Michele Hewitson interview: Michael Frawley

Michael Frawley is nuts about cars and owns seven, including an Alpha Romeo and several Porsches. Photo / Greg Bowker

The former multinational corporate restructuring specialist is now restructuring Motat.

On Wednesday it rained and on the few occasions it stopped, it thundered. It was a hell of a day to go to poor old Motat and hardly anyone did. There were a few desolate and quite probably desperate mothers with strollers and toddlers. There was somebody pinching seed heads from outside the little cottage near Memory Lane. I told the chief executive, Michael Frawley, about this and he sighed and said: "They'll take anything that's not tied down." I was simply helping with the dead-heading, I said. Motat, despite the CEO's efforts so far - he's been in the job since May 2013; he's the newish broom; he's the change merchant - looks as though it could do with all the help it can get.

Memory Lane. How hokey and yet, why not? Hokey can be charming. If you are a 5-year-old although it is entirely possible that the five-year-olds of today have more sophisticated tastes. I liked it, even as a 10-year-old, and I still like it - although I can see that it is dull and dumpy.

Motat, said the CEO, is things piled on top of each other, too often haphazardly. Bits of it look like a rubbish dump. Bits of it are a rubbish dump. People phone, or email, daily, to offer their junk. Most of it has to be considered. There could be gems, but mostly it is junk. It was before his time, he said, but there is the famous story of the lawn mowers. A chap offered his amazingly interesting collection of lawn mowers and was no doubt amazed to be told, no thank you. The next morning it was discovered that the collection of mowers had been tossed over the fence - all 40 of them.

People also kindly offer toxic junk. They say, he said: "'Do you want it? It's historically significant.' It's full of mercury or arsenic or whatever and we're not touching it. They want us to take it because then it goes from being their problem to being our problem."

It sounds like a description of his job: Full of toxic waste and other people's problems. A 2012 report found Motat was riven with in-fighting and, to paraphrase wildly but not wrongly, full of other people's sorry junk.

It is a funny sort of job, for anyone, really, but especially for him. He is, or was, according to me a flash, over-paid, London lawyer. He's a fairly easy-going one. He liked my not very flattering description of his former life so much he took to describing himself as a flash, over-paid lawyer. I don't know what he did get paid, or what he gets paid now, because he wouldn't tell me. He is not as easy-going as that. He did have a stab at working out, when pushed, how much of a difference there is between his old salary and his newish one. Somewhere between 300 and 400 per cent, he said. He used to have a big title. He was a multinational corporate restructuring specialist. I suppose you could say his job title has shrunk by about 100 per cent. He is now a restructuring specialist and, obviously, what he is supposed to be restructuring is poor old hokey Motat.

We were in his office, which is in an old pre-fab, and is hideously ugly and just plonked in the middle of the museum's grounds. "We've got a number of them splattered around the museum." How on earth did that happen? "Oh, I think the historic reason for it is that there was no sort of overall plan for the museum. So what's happened historically is: 'We've got this old RAF building. Where would you like it put?'"

He would like them put in a skip, no doubt, but you can't just go about putting old stuff, even if it is just other people's junk, in skips, even if you are the CEO. I have a feeling he'd like to get rid of the car that is supposed to be the first car crushed by Crusher Judith Collins. "It's not even the right car!" he said. The boy racer whose car it was supposed to be, switched the number plates to another car, which was the one crushed and subsequently bought by Motat. He is too diplomatic to say that this really was nuts, but he didn't have to. I told him that Brian Rudman had told me to ask why Motat had declined the opportunity to buy Auckland's last "bendy bus".

"Ha. Ha. Ha. We don't need any bendy buses at this particular stage." Whose idea was it to buy a crushed car? "My predecessor's. I don't see people flocking to see a crushed car."

I wasn't sure what we were doing here in his ugly office which, almost two years since he moved in, is still full of other people's junk. I thought he must have some grand new shed to announce the opening of, or some gem of a purchase. His PR person had suggested I go to see him and, as it is the holidays and the holidays ought to mean going to Motat, this seemed a reasonable idea. But there were the puddles which he can't be held responsible for and the ghastly carols blaring across the empty museum (if I was the CEO I'd cut the loudspeaker cord) and, I would later say, bugger all else.

