Chief executive of the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa, Courtney Johnston. Photo / Te Papa
Chief executive of the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa, Courtney Johnston. Photo / Te Papa
Courtney Johnston didn’t appear destined to lead one of New Zealand’s largest and most influential cultural institutions.
Raised on a dairy farm, most of her youth was spent on a single street in rural Taranaki. Mangorei Rd was where her family had lived for many generations; it was where she went to school, and where much of her extended family had farms of their own.
So how then did she rise to the helm of Te Papa, taking charge of major funding decisions, curating exhibitions, and managing 600 staff?
For Johnston, it was the impact of one influential third form teacher – Claire Hall – an English and art history educator at New Plymouth Girls’ High School in the 1990s.
“On Friday afternoons for the last period of school, all of us nervous, emergent little kids would go back to our class, and the class before that was seventh form art history,” Johnston told Real Life with John Cowan on Newstalk ZB on Sunday night.
“The [girls in that class] were so sophisticated, amazing – you know how you look up to the seventh formers, they were kind of like goddesses – and I just thought, ‘I want to be part of this’.”
Despite being told by another teacher that she had no artistic talent and shouldn’t pursue art history as a career, she had fallen in love with the subject and went on to study it at Victoria University.
“I fell into art history, and it’s a position of quite a lot of privilege – I’m one of the rare people who’s been able to study art history and make a career out of it,” she said.
“It’s a way of looking at the world and how cultures present themselves to the world. It’s a way of building empathy, and understanding, and for a curious person like me, it’s a way of unveiling different places, different times, different cultures.”
Courtney Johnston in her home. Photo / Mark Mitchell.
Having never really gone to museums during her childhood, Johnston says she “didn’t quite understand what the fuss was” about Te Papa when she moved to Wellington and started working there as a visitor host in 2000.
But she now understands that Te Papa was unlike other museums – and deliberately so. It was a “disruption” from the norm.
“Maybe that word wasn’t used back then, but that’s what I think of it as. It was purposely set up to be a totally different kind of museum and they just went all-out on that front,” Johnston told Cowan.
“What it was trying to do was get people to look and think in a different way, and particularly to bring different people into the museum. It was designed around families and designed to be interactive.”
Two decades on from that role, Johnston was named tumu whakarae of the museum. Having taken on the role in her early 40s, she became the youngest person ever to hold the role of CEO.
Johnston was named tumu whakarae of the museum. Having taken on the role in her early 40s, she became the youngest person ever to hold the role of CEO. Photo / Supplied
She told Cowan one of the things she’s most proud of is how Te Papa has taken taonga Māori “out of the glass box and back into the living, breathing life of the world”.
Instead of lining artefacts up in glass cases, Te Papa prides itself on emphasising the connection between the taonga and the story of the people it stands for, she says.
“At the deepest level, that’s what Te Papa is trying to achieve – but to do it in a way that invites people to bring their own experiences and knowledge and contribute that to what the museum has to offer.”
While her rise to the helm of New Zealand’s national museum has been meteoric, Johnston accepts that she’s benefitted from scores of powerful women who have come before her.
She says she’s only been able to achieve what she has through the support of others, particularly women, in her adult life and professional career.
“The whole reason I’m in my job now is that [Te Papa board chair] Dame Fran Wilde has a tradition of bringing women through into leadership roles – picking someone with potential and giving them the support and safety to learn on the job,” she said.
Te Papa Chief Executive Courtney Johnston. Photo / Te Papa
“There are a couple of generations of women who’ve gone before me who’ve had to warp themselves to cope with heavily male-dominated [spaces], and I’m so much the beneficiary of that. I get to be much more my own self than women in the ‘70s and ‘80s.”
“I’m really lucky. The job is hard – as hard as it should be, given how rewarding it is – but I don’t ever feel lonely in it.”
