When primatologist Jane Goodall first observed chimps using sticks as tools and fishing for termites back in 1960, there were those who didn’t want to believe it. There was a steadfast desire to ensure that what separated us from chimps, our distant evolutionary relatives, was our ability to make tools and communicate through language.

How far we’ve come since in our understanding, and yet … not.

I am a proud communicator of science, but I sense we are not using all our human tools to best effect right now. One thing that stands out after a decade at the Australian Museum is that for us to thrive, we need to be less hubristic about gateways to knowledge.

Kim McKay with the gilded mask from the coffin of Amenempe, part of the Rameses exhibition at The Australian Museum. Credit: Steven Siewert

The Australian Museum is the nation’s first, and I am the first female and non-scientist director and CEO. Before 1917, no professional female staff were permitted at all. When I arrived, about a century later, there were no women on the museum’s executive team. Now, approximately two thirds of the executive team, our board of trustees and our staff are women. We also appointed the first First Nations executive team leader, also a woman.

The Australian Museum’s most successful innovations in recent years are born from looking and listening differently. Unsettled, the First Nations truth-telling exhibition, broke new ground; Hintze Hall provided a new venue for discussion and debate; a new Pasifika Gallery, Wansolmoana (one salt ocean) shares stories of Pasifika peoples and climate change; the Minerals Gallery displays the natural resources that have underpinned our nation’s wealth; and we opened the popular Burra education and play area. These new spaces urge different yet complementary minds to work together.

Public trust – and the soft power it nurtures – within and around museums and other cultural institutions, locally and globally, has never been higher. Studies in the USA, UK and in Australia underscore this, acknowledging that with this trust comes even greater responsibility. The civic notion inherent in progressive museums’ strategic and tactical storytelling can transform community conversations in a way that politics, media and other information pathways are unable to.

Kim McKay in the Grand Hall of the renovated museum in 2020.Credit: Janie Barrett

That’s not to say we’re not facing our own challenges. Our work includes decolonising an 1827 museum, repatriating exhibits and artefacts; pioneering work which began more than 25 years ago. We also fund and digitise collections, as well as constantly repair and rebuild facilities to keep pace with modern expectations.

But we do face these challenges because museums show and inspire as much as tell. And what stories we have! We house nothing short of time travel in each of our collections. We are the custodian to more than 22 million objects and specimens, the largest collection in the southern hemisphere, valued at more than a billion dollars.