Q1: You grew up in Ohakune and at the start of this book you write about coming to Whanganui when you were a child, in the early 1960s. Clearly the city made a mark on you then. Is that why you decided to make this a biography that is as much of the city as it is of the gallery itself?
Whanganui was our ‘big smoke’ and I remember going there regularly from a young age. However, the reason the city figures so largely in the book is because the brief I received was to write ‘the biography of a building’. Everything else flowed from that. I had to consider the land the gallery stands upon, how that land was acquired, how it had been used previously — ultimately how the city it is so much a part of came into being. If I’d just been asked to write a history of the collection, say, the subject matter would have been much more circumscribed.
Q2: That early Whanganui history is complex, to say the very least. How would you summarise it?
Whanganui was a New Zealand Company town, an offshoot, in 1841, of Wellington; but the way in which the land was purchased was dubious, to say the least, and the local people — the many hapū of Te Āti Haunuia- Pāpārangi — never accepted the deception which had been practised upon them. Hence the early history has to be told via a consideration of both Māori and Pākehā points of view and that has remained the case in writing about the city, and the river it is built upon, ever since. This is true of many other places in Aotearoa of course but Whanganui represents the dilemmas and accommodations that resulted in quite a pure form and thus it becomes, to some degree, exemplary.
Q3: The story of the Sarjeant has some clear heroes and heroines. Tell us about Ellen Sarjeant and how important she was.
Ellen Sarjeant was a remarkable woman and without her we probably wouldn’t have the gallery we do today. She was almost 40 years younger than her first husband, Henry Sarjeant, the benefactor of the gallery; the eldest daughter of one of his close friends. It would be interesting to have some insight into the dynamics of their marriage but they were very discreet. It’s possible that he had the money and she had everything else: the drive and enthusiasm, the artistic insight, the business sense and the administrative skills. He would have seen this and I suspect their partnership was intended to transform the city the way the Sarjeant has. Ellen was among those who oversaw the building of the gallery; she was, with her second husband, John Neame, the initiator of its first acquisitions, both in New Zealand and overseas; and she continued to be a strong voice in its policies until her death in the early days of World War Two. She liked a good time too.
Q4: And Charles Mackay?
He is the other crucial figure in the making of the gallery. He was mayor during the period of its construction and he was still in office when it opened in 1919. A consummate politician, a canny, if sometimes ruthless, operator and a true visionary: the gallery was only one of the institutions he planned for the city and, despite his fall from grace, they were all, in time, built. But he is tragic figure too, a closeted gay man who turned to violence when threatened with disclosure; and in that act destroyed his career. In some respects the life he built for himself after his release from prison, in England and Germany, was just as impressive; but that too was destroyed by a gunshot. Paul Diamond’s book about him, Downfall, is essential reading.
Q5: The late Bill Milbank, the former longtime director, was of course a legend. You were able to talk to him at the start of the project. How will history remember him?
Bill was an extraordinary man and in some ways it was his ordinariness that was most extraordinary about him. He was educated at Ruapehu College, where my father taught, and there was a culture at that school which espoused what one of Dad’s textbooks called The Education of the Ordinary Child. The idea was that every kid has abilities and the task of a teacher is to bring out those particular abilities. Bill’s art teacher, Stan Frost, my godfather, subscribed to that ethos and pointed Bill on his career path in architectural drawing and town planning. Probably neither of them thought he would end up as a gallery director. Bill was an unassuming man who could relate to almost anyone he met — all except the arrogant and the entitled. In the aftermath of Gordon Brown’s mid-seventies reforms, he made the Sarjeant what it is today: by virtue of his openness, his inclusiveness, his commitment, his instinct for what is right and his superb, perhaps under-rated, visual acuity.
Q6: Covid meant that a great deal of this book had to be written from a distance during those months when it was not possible to travel. But you did manage a couple of visits back. What struck about the collection when you were able to see some of it?
When I made those few, fugitive visits to Whanganui, I hardly looked at the collection. I was focussed upon talking to people, particularly the third director, Greg Anderson (2007–2022) and, crucially, Bill Milbank (1978–2006), because I knew he was ill and wasn’t going to be with us for much longer. When we lose someone like him, we also lose their memories; so I was intent upon getting as much as I could down on tape.
Q7: Favourite painting from the collection?
A Philip Trusttum work from 1968 which entered the collection in the late 1970s — The Battle Plan of Genghis Khan, modelled after a Persian carpet. It has a companion piece called The Persian Garden, which is superb. I also love The Flight into Egypt by Frederick Goddall, a grand Victorian excursion into myth. And Para Matchitt’s sculptural work, Flag. But there is so much to like there. The photographic collection is excellent.
Q8: Favourite story from the many you came across?
The discovery, during earthquake strengthening, of a time capsule in the heritage building. A fellow called Richard Awa was drilling down inside one of the walls when he felt his drill point burst into empty space and, at the same time, heard the tinkle of glass breaking. He stopped the drill and the contents of the capsule were retrieved intact. It had been placed there by the Clerk of Works, John Brodie, during construction of the gallery in 1918 and came to light just over a hundred years later, in 2021. It turned out that Brodie’s granddaughter, Joan Grehan, was an artist who had been given a retrospective at the gallery in 2013. The Sarjeant story is full of amazing coincidences like that.
Q9: You were at the Sarjeant not long before the builders handed the site back to the Gallery and work on moving back in could begin. How exciting did it all seem?
Seeing the heritage building stripped back to its bones, while talking to stonemason Mark Whyte about the age of the limestone blocks out of which it’s built, made me consider how many layers of time there are to the Sarjeant. The sixty million year old Oamaru limestone, the two million year old sandhill the gallery stands upon, the hundred year old heritage building, the brand new structure behind, with its constitutive and decorative elements which go deep into the Māori and the Polynesian past — all of this will make a magnificent theatre for the showing of historical and contemporary art.
Q10: What is the importance of the Sarjeant both to its region and to Aotearoa?
The Sarjeant, over the last hundred years, has been morphing from a pet project of the colonial elite into a genuinely bi-cultural institution. At the same time, a dynamic symbiosis has been achieved between the gallery and the city, which now nurtures a diverse, active and highly skilled community of artists. I think many institutions, and cities, in Aotearoa can learn from its example.
