Volunteers at National Gallery in Canberra annoyed at push for casual roles

The newly redesigned and rehung International galleries displays Blue Poles upstairs at the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra.

Few things get more heated than a blue within the arts community, and it appears that the National Gallery of Australia is on a collision course with the legion of volunteers that guide the punters around the institution - and help prop up its finances.

Margin Call is told there’s a stand-off between NGA management and the gallery’s voluntary guides - an institution of their own since its founding in 1982 - over plans being floated to strip back the role of the volunteers.

Outsiders might think the volunteer’s gig would be a pretty simple one. You’d merely have to stand around and direct an endless parade of ignorant hicks in the direction of Jackson Pollock’s Blue Poles or Claude Monet’s Water Lilies.

The reality, Margin Call discovers, is a more complex.

Would-be volunteers have to do a 16 week training course before being let loose on the public. They’re then expected to do a minimum of 20 hours a year at the gallery, mostly running guided tours for visitors and - most importantly - the 60,000 or so school kids that shout their way through the NGA halls each year.

In exchange you get access to the NGA’s research library and archives, and invitations to the odd monthly lecture, study group and social event.

It’s a position of significant social prestige among a certain set of Canberra’s intelligentsia.

But a push by gallery management - led by deputy NGA director Adam Lindsay, Margin Call is told - to enforce more uniform standards in the delivery of the tours has ignited tensions with the volunteer committee that oversees the program.

Dr Gabriel Montua, Head of the Museum Berggruen and Adam Lindsay, Deputy Director of the National Gallery of Australia, with Cézanne to Giacometti. Picture: supplied

No easy task, you see, given the volunteers are mostly older, possibly a little set in their ways, and often have their own areas of interest and expertise.

But nothing that a little diplomacy, planning, and patience couldn’t fix - along with a decent management framework.

But, alas! Diplomacy and patience are often in short supply in arts administration.

Terse meetings have been held, heated words have been exchanged, and heels have been dug in on the NGA’s hallowed grounds.

It all came to a head recently when a management representative let slip a plan to remove the volunteer’s role in running school tours.

The ostensible trigger, we’re told, is a minor fracas over an incident when a child slipped the leash of their teachers and fell into a shallow pond at the gallery. Not great, granted, but also not the fault of the volunteer tour guide given it’s the school’s job to keep their kids under control.

Tensions were exacerbated when word circulated the gallery planned to advertise for casual workers to run the school tours - without, we’re told, inviting volunteers to apply.

Here’s the problem, though. More than 30 tours a week are run during the peak season when schools are trying to force a little culture onto their pupils.

Each runs for around an hour, but there’s a 3 hour minimum for casual workers. At 30 tours a week, that’s going to add up pretty quickly - call it $4500 a week, or thereabouts, onto the NGA’s tight annual budget.

Asked about the drama, a spokesperson for the NGA said the organisation continues to “work together with our volunteers so we can provide visitors with the best possible experience when visiting the National Gallery”.