. . . and neither would the woman behind Te Papa
Dame Cheryll Sotheran, creative industry leader: b Stratford, October 11, 1945; m Michael Pritchard, 2d; d Auckland, December 30, 2017.
If you look at Te Papa from a certain angle, our national museum can appear as a large vessel moving slowly and inexorably towards the sea.
Maori believe that the spirits of the dead make that same journey, into the water and then the underworld via Cape Reinga in the Far North and a brief sojourn on Three Kings Islands.
Lucy Pritchard has every reason to look at the iconic museum on Wellington’s waterfront that her mother played such a key role in building, and wonder if this is the point at which and the vessel in which she was carried into the spirit world.
She has every reason to look at Te Papa and maybe feel some bitterness at the price paid by her mother in lost friendships, family time and maybe even, as some believe, stress that led to ill-health and then death, at the relatively young age of 72.
But she feels none of this.
‘‘I think of the happiness that it gave her,’’ says Pritchard. ‘‘It’s the place I go when I want to feel positive; it’s a special place. What it meant to her greatly outweighed the personal toll; she would never have not wanted to do it.’’
For a daughter pondering the considerable legacy of a mother recently lost, Te Papa is a fitting monument to a career spent building the New Zealand cultural story for all of its many diverse participants.
But as important as this building and its narrative is, it remains just one chapter in an incredible volume of discovery, leadership and accomplishment.
Born in Stratford, Taranaki, Cheryll Sotheran developed a deep love of this country and its biculturalism as she followed her teacher parents, Marjorie and Vincent (Sam) Sotheran, around the province and then on to the Far North and East Cape.
‘‘Her parents were teachers in small Maori schools,’’ says Pritchard. ‘‘I always remember my grandmother, for her age and in New Zealand society, being very far advanced in her attitudes.’’
Like mother, like daughter. As Sotheran made her way through her academic career, finishing teachers’ college in 1968 and a Master of Arts in English at Auckland University, she demonstrated a knack for ‘‘working against the flow’’ that would bring great pain and also success in later life.
Those early stints in Maori schools laid the foundations of Sotheran’s hard-wired approach to biculturalism and a deep understanding of the role of Maori, the national story and how the narrative should be told.
‘‘Committed wasn’t the right word, but for her it was a given that we lived in a bicultural New Zealand,’’ says Pritchard. ‘‘That was what it should be and what it is.
‘‘That was way before Te Papa. It came through in her developing relationships with iwi in Taranaki and in Dunedin . . . she would form those relationships and bring them into the institutions she worked in, and brought them in whole-heartedly.’’
She developed plenty of those relationships as she later travelled around the country with her own daughters, Lucy and Miranda, taking director roles at Govettbrewster in New Plymouth in 1986 and Dunedin Public Art Gallery in 1989. Both involved major, potentially divisive projects, including moving the southern gallery into the city centre. Both would help prepare her for the defining project of her career.
‘‘She absolutely loved New Zealand, so that meant travelling and exploring places, so as young kids and adults we were always going off on adventures,’’ says Pritchard. ‘‘Most of the time it was the out of the way, the unusual, the wild beaches.’’
The travel around the country gave her plenty of insight into the Kiwi story; her work in museum management and trips to galleries and institutions overseas helped inform her strong, developing views on how that story should be told.
‘‘She knew it [museums] had to change. She travelled a lot when I was young, to Europe - she went to the Pompidou Centre in Paris, all around the world, looking at what museums were doing, meeting museum directors.
‘‘She soaked up everything she could about museums and brought it back for New Zealand to make Te Papa the best of all of the things that she found.’’ That ‘best’ had to be a democratic sum of all New Zealand’s disparate cultural parts, a narrative for the people, by the people. One that would reinvent cultural storytelling.
When Sotheran was appointed in 1992 as the founding chief executive of the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, with the daunting job of developing and building a national museum, guiding legislation sought an interactive storehouse that would reflect biculturalism, be a forum for the nation and foster debate about culture and national identity.
Sotheran had succeeded with big projects before, but this was something else: a $300 million leviathan that was unpopular in political and arts circles. And that was before she laid out her plans.
‘‘She always surprised me because she never seemed that daunted by it, she just knew she needed to do it,’’ says Pritchard. ‘‘Somehow in her mind she just had this belief and ability in herself that she knew she could do it. I don’t know how she did that.’’
Sotheran would need all of that belief as she worked tirelessly against a strong tide of opposition and also a genetic blood disorder, hereditary hemorrhagic telangiectasia - ‘‘it was like a form of anaemia’’ - that would eventually play a role in the 2013 stroke that led to her death.
So there were plenty of enemies, inside and out.
Critics thought Sotheran was creating a dumbed down ‘‘Disneyland’’.
Art commentator Hamish Keith initially referred to Te Papa as a "theme park", the "cultural equivalent to a fast-food outlet".
‘‘There was a huge amount of opposition and criticism,’’ says Pritchard. ‘‘She couldn’t take it on and achieve it. She did take it on personally but she had to keep going. No compromising.
