Andrew Sayers has no regrets.
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True, he's stepping down from the job of a lifetime before his term is up, but this, he says, is preferable to soldiering on when his heart is somewhere else.
The outgoing director of the National Museum revealed to The Canberra Times that his surprise announcement to museum staff this week that he would be retiring early was the culmination of several months of soul-searching.
His wife, a senior bureaucrat, had moved to Melbourne two years ago, and the commuter lifestyle he had been leading ever since had become untenable.
"You start to think the commuter life is quite draining, quite tiring, when you are in the Virgin terminal at Melbourne airport, waiting again for the 6.10," he said.
"One of the things that's been very reassuring to me since I made the announcement yesterday is the number of people who have done that for a part of their career and who have all said I understand entirely...how very rapidly the air travel palls, and how you also are disconnected spatially from where you live and where your emotional life is."
But he said he was leaving with more of a sense of achievement than one of regret. In fact, he said, he doesn't believe in having regrets.
"I don't want to regret having stayed in a place and feeling as though there are other places I should be and things that I would really like to be doing," he said.
"I've been here for three years, and I'm very pleased that I'm leaving with a number of things which I was very keen to do at the museum...that you can actually see. A lot of institution-shaping is invisible, it's about structural things, it's about internal communication, it's about putting systems in place for the future, sustainability and budgets and all of those sorts of things," he said.
He had wanted, for example, the museum to look more like a museum when visitors walked through the door, and arranged for several of the collection's larger objects to be placed in the main hall.
"I wanted it to make much more of its connection to the lake, and its position on this peninsula, and here we are sitting in the café with the lake surrounding us on three sides," he said.
He also worked on the institution's new branding, summed up in the slogan, "Where our stories live", and said this thinking now permeated the whole of the museum, right down to the layout of the new staff wing which is due to open in June.
"One of the things that came through strongly from staff when I first arrived at the museum was that the cross-museum communication between various divisions and parts of the museum's activities could be more open and free," he said.
"That open, friendly sense of the branding that the museum is a conversation, and that we just enjoy communicating what we do, is pervasive in the interior design of the new wing."
He had also relished his direct involvement with the current exhibition on the year 1913, Glorious Days, an overlooked period in Australia's history that includes works by some of his favourite artists.
"That is the sort of thing that as director of a large, complex institution, you get far too little opportunity to do, so that is something that points to what I'm going to be doing after I retire," he said.
He said it while he was taking a late evening walk past the War Memorial last weekend, thinking through what he was going to tell his staff, that he realised one of the things he would miss most about Canberra.
"That is the quality of the light here," he said.
"If somebody asked me what it was that I was most going to miss about Canberra apart from people things and professional things and the great fun I've had in cultural institutions, I don't think there's anywhere else in Australia where you get a particular kind of rarefied light that makes you feel healthy and good."
Apart from being a keen runner of marathons – he plans to run in the Canberra Marathon on April 14 - he is, at his core, a man of the arts, and said he planned to treat his "retirement" only in the sense that he would be moving away from official employment.
At just 56, he said he was old enough to retire but was by no means treating this phase of his life as any kind of ending.
" 'Retirement' has a kind of particular ring to it, which I think increasingly these days is one of those kind of clichés that we think in...Increasingly retirement is a transition to people being equally active, just in a different way, and contributing in a whole range of different ways," he said.
He said he preferred to look at his departure in terms of opportunities for whoever replaces him – the chance to mine the collection further for ways to tell the country's story, especially as the centenary of the First World War approaches.
"Unless one leaves a role like this being absolutely wrung out and exhausted and tired, or bitter, or disappointed, then inevitably one has ideas," he said. "But there's a very good and very driven council here at the museum, and they want the momentum of the museum to continue unabated."
And if he has any advice for his successor, it's the same advice he was given by the director of the British Museum Neil MacGregor.
"He said to me that there are two exhibition subjects that cross all boundaries in society. One of them is animals, and particularly horses, and the other is gardens," he said.
Mr Sayers will finish at the museum on July 1, and a decision on his replacement is probably some time off.
Nevertheless, he said he looked forward to visiting the museum's future exhibitions – be they on horses, gardens or war – as a consumer, rather than an instigator.