Tracy Puklowski Appreciation Network

Tracy Puklowski, the outgoing City of Launceston’s creative arts and cultural services general manager, who is off to be senior director at the National Aboriginal Art Gallery in Alice Springs.

The interaction of cultures has always been central to the work of art director Tracy Puklowski, whether in New Zealand or Launceston. Now the Territory is calling

There seems to have always been a little bit of the Northern Territory lurking in the background of Tracy Puklowski’s life. Shortly after her family first migrated to Australia from England in the 1970s, her father was offered a job in Darwin, which he didn’t take.

That was 1974, the same year a cyclone sharing her name devastated the region.

Instead, the family moved to New Zealand, where Puklowski grew up and spent most of her life.

In 2018 she moved to Launceston, taking up the role of general manager of creative arts and cultural services at the City of Launceston, which included directing the Queen Victoria Museum and Gallery and developing a groundbreaking cultural strategy for the city.

She has returned to the Territory a few times to visit, both to Alice Springs and Darwin, and says each time she had a sense of unfinished business, of something calling her back.

And later this month she will be fulfilling that whispered destiny when she moves to Alice Springs, in the heart of Australia, to be senior director of the new National Aboriginal Art Gallery. And it will be a big job: the gallery has not even been built yet. 

On top of that, the NAAG project has been slow to get moving, there have been disputes about ownership of the land earmarked for its construction, there are already some dissenting voices about the appointment of someone non-Aboriginal to the role, and the gallery does not have a collection of any kind. 

So to say Puklowski is taking on a big task is something of an understatement but she says she welcomes the challenge. “We are at a really interesting time internationally, with a really strong focus on museums and galleries and the stories they tell, on behalf of whom, and how, so I’m not surprised there is some interest in my appointment,” she says, diplomatically. 

“And I think it’s good that people are so interested and passionate. I’m just one part of this, it’s about being surrounded by smart, intelligent, amazing creative people to make this thing happen. 

“Last time I was in Alice Springs I was visiting some of the local galleries and asking people on the sly what they thought about this project and the feedback I got was that people were really just wanting it to go ahead now, just wanted to see it happen.

“That’s a good time to come on board, when there is that collective will for this to take place, so my first priority is going to be gaining the respect of the community.”

Puklowski will take up the new role on May 24 and will be responsible for leading a project team of five officers across curatorial, engagement and project management aspects of the gallery. She will also provide input into the design of the art gallery itself, the design consultancy tender having been released in early April.

With extensive knowledge about the arts, museum and culture sectors, Puklowski’s career has included senior roles at museums, libraries and archives across New Zealand and in Australia.

She holds a master of arts with honours in art history, including studies in Australian art, and postgraduate qualifications in museum studies. And in 2009 she was accepted into the highly competitive Museum Leadership Institute program run by the Getty Foundation in Los Angeles.

And with a strong interest in and proven track record of helping to bring the voices and culture of First Nations people to the fore, Puklowski is confident she can make the National Aboriginal Art Gallery into the cultural beacon it deserves to be.

Born in the UK, Puklowski’s family migrated to Australia as “ten pound poms” before settling in New Zealand, which she called home for most of her life and where she has already had an esteemed career in the arts and cultural sector.

“My masters degree is in art history and I started out as a curator but I wasn’t very good at it,” she laughs. “I was better at other things, I’ll put it that way. For one thing, I like writing things that people can understand!

“In my curatorial work, I was involved in public relations, sponsorship partnerships and so on, and I got such a buzz out of those aspects of the job I decided to make a lateral move into directorship instead, to spend more time on the things I was better suited to.”

Working in these institutions in New Zealand gave Puklowski a lot of exposure to the concepts of bi-cultural galleries and museums that focused on the culture of the Maori people.

Relations between the Maori and Europeans is much different in New Zealand to how it is between Aborigines and Europeans in Australia, she says.

Even non-Maori people in New Zealand frequently speak varying levels of the Maori language, with dual-naming of places already very common and people supplementing their English with Maori words in conversation.

“The big difference in New Zealand is you have a treaty. It’s not enshrined in the constitution but it frames your thinking, particularly at a political level, and it provides a huge amount of guidance to people in the cultural sector.

“There were two places where I worked, in particular, where that commitment to partnership was most evident. The first was the National Museum of New Zealand, or Te Papa.

“That was established in 1998 with a very specific bi-cultural mandate which, at the time, was a completely new approach to museology.

“The other was when I was director of the National Army Museum. For that role I became a civilian member of the Defence Force, and the army in New Zealand is a Maori tribe in its own right, Ngati Tumatauenga.

“Being exposed to a defence force that drew on both British military traditions and Maori fighting traditions to create this truly unique army, was really inspiring.”

Her husband, Nick, was recently accepted into the Ngati Koata tribe after proving his ancestry and applying to join the tribe. Puklowski says being welcomed into that community has been just another aspect of a broadly welcoming and inclusive cultural environment in New Zealand.

That bi-cultural harmony is something she still strives to create in every project she takes on, especially since coming to Tasmania.

