They got a deal for the best quality strings in America. Out of that came the invitation for the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra to play at Gergiev’s White Nights festival, one of the great festivals of Europe.
Sometimes my involvement has been to sort out problems, quickly and effectively. There is always a way around any problem, even moving slow ticket sales for the Melbourne International Arts Festival in 2000. Australians were just coming off the high of the Sydney Olympics, and tickets at the festival weren’t moving as well as they should. The man in charge of the festival’s box office was a veteran of the caper. He could smell whether a show was in trouble or on fire. The senior executives at the festival used to rely on his antennae.
One day he walked into general manager Ian Roberts’ office. ‘I want to show you this, a very strange thing,’ he told Ian. ‘Some shows last week had sold five tickets, now they’re sold out. And it’s all coming from one credit card.’
Well, yes, that was my credit card. It was much later that the ticket man found out I had spent $110,000 on tickets for various shows that hadn’t sold well. Ian Roberts asked him not to tell anyone, and brought him into his office where all these tickets were stacked up in a cupboard behind his desk. We gave the tickets away to college students and youth organizations. It meant nice full houses. The politicians just want you to deliver and make what you’re delivering a success. They don’t care how you do it. Full houses create the buzz of success, and I was surprised and delighted to have my $110,000 returned by the organizers after the final wash-up of the festival.
Much as I loved experiencing so many different art forms, it was impossible to remove politics from these positions, as I was soon to find out. First political shot was that, as president of both Museum Victoria and the NGA, the Melbourne Museum would be set up in direct competition with the gallery. The suggestion of a conflict of interest was ridiculous. People tended to look for problems where there weren’t any.
But in 2004 there was trouble that couldn’t be sorted out quickly. It was both the proudest and the most heated chapter of my five years at the National Gallery.
A confronting study of three nudes by British artist Lucian Freud called After Cézanne became available for purchase. It’s true the painting wasn’t going to be to everyone’s taste, and I am no art expert, but art experts are among those I’m good at listening to. Among those experts was the NGA’s soon-to-be controversial director, Irishman Brian Kennedy. Brian and I had a couple of meetings and quite a few phone calls about the painting and how we would position ourselves to acquire it. He thought the work was a must-have for the gallery, and I was persuaded by that view.
But once convinced of its artistic merits, finding the money wasn’t easy. Under instruction from me, Tony Berg, chairman of the National Gallery of Australia Foundation, was negotiating the purchase with the New York dealer. I told Tony that the gallery had $3.5 million to spend, that I would seek $2.4 million from donors, and that I would personally make up the shortfall. For the next day or so I didn’t wonder too much about the gamble I had just undertaken. It was a measure of how important I thought the purchase was.
Next morning at 6.45 a.m. the phone rang. It was Tony. ‘Harold, we’ve got it,’ he said.
I congratulated Tony on his work. And then, only slightly biting my lower lip, asked him how much I was up for. My contribution was to be $1.5 million, which brought it up to the $7.4 million asking price. It was the gallery’s most expensive acquisition ever, and the highest price ever paid by an Australian public gallery. I kept this contribution a secret from the public—and, for a while, my family—until 2005 because I didn’t want the NGA’s chairman to be seen as extravagant. Or get in trouble with my family. When I told my family, they were thrilled.
Brian Kennedy was kind enough to say: ‘The gallery’s success in acquiring After Cézanne is due to the splendid work of council chairman Harold Mitchell, and of Tony Berg AM, chairman of the gallery foundation, and his board. The foundation’s role is of vital importance and the gallery pays tribute to its distinguished benefactors for their combined vision and support.’
Not everyone admired the painting. It wasn’t a crowd pleaser. Sydney rugby-league identity Rex Mossop, not a noted art critic, offered this commentary: ‘I can’t see my portion of the $8 million going towards that sort of crap.’
