Gallery director had art in her blood
Avenal Beryl Elizabeth Gough arrived in the world 10 minutes ahead of her brother Antony, each twins of Owen and Avenal Gough, and with older brothers Tracy and Harcourt.
Avenal was a rare heiress among several heirs to the fortune of her grandfather and larger-than-life industrialist, Tracy ‘‘T.T.’’ Gough. In the
1930s, T.T. once arranged for a cabinet minister to crush a wheelbarrow with a Caterpillar bulldozer in graphic symbolism of a new mechanical era.
Contests over T.T.’s complicated 1954 bequests and control of the family heavymachinery trading company was subject to dispute in the highest courts for much of her life, with the 90-year-old Gough Group finally sold out of the family’s hands only in 2019.
Avenal was the 50:50 partner with twin Antony in developing Oxford Terrace in Christchurch’s city centre from the early
1970s up until the destruction of the 2011 earthquake. Antony has since rebounded as Christchurch’s most colourful reconstruction champion. Avenal, for her part, devoted her own efforts in life to pursuits further afield.
In Wellington, she is best known as a longtime director of the New Zealand Portrait Gallery (2005-14), for which, in
2015, she was invested into the NZ Order of Merit. She admired painted portraits for their ability to capture emotions documented over generous periods (hours, days, weeks), the antithesis of photography’s ‘‘decisive moment’’.
Growing up with the family’s extensive collection of C.F. Goldie portraits of Ma¯ ori chiefs and elders at the Fendalton homes of the Gough family at Mona Vale (now a city park) and Silver Birches, a love of art was in her blood. Her first of many acquisitions, while still a student, was a pink Colin McCahon.
Avenal’s favourite artist, though, was always Frances Hodgkins, famous for her late career ‘‘self-portrait’’ still lifes of hat, handbag, shoe, scarf et al, which anticipated and antedate Instagram by half a century. What drew Avenal to Hodgkins, this most influential of our modernist artists, was the unwavering strength in overcoming whatever hurdles – usually Hodgkins’ gender and poverty – to render a vision reality.
Throughout her life, Avenal loved collecting and supporting New Zealand artists and ensuring recognition of underloved ones already lost to us. Her project with the portrait gallery was more than the creation of an institution. It was also a way in which artistic talent could be promoted, as in 2014 when Avenal secured a rare diamond jubilee seated portrait of the Queen by young New Zealand artist Nick Cuthell.
She studied English literature at the University of Canterbury, where she embarked on a lifelong passion for the moody intrigue of Edgar Allan Poe, trusting always to her own intuition. She and Antony motored about town in a pair of Isetta BMW two-seaters. Avenal shared her cabin with a 60-something kilo St Bernard called Marcus. Another motorist pulling alongside shrieked at seeing a giant dog, seemingly at the wheel, looking their way. Marcus, tied by a leash to the front bumper while Avenal ducked into the faculty, once pulled the bubble-car half-a-block to meet her. Avenal’s astonishment was reciprocated by Marcus’ beaming joy at reuniting.
For Avenal, the Wellingtonian adoption process began in London in the northern autumn of 1972 at a university dining hall, where she chanced on John McKinnon. He was also a twin, the younger by 10 minutes of his brother Malcolm. John was somehow ‘‘special’’ and ‘‘different from all the others’’, she once remarked of the man who was to become her husband of 45 years.
In London, Avenal studied under the confessed but yet to be revealed Soviet double agent, Sir Anthony Blunt, director of the Courtauld Institute. A Nicolas Poussin work took pride of place in his flat, leading art history postgrads such as Avenal later to speculate whether the grand masters were in fact the currency of the spymasters. John, meanwhile, graduated from the London School of Economics to start what became a foreign service career.
The couple were posted to our most significant foreign partners in Washington, DC, to Australia, at the UN and, above all, to China. She became a face of New Zealand to the wider world: Bill and Hillary Clinton would gaze into her extraordinarily big and sparkling blue eyes at the Temple of Dendur inside New York’s Metropolitan Museum during a reception with ambassadors to the United Nations. A short trek from her Colony Club haunt, Avenal knew the Met like the back of her hand: she had developed her own tour of the grand masters and drew enormous pleasure teasing enthusiasm out of American school kids as a Met volunteer.
She supported John during difficult diplomatic times. New Zealand’s presidency of the Security Council in April 1994 coincided with the Rwandan genocide. This type of work was John’s daily toil, with his brother Don also co-presiding over that particular council as New Zealand’s foreign minister. Many a visiting dignitary to Don’s Beehive office enjoyed works of art on loan from his sister-in-law.
Avenal had to be adaptable as the couple moved through their postings, including three to China between 1978 and 2018. John, fluent in Chinese, served two terms as ambassador there. But first, visiting from their base in Hong Kong in 1976, they experienced Beijing’s journey to modernity from throngs of donkeydrawn carts, bicycles, ubiquitous Mao suits, a makeshift airport road, and staff who reported daily on their every movement to a Kafkaesque department handling foreign surveillance.
‘‘They must have been so desperately bored,’’ Avenal would muse. Nearly 40 years on, in 2015, pollution was so intense that facemasks were a must on many a day out of doors. Avenal could scarcely make out buildings across the road from the official residence, itself a showroom for her sprawling collection of contemporary New Zealand art.
She lamented the environmental catastrophe of it, which cannot have aided her years-long, on-and-off battle with cancer that finally claimed her life.
She was herself a life-long lover of nature. Beyond her pets (among them Jessie, Cinnamon, Daphne and Rosey), she delighted in her garden, and especially adored hydrangeas. She developed a company, Sycamore Toys, at the apex of the late-80s plastic toy heyday, to rekindle interest in sustainable, wooden crafts. She hand-painted many of the toys herself.
Unimpressed by radiata pine monoculture, she acquired and maintained hundreds of acres of native bush at Punakaiki and the Queen Charlotte Sound, her favourite holiday spot since childhood. Through the application of a certain amount of family labour (who could refuse Avenal?) and an expert German forester, she also planted an unusual European hardwood stand at Acerwood, in Reikorangi, near Waikanae, her ‘‘gateway to heaven’’.
As with her mother, Avenal was deeply devout, unembarrassed to witness her faith, unlike many fellow Anglicans, though never judging of others’ beliefs, looking for the best in people – the divine spark – which she often found, including by never failing this writer, her son, one problematic middle child.
She excelled as a curator and art historian, diplomatist, property developer, forester, toy maker, homemaker, mother and grandmother. Perhaps on account of the impossibility of fitting it all in every day, she was also a night owl, known as ‘‘ruru’’ by a number of her grandchildren.
She nevertheless took after her other namesake ‘‘Aunty Beryl’’, the subject of a 2020 Landfall essay, whose ‘‘best advice’’ she passed on to the eldest of her five grandchildren, Ella: ‘‘hope always, love much and laugh often’’.
Avenal is survived by her husband John, children Alexander (Sasha), Matthew and Sophie, her three brothers Tracy, Harcourt and Antony Gough, and her five grandchildren.
She is buried, according to her wishes, at St Matthias churchyard in Makara, a stone’s throw from where she used to bring her family for picnic swims. She will forever remain a testament to a life fully lived.