It’s quiet today. Just a table of cyclists who have popped in for a coffee and a few random stragglers. It is the in-between period of major exhibitions. Discovering Ancient Egypt has been packed up and sent on to its next destination. Pompeii is still being installed ahead of its opening the following week.

It strikes me as ironic that in order for Australia to tell its story, its only national museum must schedule global blockbusters to fund that mission.

Even then, the must-see blockbusters don’t make money, McMahon says. “We aim to defray the costs.”

It’s a competitive business pulling together a major exhibition, with museums and galleries across the globe all hustling to find the one that will break their box office records.

“There’s an art involved in how you pick what you pick and when to change gears,” she says.

“What we didn’t know when we were pulling together the Egypt show was that two other institutions in Australia were also working on shows on ancient Egypt – the National Gallery of Victoria and the Australian Museum.

“Ultimately, it had little impact on ticket sales. Some subjects resonate, they never lose their power, and ancient Egypt seems to be one of them.”

Indeed, a third of all the people who saw the show in Canberra had never stepped foot into the museum before.

“The logic of doing these shows is that at some point you want people to come into your galleries, to see your collection and understand the Australian story,” she says.

Who’s sorry?

The National Museum is an imposing post-modern building with a large cartoonish orange arch that can be seen from many vantage points around the city.

Designed by iconoclastic architecture firm ARM, the word “sorry” was surreptitiously plastered in braille across its colourful exterior – a cheeky third finger to then-prime minister John Howard, who officially opened the building in 2000, for his refusal to apologise to the stolen generations.

Some of the word was hidden behind silver discs before the official ceremony. Like history itself, just because you can’t see it doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.

As an article in magazine Architecture AU pointed out: “The design of the museum was based on two big architectural ideas: the Boolean string, meant to signify the tangled nature of Australian history, and the jigsaw puzzle, meant to convey that the museum was conceptually unfinished.”

McMahon says with a mission as large as telling the story of Australia – “which is a really complicated one” – the gallery needs to be “selective rather than comprehensive” due to a lack of space. The majority of its collection sits in a warehouse a few kilometres away. The NMA started with items already owned by government and has added to the collection through donations, bequests and purchases.

In 2020, McMahon and colleague Sophie Jensen were integral to the museum making the largest and most significant acquisition in its history. Trevor Kennedy, a businessman and media mogul who had spent time working for Kerry Packer and Malcolm Turnbull, had over decades pulled together an extraordinary assemblage of the nation’s collectables.

Among the 5000 items are boxer Lionel Rose’s world bantamweight gold medal, the Sydney Cup made from an emu egg and mounted with intricate silverwork (including a silver emu pulling the egg on a silver cart), a 2½-metre cedar clock commissioned by former governor Lachlan Macquarie, and dozens of pieces of bric-a-brac and ephemera that reveal how Australia saw itself at points in the past.

“Being involved with that acquisition is probably one of the most amazing things I’ve ever done. When you have no money, it’s easy not to have confidence. But you still have an ego and talk the talk. It felt a bit like gambling,” McMahon says.

In the end the museum purchased the collection for about $8 million and structured a deal to pay it off over time.

In 2022, the museum acquired another masterpiece. It’s an impressive, if somewhat grotesque, Tasmanian blackwood billiard table carved in 1885 by George Billyeald. It depicts Australian flora and fauna – including a kookaburra devouring a small snake – and themes of the time, such as a massacre of Indigenous people by colonial settlers.

The table toured the world and spent time at Buckingham Palace, where Prince Albert is believed to have chalked up for a game or two.

“We are unafraid of displaying that sort of stuff [the massacre]. Australian history, like most histories, is not clean. We need to find a way to tell our stories from multiple perspectives,” she says.

Among the most successful of the home-grown exhibitions is Songlines: Tracking the Seven Sisters. It debuted in Canberra in 2017 and is currently showing in Finland after successful stints in Berlin and Paris.

Combining, art, artefacts, photography and storytelling, Songlines is a dramatic story of creating, desire, flight and survival that follows a journey of female ancestors pursued by a powerful, shape-shifting figure.

“I’ve just come back from opening the exhibition in Tampere, just outside Helsinki. It is particularly interesting in Finland because of the relationship with the Sami people. There was this First Nations to First Nations dialogue happening.

“It’s a beautiful, epic story the world needs to know about.”

Close to home

McMahon is about as Canberran as humanly possible. She was born in the old Royal Canberra Hospital, now the site of the institution she runs. The hospital infamously hit global headlines when a demolition implosion went wrong, hurling debris across the lake, killing a 12-year-old girl, Katie Bender, and injuring nine others.

McMahon went to school and university in Canberra and her two employers have been cultural institutions of the national capital. She has never lived anywhere else.

McMahon says she was born with an artistic bent and, after studying art history at the Australian National University, had her heart set on becoming a curator until someone told her it would take 30 years to be taken seriously.

She describes her first job, at the Australian War Memorial, as being “a young woman in an old institution”.

She took the road less travelled. A job in HR led to another with the war memorial’s governing body working with men – all men – who had served in World War II and the Korean War. Some remembered her grandfather, who had served in the RAAF.

Even in the early 2000s, McMahon was expected to wear a skirt when in the boardroom. Not a dress, not pants, but a sensible skirt, in a neutral colour. She did not obey.

Despite such antiquated demands, McMahon says the war memorial was a progressive institution that gave a young woman with a bit of spirit and sass the opportunity to climb the ranks. By the time she left, she had risen to head of exhibitions and gallery development.

“People look at war and think it’s really complicated. From a museum perspective, it’s not,” she says.

Throughout our lunch, McMahon vacillates. She wants to emphasise the struggle it is to run a cultural institution on a meagre budget while not offending the federal government, the NMA’s major funder.

The NMA is one of 11 national cultural institutions, mostly in Canberra, which attract about 2 million people a year.

Supporters say these organisations have been underfunded for years. The National Gallery of Australia had to use buckets to catch rainwater because it didn’t have the maintenance budget to fix holes in the roof. The National Library couldn’t afford to keep its expansive digital archive Trove going until a Labor government bailout last year.

The NMA received an extra $78 million over four years as part of Arts Minister Tony Burke’s $535 million top-up to keep Australia’s cultural institutions ticking over. McMahon describes the additional funding as “life-changing”.

“Gone are the days when museums should judge themselves by the size of their collection. That’s ridiculous, from an environmental perspective and the ridiculous amount of energy that goes into care for collections,” she says.

“You’ve got to make it as exquisite, significant and refined a collection as you can for the public to understand your story.”

Three weeks after opening, Pompeii is going gangbusters. Ticket sales have surpassed 37,000, some days have sold out, and the museum has extended trading hours several times. It’s on track to being one of the NMA’s biggest hits.