But weightier figures than Mossop had concerns, too. In Good Weekend in 2006, one of Australia’s leading art experts, Ann Lewis, said she thought the painting was a waste of money. ‘I think it’s the worst picture Freud ever painted.’ The magazine reported that at the time of the purchase Lewis was not only on the NGA council but also a member of its acquisitions committee. ‘But we weren’t consulted. It just happened.’
My fight to save Brian Kennedy’s tenure at the gallery was the toughest period of my five years there. Brian had been deputy director of the Irish National Gallery in Dublin before he came to Canberra in 1997 on a five-year term. I believed Brian was an enormous talent with an extraordinary intellect, fascinating personality and, incidentally, a wonderful singer. He would have a couple of drinks and burst into ‘Danny Boy’. He was very Irish.
At an NGA council meeting in May 2001, the members of the gallery’s board felt his time might have been up. I didn’t.
At the next NGA council meeting on 14 December eight councillors—deputy chairman Rob Ferguson, Philip Bacon, Tony Berg, Michael Chaney, Lyn Williams, Peter Farrell, Ann Lewis and Rick Allert—were present. It was reported that several were angry with me for having apparently given them no option but to approve Brian’s extension and that if they had been asked whether his contract should be extended the majority view would have been that it shouldn’t. However, the meeting resolved that Brian would stay.
Rob Ferguson believed I had given my own ‘positive view’ of Brian to the then Arts Minister Richard Alston without consultation with the council. But I deny the charge that I advised the government to reappoint Brian before the council meeting and that I did not adequately consult fellow councillors.
I liked Brian and felt criticism that he had a divisive management style and that he was failing to attract audiences to exhibitions was unfair. I said to Richard Alston that sacking Brian would have made the government and the gallery look very bad. With some discussion, I was able to put to Senator Alston that Kennedy’s contract should be renewed for a further two years, not the five that he wanted. Alston was much relieved about this, especially given that the numbers appeared to be against me. He took me aside one day. ‘Harold,’ he said, ‘never go into politics. You can’t count.’
But it wasn’t an easy victory and certainly no fait accompli. There were claims that I rode roughshod over the other board members. Rob Ferguson resigned in protest, reportedly outraged at the way I had chaired the NGA. Fergsuon and other NGA councillors reportedly believed that I had not conveyed to Senator Alston the depth of their concerns about Brian, concerns that were expressed at the May meeting of the council.
Ferguson wrote a long letter to me and one to the Age, both complaining about me and my apparently autocratic style. I didn’t mind. I did worry a little for the institution, however; I didn’t want it to be seen in a bad light. I felt the need to defend the institution and its director. My other chief critic, Ann Lewis, had always thought she could do the job of anyone in the gallery, including the director. I was unmoved by her protests. I always respect boards, but ultimately leaders should lead. I wasn’t about to pander to people just so they might think I’m a good guy.
The Kennedy matter received a lot of media coverage. ‘He might have underestimated the Australian press,’ I told Lyndall Crisp of the Australian Financial Review. ‘They are intelligent, observant, supportive, but they like to know all of the facts most of the time.’
I spoke about my decision to stick to our strengths. ‘His later years with me were good,’ I told Crisp. ‘I came to an arrangement with him: he’d talk about art and I’d talk about everything else. If there was something of concern to the press, we would tackle it head on and tell the truth and there were no troubles after that. He had more farewell parties than I’d ever seen.’
But Brian’s reign had been controversial. In February 2004 in the Age, Robin Usher wrote: ‘He has been much-criticized: for faulty air-conditioning that risked damage to prize exhibits, for his perceived closeness to the Government, for an erratic exhibition policy and the end of blockbuster shows, and for chronically low staff morale.’ Usher offered this assesment: ‘Kennedy’s time in Canberra will be remembered mostly for the controversies. A storm broke in 1999 when he unexpectedly cancelled a proposed tour of Sensation, after first discussing the move with Alston. The show included a portrait of British child murderer Myra Hindley and Chris Ofili’s painting of the Madonna with elephant dung.’
I did have one regret about my time at the NGA: that I didn’t accompany Brian when he travelled to Outback Australia to learn more about Aboriginal artists and their work.