Perhaps any mention of Motat which doesn't involve in-fighting and volunteers walking out (he says they didn't actually, as far as he knows; or "not officially", and that the boiler room exhibit was dangerous and is being restored and until it is, boiler room exhibit volunteers are not required to run the thing) counts as good PR. Motat runs on, and by, volunteers who would probably be, I said, hopefully, a bit nuts. He is a lawyer and he said: "I think you have to be passionate." It is a fine line, I said. Could we settle on eccentric? "Eccentric is a good word. I think most people are eccentric."

He is nuts for, or has as his eccentricity, cars. He has seven cars including an Alpha Romeo and some old Porsches and an Audi, for his sensible car. He keeps some of his cars on his 20ha farm, Four Pigs Lodge, in the South Island and some of them here in Auckland at his "comfortable" house in Takapuna. (It is fairly flash; I looked it up on Google.) Cars were a rich man's eccentricity, I said. He said: "I don't think there's such a thing as a cheap car." Anyway, he is mad keen on cars because his father, an electrician, was mad keen on them and used to race at Baypark in Tauranga and his stepfather was an Australian mechanic who was into drag racing. His parents divorced when he was about 7. He thinks his mother - who lives with him, his lawyer wife, Kathrine and their two daughters - eventually married three times, but he's not altogether certain. She was, among other things, a press photographer and a restaurateur whose idea of feeding her family was to give them a can of baked beans and a can opener, he claims. He really wanted to be a chef, and started out at a Cobb & Co, making Chicken Kievs, before settling on law. The other thing he is nuts about is food (this may have something to with the can opener and the Chicken Kievs) and he has about 500 cook books and and an enormous photograph of Marco Pierre White in his living room. This is an unusual thing to have in your living room. He says it is art. It cost an enormous amount of money; he wouldn't say how much.

I was trying to find out how rich and flash a London lawyer he was (he spent 22 years overseas) because the Motat role seems such an odd choice of job for a rich and flash London lawyer. He says he was never very flash but he does wear a white gold Bvlgari ring. His wife bought it for him, he said. I'm still not certain why he wanted this job other than that he loves the old cars, and the old planes, and he likes effecting change. He is given to the odd epiphany, to restructuring himself, you might say.

He gave up being a lawyer soon after his wife was diagnosed with a brain tumour in, he thinks, 2009, and he thought she was going to die (she is fine now). He realised then that it was crazy to be working six days a week until 11 at night, and never seeing his family. So he chucked it in and the family came back to New Zealand and bought the lodge and restored it and he grew his hair long and ditched the suits and the ties for farmer's gear and went out on the farm all day, digging out blackberry, with his border collie. He did this for three years until his wife "came to the conclusion that I had gone feral" and told him to get a job. She might not have thought that he would get such a hokey job. "She loves it. It keeps me off the streets."

He certainly didn't set out to be a corporate lawyer. He started in criminal law because he had an idea about wanting to help "the underdog". Then one Christmas Eve he was representing one of his underdogs whose alibi for some crime was that he was driving his girlfriend's car at the time. The by-then-ex-girlfriend, once in the witness box, didn't back up his alibi, so he punched her and then went for the judge. At Christmas drinks afterwards the judge said that, in the spirit of the season, he told the lawyer wouldn't charge his client with contempt of court or for threatening to kill him. "I said, 'Well, you can do what you like, your honour, but I'm not going to do this any more.' You realise that actually a large percentage of the underdogs were underdogs because - they were violent - hardened criminals. Some of these guys are pretty nasty characters."

So he started working for banks instead. I found this funnier than he did.

So here he is, in his ugly office, doing, well, what, exactly? What does he know about running a museum? "Not a hell of a lot. But I know about running a business and a museum is a business." I wondered whether there was an idea that he'd been here for almost two years and that it looks like bugger all has changed. "Yeah. Absolutely. I'd be saying that. But the reality is that to come up with a new strategy and then get the structures to support the strategy ... that takes time."

Time, then, will tell whether he can make a 50-year-old Motat a success - and what that success might look like. His job is to make it less dull, but not too flash. He has, I think, a nice sensibility about the old place. He too has a fondness for its faded charms, and its intrinsic hokeyness, and he didn't try to talk it, or himself up, and I liked that about him.