Speech to Australian Museum Supporters

Tonight is a very special moment, particularly for Simeon and me, because long before I joined the Trust, I was a local Sydney mum taking our daughter, Lotte, to the Australian Museum – to the Kids Island.

It was something that all new parents did in Sydney. If you could get to the Museum with your pram and your child and a few supplies, you went to Kids Island. For so many of us here in Sydney, in New South Wales and beyond, the Museum has always played a significant part in family and community life. It has always inspired curiosity and wonder, something that continues to define so much of the affection that we all have for this grand institution.

Lotte is now 25 so the Museum has been a part of my life for many, many years, and tonight, as I look around the room, there are so many faces that take me back to precious moments at the Museum in so many different respects. For Simeon, the Museum also holds a very special place going back even further. His late father, Professor Jeremy Beckett, was a renowned anthropologist. He did extraordinary work in the Torres Strait, in western New South Wales, with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, their histories, their language, their culture, and was renowned as an emeritus professor of anthropology at the University of Sydney. But of course, the Australian Museum, for him and his colleagues from the 50s onwards, was an incredibly vital institution supporting their work over the many decades that followed. And I know that the focus on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander history that is now given such wonderful prominence and support and the full respect of the Museum is something that he would have found deeply enriching.

And most recently, I was very generously assisted by the Australian Museum team to bring my 90-year-old father in to slip in quietly to see the Machu Picchu exhibition. My father had always wanted to travel to Peru, but never had. He was fascinated by Machu Picchu. He was able to experience the power of virtual reality and the wonder of a blockbuster exhibition that took him straight to Peru and flew him over Machu Picchu. And I sat there and thought about just what that said about time and what has happened across the history of the Museum, that my dad, as a young man, as a high school student, would have gone to the Museum in a very old-fashioned way. He would have enjoyed that. But imagining as a 90-year-old to be flying across Machu Picchu, that says so much about what you're doing at the Museum. And so it is really, really special for me to be returning now as Patron of the Museum. It's one of the patronages I was most keen to say yes to, and it gives me great delight to be your Patron. In fact, before we go on and think about the Museum's 200th anniversary, Kim shared with me as we stood out on the lawn with the assistance of one of the great architects in the room, the history of this house and its connection to the Museum. So the wing we are in, the architect was Barnett. So this is a Barnett design, an architectural feature of Sydney. Barnett designed and was the architect of the wing that faces College Street of the Australian Museum. On the other end of the house is a part of the house that the architect Vernon designed, and was the architect of the part of the Museum that faces Sydney Grammar. And so we are joined in this building at Admiralty House in ways that I hadn't anticipated.

So of course, tonight we gather to anticipate and reflect on your 200th anniversary, less than two years away, a magnificent and pivotal moment in the history of the Museum, and of course, Australia's story. I'm so delighted that I will get the opportunity, both as Governor-General and your patron, to have the coincidence of celebrating with you that significant milestone, and I can't wait to see what that will be like.

Now, as many of you already know, a central part of my role is reflecting Australia back to all Australians, in all of its light and shade, something all former Governors-General have done. The living Governors-General I met with before my appointment, gave me the same advice, the light and shade, and to do everything with compassion, so engaging with each layer of our storied and unique identity: 65,000 years of continuous Indigenous culture and history; the stability, equality and prosperity assured by the strength of our democracy and our institutions of government; and now our modern chapter of belonging, progress and success, underpinned by the most remarkable multiculturalism. Over half a century of immigration and refugee arrivals to this country; over seven and a half million migrants and almost a million refugees. It's an extraordinary story, and I see meaning and purpose for my role in the braided strength of those three parts as they come together and strengthen one another in everything we do. Wherever I go, I share that complex, beautiful Australian story because I think I'm getting to see it up close. The extraordinary strength of our communities right across this country, and Simeon and I now get to see that so we share those stories wherever we go. Some of you were in the Senate on the day that I was sworn in as your Governor-General on the first of July, and I committed then that Simeon and I would conduct ourselves with care, kindness and respect for the duration of our five-year term. Care for each other, care for those that do the caring of others. Care for our magnificent environment and the continent that we derive so much joy from, care for our civics and our institutions and care for the way in which we conduct the difficult, difficult things and times that we're living in with respect rather than rancor and anger and violence.

That care seems to me to be at the heart of what the Museum has always done. Kim, you once described learning about the Museum as being like peeling an onion – that it reveals itself layer by layer over time, and there are so many, many layers to our Australian Museum, not only the detailed, immersive strata of its 22 million objects and specimens, all so exquisitely and carefully curated, but in its many layers of meaning and purpose. The place of the Museum in our culture and our community, in our past and our present, and, of course, helping to chart and understand our future. Like layers of sedimentary rock or the rings of an ancient tree, or indeed, the foundations of the Museum's building, or as we've discovered tonight, its resonance back here with the foundations of this building: we can trace the evolution of the Museum across time from its colonial echoes of European museums in 1827, through to its thoroughly modern character and architecture today, with such an appropriately ambitious mission to be the leading voice for the richness of life the earth and the culture in Australia and the Pacific, and your vision to ignite wonder, inspire debate and drive change.

In these words, is everything we need, because the work of the Museum to preserve and understand nature and culture is about more than their – or our – survival. Sustainability, which has always seemed to me to be an essential thread that binds environment, economy, history, culture and community together, is about more than preservation, more than virtue. It's about the richness of life on Earth, the wonder of it, the endless fascination of how it came to be and why it is so beautiful and entrances us all.

I think that's why one of the world's greatest science communicators, Sir David Attenborough, loves the Australian Museum so much, where he is a Lifetime Patron and so loved by the people and scientists of the institution that a species of Tasmanian Snail is named in his honor. Nobel physicist Frank Wilczek says in his book A Beautiful Question, ‘Having tasted beauty at the heart of the world, we hunger for more.’ That hunger has compelled so much science and art and exploration across the centuries, here in Australia, but particularly at the Australian Museum.

Now in our own time, that hunger has a new urgency. We want more because we know what we have is under threat. We want to know that the world's beauty, and all of its riches, will still be there for our children and their children and their children and beyond. The Australian Museum speaks to that hunger and also helps to address it. You all know this. The Museum has known it, but the challenge of climate change has for such a long time focused and guided much of the work at the Museum, from a fact-based scientific perspective, particularly in communicating with and educating the general public in ways that often people don't take the time to do. Every year, scientists in the Australian Museum Research Institute add around 200 new species to our roll call of life, and every year the delicate, focused work of the team at the Lizard Island Research Station teaches us about another precious environment.