by Gabriella Vukman
“The line’s cutting out… oh wait I can hear you now.”
Gareth’s voice crackled back at me from the other end of the line.
The familiar phone signal issues that accompany calls to and from the Hills are unrelenting.
“Must be a ‘Hills’ thing,” Gareth said.
“Unfortunately I can’t move the landline to fix it. Can you hear me ok?”
Chief executive officer and creative director at Burrinja Cultural Centre Gareth Hart is stepping down from their position.
After over fifteen years of working at the centre, Gareth has decided to take a break, hoping that someone passionate and creative will fill their shoes.
Gareth said, “I started to feel that my resilience was a little low this year and I was thinking about how I care for myself as well as care for this organisation, the community and the team.”
“I have a responsibility to do what is right for the organisation and for the community and I sensed that I needed some rest and I think it’s the best thing for this community that I make way for a new leader who has the drive and passion to lead into the future.”
“I am excited for my future and finding some more time to balance both my work life and my life but I will be very sad not to walk through the doors every day into this thriving colourful, creative jackpot of a centre so I’m quite torn,” Gareth said.
Gareth is a passionate and eloquently spoken person with a subtle sense of humour presenting itself every now and then during our discussion.
Tracing their correspondence with Burrinja back to 2008, Gareth kick-started their affiliation with the Cultural Centre with multiple small projects including a community dance project in 2009 before landing a permanent job in 2014.
“I’ve been in this CEO/Director role since 2020 and Burrinja is such a fabulous place to work in the sense of seeing artists at every stage of their career with a whole different range of interests from visual arts to performing arts to people just coming in to be inspired or challenged by a piece of art.
“You get to see everything here -a whole range of community and artists come through the building so it’s so diverse in that way and I just love this part of the job.”
Upon becoming CEO in 2020, the first few years of Gareth’s experience in the role were marred by Covid-19 and severe flooding.
“Lockdowns were an incredibly challenging time to be alive but also to step into a leadership job and support a team that are all experiencing the lockdowns not to mention trying to find ways to share art with the community and support peoples health and wellbeing and their social connection when the entire world was telling us not to connect,” they said.
“In amongst the [pandemic we had the very intense storms of June 2021, and so all of that happened in my first 18 months in the job and it was incredibly difficult leading through that period.
“I just kept believing that it was never more important to have art in our lives because art can bring us together, it can celebrate who we are and it can bring joy and colour to our lives, so when the community couldn’t come to the art, we needed to bring the art to the community,” Hart said.
Gareth is proud of the new relationships they have been able to develop with organisations such as Vic Health and Creative Victoria as well as of continuing their relationship with the Yarra Ranges Council during their time as CEO.
“It has been wonderful to lean into the collaborations with other organisations. That is something I really thrive on and find a lot of excitement and enjoyment in.
“The small things have also been wonderful. For example, one time the finance manager came to me and said ‘I’ve got this great idea for this thing in the theatre that works with our ageing population. I read the strategic plan and we haven’t done something for that community before.’”
“I just thought that was brilliant to come from the finance manager.”
A suggestion from one of Burrinja’s technicians to play an acknowledgement of country at the start of every show was also recounted by Gareth as a fond memory.
“I thought ‘how brilliant!’ That’s not coming from the CEO, or the senior producer or the indigenous advisory committee. That’s coming from the people on the ground who are doing the work,” Gareth said.
“Little moments like that have felt really powerful to me as well as the big stuff like more queer art, more art that looks at our mental health or the climate crisis.”
Gareth hopes they have been able to contribute their own flavour to Burrinja over the years
“I guess I was really conscious of the context in which I stepped into my role as CEO. It was the early stage of the pandemic, Burrinja had gone through a huge redevelopment after almost a third of our building had been demolished.
“I hope that under my leadership Burrinja has been able to grow. I hope Burrinja feels exciting and dynamic, it always did but I hope that I was able to bring a bit of a flavour to that.”
Championing the art of listening, Gareth believes in the power of the community voice.
“My advice to the next CEO would be to listen.
“This community has a voice and this community is so beautifully bold and they tell you what they need so I think the advice is just to listen.
“I think listening is an incredibly powerful skill that we are not excellent at. There is a lot of emphasis on speaking and being heard and I think that it is a very powerful thing to listen to people and communities and we don’t do that enough.”
Gareth’s wish for the next CEO also includes bringing an exciting array of creative possibilities to fruition at the Centre.
“I really hope that the next CEO feels excited about the possibilities of the future but not necessarily bound by the past. I think the past is really important and that it informs what we do in the future but we’re not bound to the past.”
“I would hope that a new director has an exciting vision for something that hasn’t yet happened in the future of the organisation.”
“I would like to extend a genuine thanks to everybody who has been part of my journey, especially the team here at Burinja, the board, the Yarra Ranges Council, all of our partners in the community, all of the artists that have been part of my time here , that have made it incredible special and definitely the hardest decision of my career was to leave this job.
It is safe to say that wherever Burrinja is, Gareth won’t be far away.
The former CEO remarked “I have a joke here that I’m like a barfly. With a fifteen year history and five different jobs and different volunteer roles, I have no doubt that I will be a part of Burrinja’s future. I don’t know what that looks like at the moment but once I’ve rested we’ll see.”
“Once you are a part of the Burrinja family, you are always a part of the Burrinja family.”
“Once you are part of the family here, you are actually in the family for life.”
