Our museum is thriving because we do things differently

When primatologist Jane Goodall first observed chimps using sticks as tools and fishing for termites back in 1960, there were those who didn’t want to believe it. There was a steadfast desire to ensure that what separated us from chimps, our distant evolutionary relatives, was our ability to make tools and communicate through language.

How far we’ve come since in our understanding, and yet … not.

I am a proud communicator of science, but I sense we are not using all our human tools to best effect right now. One thing that stands out after a decade at the Australian Museum is that for us to thrive, we need to be less hubristic about gateways to knowledge.

Kim McKay with the gilded mask from the coffin of Amenempe, part of the Rameses exhibition at The Australian Museum. Credit: Steven Siewert

The Australian Museum is the nation’s first, and I am the first female and non-scientist director and CEO. Before 1917, no professional female staff were permitted at all. When I arrived, about a century later, there were no women on the museum’s executive team. Now, approximately two thirds of the executive team, our board of trustees and our staff are women. We also appointed the first First Nations executive team leader, also a woman.

The Australian Museum’s most successful innovations in recent years are born from looking and listening differently. Unsettled, the First Nations truth-telling exhibition, broke new ground; Hintze Hall provided a new venue for discussion and debate; a new Pasifika Gallery, Wansolmoana (one salt ocean) shares stories of Pasifika peoples and climate change; the Minerals Gallery displays the natural resources that have underpinned our nation’s wealth; and we opened the popular Burra education and play area. These new spaces urge different yet complementary minds to work together.

Public trust – and the soft power it nurtures – within and around museums and other cultural institutions, locally and globally, has never been higher. Studies in the USA, UK and in Australia underscore this, acknowledging that with this trust comes even greater responsibility. The civic notion inherent in progressive museums’ strategic and tactical storytelling can transform community conversations in a way that politics, media and other information pathways are unable to.

Kim McKay in the Grand Hall of the renovated museum in 2020.Credit: Janie Barrett

That’s not to say we’re not facing our own challenges. Our work includes decolonising an 1827 museum, repatriating exhibits and artefacts; pioneering work which began more than 25 years ago. We also fund and digitise collections, as well as constantly repair and rebuild facilities to keep pace with modern expectations.

But we do face these challenges because museums show and inspire as much as tell. And what stories we have! We house nothing short of time travel in each of our collections. We are the custodian to more than 22 million objects and specimens, the largest collection in the southern hemisphere, valued at more than a billion dollars.

Science is at the forefront of all we do. The now somewhat cliched idea of the solo “eureka” scientific moment is firmly over and collaboration is the name of the game. True collaboration calls for a multidisciplined and non-hierarchical approach to problem-solving, and where you’ll find the real spark that fires innovation. It is the long, day-after-day marathons undertaken by devoted teams of people, working through multiple failures and incremental progress, yet with the willingness to search for the missing piece that brings a project to land.

This is on display at the Eureka Prizes for science, now in its 34th year, when we celebrate Australian innovation and scientific discovery.

The Ramses II exhibition has been a blockbuster success.

The intrinsic beauty of natural history, science and culture museums is that they are innately immersed in understanding that diversity is the obvious foundation for saving humankind.

That we are all alike and different. Our world-class scientists at the Australian Museum Research Institute accept this at an ecological level, are dedicated to highlighting the impact of climate change on biodiversity, and are at the forefront of citizen science.

A few years shy of the Australian Museum’s 200th anniversary in 2027, and we’re going strong. The Ramses II exhibition has been a blockbuster success, and our Frog ID app has just identified its one millionth frog, demonstrating there is still so much joy in unpacking culture, natural history and scientific awe spatially, visually, verbally. The marvel that this can be done right here in our own backyard never leaves me.

I see it on children’s faces every day at the museum. Seeing those faces glow with wonder among the million plus visitors we now host annually proves what we do inspires a thirst for knowledge and discovery.

We are linked to everything around us, from Jane Goodall’s chimps to butterflies and birds. Natural history, science and culture institutions should understand, perhaps better than anyone, that everything in nature is continually communicating – from raindrops to tree roots to a virus or the DNA in our cells. Museums are trusted messengers for how to restore and renew our planet, we need to keep the pressure on.

I am a collaborative optimist and I have always believed that we can change the world for the better if we invite all kinds of minds to help do it.

Kim McKay is CEO of the Australian Museum.