She took on her current role at the QVMAG in Launceston after being contacted by a recruiter while still living in New Zealand.

With opportunities like this arising in the cultural sector only very occasionally, she was quick to take it up.

The biggest regional gallery in Australia, QVMAG is considered quite a significant institution and Puklowski arrived at a crucial time in its lifespan.

“It was clear that QVMAG was ready to take the next step in its evolution. As an institution it had done some brilliant work, especially if you think about the First Tasmanians exhibition at the art gallery (at the Royal Park site), that was really a quite momentous exhibition, incorporating the culture and history of Tasmania’s Aboriginal people in that way.

“But I got the feeling that because it is such a big, encyclopaedic museum, you can fall into the trap of trying to do too much. And I felt maybe it was time to focus more specifically on the key stories we should be telling to move us into the future.

“We had some energetic new staff coming on board who could also see different ways to use the collections and tell different stories and it became a matter of reaching out to a wider audience and putting that audience at the centre of our thinking.

“Museums are devils for this. It’s like shoving a bowl of muesli or vegetables at someone and saying here, eat this, it’s good for you! But what do people actually want? What’s the experience they want to have?

“And if you don’t see your story told here, why would you come?”

Puklowski is extremely proud of the way QVMAG has evolved during her time in Launceston, with the institution regaining a stronger sense of community ownership than it has in many years.

But she says there is still a long way to go in terms of including the stories and art of First Nations people, because making those cultural influences a part of people’s everyday experience of where they live is a vital part of creating harmony and understanding.

She also says museums have a vital role to play in looking to the future as well as the past, and while there will always be a place for things like dinosaur skeletons and taxidermy, we should be looking for opportunities to tell new stories as well.

“We have to bring in more local content and local stories, because they are ciphers for bigger global stories.

“Like the work our natural sciences team does: they go out into the field every year and see evidence of animals moving further southward, which tells us a lot about climate change.

“That is a very local story that tells us a lot about what’s happening in the world. That’s what our role should be, I think. Telling local stories but tapping into global conversations.

“I always look at the maireener shells as a symbol of all the different stories the museum tells. They are a story of the survival of cultural traditions, and they are also beautiful art objects in their own right.

“They tell us a story about early relationships between Tasmanian Aborigines and white visitors, because there was a tourist trade in the necklaces. And the shells are becoming rarer and rarer due to the decimation of kelp forests, so it’s a natural sciences story as well.

“If there was one thing that connects everything the museum does, it would be those shell necklaces.”

Puklowski is proud of the legacy she leaves behind at QVMAG but says it is still difficult to walk away from an institution and a state that have become her home in the last two years.

But she also feels ready to move on and embrace something new.

“It’s been really lovely living here in Tassie, there are so many elements that are similar to New Zealand. We have lived comfortably here and met lots of lovely people but we’re pretty nomadic, really, we’ve lived in lots of places.

“The Northern Territory got its hooks into me years ago. Last time I was there, I had this feeling of unfinished business, that somehow I would be back.”

She describes Alice Springs as the heart of Australia, both physically and spiritually. And she says it is a place where art is everywhere.

“When we were last up there we drove out of town and saw some of the rock art. We were the only people there and it was really magical to see this incredibly old art, it was like being in the biggest art gallery you could imagine.”

The National Aboriginal Art Gallery is intended to be more than just a gallery. Falling under the NT Department of Arts, Culture and Heritage, its intended outcomes are as much community-centred as cultural and economic.

“It’s about cohesion and truth-telling, a safe space for people to come together, employment outcomes and economic outcomes for the community as well,” Puklowski says.

“It’s much more ambitious than your average art gallery project, it sends a clear, forward-thinking message about what arts and culture can achieve within a community.

“Te Papa was a museum where those bi-cultural principles were very important and I will take a lot of what I learned there with me into this project.

“And in terms of the bricks and mortar, what I’m really concerned with is that we end up with something that is of the place, and where the architecture says something about what’s inside.”

Not only is there currently no gallery, there is also no collection yet. But Puklowski is looking forward to the process of changing that.

“I imagine we will have a lot of conversations about art in the digital space, as part of that. There are so many different ways of telling stories and presenting art that digital technology allows us to do, the challenge is to think laterally.”

Puklowski says that when thinking about Aboriginal art, it is important to think about more than just the material. Oral history, music, dance, and other aspects of culture are just as significant and there are myriad ways of presenting these art forms in a modern gallery.

“In New Zealand, when we talk about art, we use the Maori word for art or treasure, taonga. That word encompasses stories and songs, not just tangible objects, and that intangible culture is something we really need to get our heads around in museology in Australia.”

Overall, she is excited about the opportunity to get in on the ground floor and work with the Alice Springs community to create something unique and special, a gallery that is not just a hub for the local community, but an attraction for tourists as well.

“For me, Alice Springs, Mparntwe, is the heart of the country, it should be a pilgrimage for everyone in Australia, and visitors as well, because it is so special.”