My four years as the NGA’s chairman were a great time for me. When the gallery’s collection was revalued in 2004–05, its worth had increased 10 per cent to $3.135 billion. In 2005 two thousand works were acquired and 1157 donated. The NGA opened fourteen exhibitions in Canberra, and we put on eleven travelling exhibitions. More than 3.9 million people viewed works from the collection, including more than four hundred thousand at the gallery.
In 2001 serious allegations were raised about possible collusion in the bidding for a painting by British painter John Glover entitled Mount Wellington and Hobart Town from Kangaroo Point (1833). Here’s what happened.
The NGA was especially keen to acquire the work, and we approached the Tasmanian Museum in a bid to buy it together. Christies auction house had predicted the painting would fetch $2.5 million. I met Steve Vizard, then chairman of the National Gallery of Victoria, to discuss the NGV’s interest in joining the auction. In the end the NGV did not bid.
On the night there was only one bid, from our NGA director Brian Kennedy, for $1.5 million, which secured the work for the gallery. Brian and the then Tasmanian Museum director Patricia Sabine were thrilled. It was the first time two public institutions had acted jointly to buy a work of art.
The Australian alleged that the fate of the Glover had been decided at a Melbourne meeting of state and national gallery directors. A few weeks later came the news that the consumer watchdog, the ACCC, would conduct an investigation into why there were no other bidders, at least from the public galleries, and into whether the Trade Practices Act had been breached. Then ACCC chairman Allan Fels warned that if the act had been breached, directors involved could face fines of up to $10 million.
In September 2002 Geoff Maslen wrote in the Age: ‘Fels said public institutions had to apply to the ACCC in advance for immunity from the act, and the commission would then decide if the public interest outweighed the anti-competitive action. He said art markets were as subject to the law as any other and vendors had a right to get a fair price without “understandings between potential bidders”.’ Maslen went on:
The two directors had not sought an exemption from the act, although, at a meeting of the Australian Art Museum Directors Council in Melbourne on November 7, the others agreed not to compete. Their decision was hardly news, for the directors had signed a pact in the 1980s saying they would not bid at auction if one of them wanted a particular picture. This was intended to limit competition between public institutions while keeping prices down. The directors even devised a ‘template document’, as Kennedy called it, to be used by galleries making joint purchases, but it was not until the Glover was offered for sale that the document came into force.
I decided to tough it out. In the end the ACCC decided to take no action. Fels said that, ‘whilst it [the ACCC] will not be taking any further action at this stage, it may do so in the future should new information come to light’. He made reference to reticent witnesses. ‘When meetings were held with possible witnesses, little evidence was forthcoming,’ he said.
In December 2002 the Australian reported Fels’s comments: ‘If museums get together and make agreements about buying, they have to be extraordinarily careful to avoid breaching the law. They would be well advised to have good legal advice before collaborating on buying decisions.’ In the end Professor Fels said no evidence was provided that ‘would have supported litigation so no action was taken’.
Sometimes in my role as a senior arts administrator I felt the need to use the position for someone else’s greater advantage. When I joined the National Gallery of Australia and became its chairman I found it an oddity, if not a little annoying, that the Victorian gallery retained the word ‘National’ in its title. In 2002 I was asked by a Rotary Club to speak at its function at the Windsor Hotel in Melbourne. I thought this might be an opportunity for the club to get on the front page of the newspaper, so I delivered a speech suggesting that the National Gallery of Victoria should drop the ‘national’ from its name, how ridiculous their title was and that they should change it.
My tactic achieved exactly what I wanted. ‘Yes, it is slightly confusing that Melbourne’s gallery bears the word “national” in its name when it is a state institution,’ wrote Raymond Gill, the Age’s arts editor, ‘but Harold, we’ve been calling it the National Gallery of Victoria for a long time now, and we’re kind of used to it.’
I received a message from Premier Steve Bracks saying: ‘Respect everything you say, Harold, but we’re not going to change.’
At least I got people thinking.