‘‘She lost friends in really, really powerful communities. But she had support from family, from people like co-leader Cliff Whiting and me and her colleagues, colleagues around the world.
‘‘For Te Papa it was always about knowing what the end goal was.’’
Te Papa’s opening in 1998 and overwhelming success was a vindication of sorts, followed by Sotheran being named a Dame in the 1999 New Year Honours list.
But there was no fist-pumping or elegant middle finger extended to those who continued to attack Te Papa and its ethos.
‘‘She was very humble about it. Her nickname at her work was Dame C. She gave the medal to her mum,’’ says Pritchard. ‘‘For us it was a reflection of the years of work that she put in, and that’s New Plymouth and Dunedin and Wellington.’’
Vindication or not, the many years spent hauling this leviathan on to the Wellington waterfront had taken their toll. On top of her blood disorder she was diagnosed with type-1 diabetes. Opponents were still circling, minor issues with travel expenses were raised, but Sotheran appeared to lack the old fiery energy to fight back.
‘‘She had just been visiting with me in England and I just remember feeling that she was not well. She had been not well for some time.’’
Her resignation in 2002 was followed by a new role with New Zealand Trade and Enterprise.
‘‘It was much less stress, she wasn’t a figurehead, was out of the public eye. She would still support New Zealand’s creative industries anyway she could.’’
She was still there in 2013, working fulltime at age 68, when she suffered a significant stroke.
Just as she had with her cooking - ‘‘she gave everything when she wasn’t at work into cooking for people’’ - and reading ‘‘a super-fast reader, voracious; you could never keep up with her’’ - she was determined and put her all into her rehabilitation over her last years.
Now Dame C is gone. But Te Papa lives on.
‘‘Mum always imagined it as a living museum; it’s not going to stay the same, it’s meant to change and develop . . . so I’m delighted to see the work over the last few years to change Te Papa and that’s how mum always imagined it would be.’’
Tim Walker has an insightful memory of the famously fiery Cheryll Sotheran. It was the early 90s and the senior curator at the National Art Gallery was being informed by his new boss that he and his colleagues were being moved to another office in Wellington.
‘‘I was aggrieved and did a slightly childish and petulant thing. Cheryll decimated me in front of my manager and peers.’’
His reaction was ‘‘to really click in and get with the programme’’.
That wasn’t always the case. The path to opening Te Papa was littered with the bodies of those deemed by Sotheran to be ‘passengers’. Many did not go quietly.
Walker, now a strategic consultant, concedes she could be ‘‘fierce’’ and ‘‘prickly’’, but he believes much of it was a byproduct of visionary leadership, high-level strategic thinking and an incredible pressure to deliver.
‘‘When you look at the scale of the challenge that was Te Papa, I believe, on paper, it was impossible to pull off in New Zealand in terms of our intellectual resources, our sponsorship ability, and then to do that within a five-year period.
‘‘There was no precedent for achieving anything that was this conceptually or physically complex in New Zealand, and no skill base.’’
The founding board thought so too. Sotheran was one of two final candidates to lead the project but the board was set to reject both and look overseas.
According to Walker, Sotheran ‘‘asked for a chance to meet the board again . . . and convinced them she could see what the opportunity was and that she could deliver it’’.
‘‘She was driven by a democratisation, a kind of liberal, socialist idea of what the outcome would be,’’ he says.
That idea attacked traditional pillars of academic thought; it undermined the elitist thinking of artistic silos.
‘‘If this is a museum for all New Zealanders then what is the story in terms of art in that museum. It was about framing the question.’’
And the answers would come from the kind of places bitterly despised by many of those storied gatekeepers of arts, research and science.
‘‘We’d have experts from Disney here and other experts.’’
For those like Walker who clicked in and got with the programme, Sotheran was an inspiring leader with two clear eyes on the vision and two strong hands on the wheel of budget and project management.
‘‘She fired talent into being, where otherwise those people might have remained passengers. We worked as a staff that was excited internally but definitely it was hostile outside. Inside that Te Papa project development period you saw an incredibly cohesive, collaborative, positive culture.’’
That included a commercial nous that Walker says belied her relatively traditional careers in arts and teaching academia and museum management.
‘‘Her commercial thinking evolved through Te Papa,’’ he says. ‘‘You have a government that says, ‘we acknowledge this is a $300 million project and we’ll give you $275 million’. So the project had to raise the value of an America’s Cup campaign.’’
The evolution of that thinking allowed her to continue her valuable contribution to the country’s creative industries at NZTE and SODA Inc. She developed the nation’s first Creative Industries Strategy.
‘‘Her high-level strategic thinking and ability to grapple with bigger questions was really critical, and came from what she learnt at Te Papa. It was the crucible of her intellectual strategic development.’’
That ‘‘crucible’’ remains the defining fixture of Sotheran’s life, ‘‘but the real legacy is in the incredible strategic, visionary, intellectual courage and leadership that she expressed and shared with others’’.
- Rob Mitchell