Retiring head of artsACT David Whitney looks forward to enjoying Canberra's arts scene as a punter

No longer will he have to remain neutral when he emerges into the foyer from a darkened theatre or drifts around a gallery space.

"I'm happy to say that performances move me to tears, or that I really like this, but one of the hardest jobs is in the foyer afterwards when people say, 'Wasn't that fantastic – did you enjoy that?'" he says. "And you have to find a way of being as polite and flat as you possibly can."

When he became director of artsACT seven years ago, his licence to be excited by art was, if not revoked, then parked in a safe place while he got on with the job of being Canberra's most senior arts bureaucrat.

But soon, he will be able to openly wax lyrical about all the things that move him – being floored by daring theatre shows, seeing young performers take risks, watching an emerging artist take flight, attending a concert of avant-garde music. And best of all, he'll be able to take it all in as a rank consumer, as part of the Canberra arts community he now calls home.

However, he still has a month or so left at the helm of the ACT government's arts agency and, perhaps not surprisingly, he has been hard to pin down for an interview.

"That's how things normally are!" he says, settling down over a pot of tea in his office on a freezing late autumn day. The space – a standard Canberra office overlooking a dreary corporate square – is dotted with artworks and souvenirs from his 35-year career in arts administration. And Whitney is wearing his customary bow-tie – one of a collection of dozens, all handmade by his wife, the potter Kaye Pemberton.

"The nature of my job is you need to look smart and you need to be able to engage with whoever you need to engage with," he says.

"The arts needs the best support and advocacy it can get. It's very easy to diminish the arts. People look at some ends of the arts practice and just write it off and demean it as being an unnecessary waste of money. It's not that, and it's much easier for me to take those arguments on if you look slightly respectable."

This flamboyant signature, along with his frantic schedule, are the two constants throughout a working life that has taken him from his home town of Adelaide, to regional South Australia, Alice Springs, and finally to Canberra.

"I've been involved in this system for 35 years, and started as a trainee community arts officer, and so you worked all the hours that there were, invariably putting activities on when other people weren't working."

And of course, he loves it, even the side of his job that involves a lot of administration and wrangling over meetings, schedules, questions from ministers, prizes, funding rounds, and just the sheer number of events that happen in Canberra's changing arts landscape each week.

"Whenever you get half a dozen arts managers in Canberra sitting together, they say, 'We have to work out how to avoid having opening night clashes'. But every night of the week something else is going on. That's just because it's a busy town, and that's the fun part of the job."

Born and bred in Adelaide, Whitney grew up in an arts-loving household. His mother had long been involved in amateur dance, and his father was an avid reader. The family spent many a happy night at the theatre, before his brother went to art school, became an art teacher, and eventually a full-time artist in Adelaide.

Whitney planned to become a drama teacher, taking on a bonded scholarship at what was then the Adelaide Teachers' College. A change in the state's student funding system halfway through the degree meant he had to find a job, and he began work in a small community arts office in the fledgling festival centre.

He never became a drama teacher. "I think I saved so many young people – no regrets about that!" he says.

Instead, he became part of the mini-revolution of the Adelaide arts scene in the late 1960s and early '70s.

"It was quite a substantial social, political and indeed cultural change. The Adelaide festival was at that stage the peak festival around the country, and when it got its new home at the festival centre, Adelaide just took off. So it was a pretty exciting and heady time to be there."

He began working at the festival centre in the mid-'70s, and stayed until 1990, when he moved to the Riverland Cultural Trust, one of four regional trusts in South Australia. His region had a population of around 60,000, with scattered facilities, lots of travelling and plenty going on in the performing, musical and visual arts.

When a job came up in Alice Springs, as the general manager of the Araluen centre for Arts and Entertainment, he took it. It was, he says, "very interesting in a whole lot of ways".

"There's a joke that the mayor of Alice Springs had that we were closest to every beach in Australia. A bit of a silly line, but what it meant was that all of a sudden… it's the same distance to get to Perth as to get to Sydney."

It was a small, isolated community which he knew he would never truly be a part of.

"In Alice Springs, because it's such a transient population, [there are] 25,000 people in the town but in any one year you're getting probably a third of those moving in or out. So after a couple of years, you become part of the community."

But even those who've lived there for 20 years or more didn't stand a chance when faced with the ancient and complex Indigenous landscape.

"It's such an incredibly rich and complex society that you've got to be committed to be a part of it, to actually understand and learn about it.

"But we had a very strong visual art program and the strength of that program was phenomenal – what is now known as 'Desart'. All of those regional Aboriginal communities, often the only economic project they've got is their art centre."

Whitney and Pemberton stayed in Alice Springs for seven years, until 1999, when a job came up as director of the Canberra Theatre Centre. It was shortly after the centre had become part of the Cultural Facilities Corporation, and it was a good time to start building the subscriber base and consolidate what had been a rather haphazard approach to programming.

While that job segued nicely into the top job at artsACT, Whitney admits that theatre was and still is his first love.

"Sitting in a darkened space with a shared audience is pretty good, and when it works, it works exceptionally well.

"I think even with a one-person show, that person's not on their own, so there's a whole sensitivity about how to make that work. Visual artists often do it on their own, and you can see the angst of having spent all that time with no other process. Theatre workers tend to work in collaborative processes. I think as a member of the audience, you're aware of that and it is that shared experience and it'll never be repeated."

He says the balance between risks and spending taxpayers' money has always been a delicate one.

"[We need to see that it's] going to the right place, and sometimes that becomes contentious. Certainly if the rationale is solid and it's robust and interesting, it still might be controversial. Thank goodness, in the territory's experience … there's been no interference from an arts minister against a practice because of the controversial nature of it, which is terrific.

"But sometimes it's about risk, and artists are always in the business of taking risks. Every time an artist puts an exhibition on the wall or has a display of something or a theatre production, it's extraordinarily risky behaviour, not only from their own putting their soul on the wall or on the stage, they're also testing the ideas and seeing where things can go."

He is, he says, a sucker for physical theatre, which brings the conversation to the spectacular, mind-bending Canberra season of Cirque–Le Noir this month. It was every bit as slick and awe-inspiring as one would expect.

But that's not what impresses him the most – quite the reverse. He recalls being literally moved to tears by a performance last year by Warehouse Circus, a youth organisation dedicated to giving new skills to school kids.

"[They] did their end of year little show out at the Belconnen Community Service, a converted squash court into a community theatre, and there were these kids with great skills doing some beautiful work.

"It's the confidence of the young people and the risks they're prepared to take, and the trust in themselves, and that's the stuff where I think, 'this is pretty good'. I wasn't howling, I wasn't reaching for the tissues, but you moisten up because you think this is actually what it's about."