Born: 11 January 1931, Australia
Died: 31 March 2015
Country most active: Australia
Also known as: Elizabeth Ann Dewar Cameron
The following is republished with permission from the Victorian Honour Roll of Women.
Betty Churcher was the first female director of the National Gallery of Australia.
Betty Churcher was born on 11 January 1931, in Brisbane. She was good at drawing and wanted to be a professional artist. She won a scholarship to study painting at the Royal College of Art in London. She also studied Art History at the Courtauld Institute in London, where she attained a Master of Arts. While there she met and married Australian artist, Roy Churcher. On her return, she taught Art at secondary schools before becoming an Art lecturer at various tertiary institutions.
In 1982, she became Dean of the School of Art and Design at the Phillip Institute of Technology in Victoria. In Melbourne, Betty chaired the Australia Council’s Visual Arts Board (1983-87) before being appointed as the Director of the Art Gallery of Western Australia in Perth. She was the first woman to head a state gallery.
In 1990, she replaced James Mollison as the Director of the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra, another first for a woman. She built a reputation for bringing ‘blockbuster’ art to Australia such as the 1992 Rubens and the Italian Renaissance exhibitions which made a profit of more than $1 million. She also presented ‘The Age of Ankor’ which showed 35 stone and bronze sculptures from the National Museum of Phnom Penh.
“My aim was for people who couldn’t travel or would never travel to places where those great works could be seen, to have access to the art.” Betty is said to have broadened the gallery’s appeal through her ‘public access’ policy. Her publications include Understanding Art (1974) and Molvig: the Lost Antipodean (1984).
This biography is republished from The Encyclopedia of Women and Leadership in Twentieth-Century Australia. Written by Monica Raszewski, The University of Melbourne. See below for full attribution.
Betty Churcher (nee Cameron) was born in Brisbane in 1931. She was one of two children and the only daughter in a household where most of the attention was focused on her brother. Churcher has always had a passion for art and practised as an artist before her career in art education and administration. At the age of 13 she won The Sunday Mail Child Art Contest. In 1948 she began to exhibit with the Younger Artists Group (YAG) of the Royal Queensland Art Society (RQAS) and later became Chair of the group. In 1951 she won a travelling art scholarship which allowed her to study in London at the South West Essex Technical School and later at the Royal College of Art, London where she was awarded the Princess of Wales Scholarship for the best female student. During this time Churcher met and married the painter Roy Churcher. The couple moved to Brisbane in 1957 where they set up a studio and gave art classes.
Churcher gave up painting to look after her first son. When her fourth and youngest son began school, she returned to work as a secondary school teacher. She wrote a school textbook, Understanding Art, which was published by Rigby in Australia in 1973 and by Holmes McDougall in the UK where it won the London Times award for an Information Book. In 1975 she returned to London and completed an MA in Art History at the Courtauld Institute of Art, London University.
Betty Churcher has been a role model for women in art education and art administration for many years. She became the first female head of a tertiary institution in 1982 when she took up the position of Dean of the School of Art and Design at Phillip Institute of Technology in Melbourne. In 1987 she became the first female director of a state art gallery when she became Director of the Art Gallery of Western Australia.
In February 1990 Churcher took up the Directorship of the National Gallery of Australia and remained in the post until 1997. During these years she presided over 12 twelve international blockbuster exhibitions and a growth in attendance numbers and revenue.
Since her retirement, Churcher has been Adjunct Professor for the Centre for Cross-Cultural Research at the Australian National University. She was appointed a Member of the Order of Australia in 1990 and an Officer of the Order of Australia in 1996. She has been active on a number of boards and committees including the Visual Arts Board, the Australia Council, the Council of Australia Art Museum Directors, National Committee, UNESCO, Art Exhibitions Australia, the National Cultural Heritage Committee, the ANU Institute of the Arts Board, the ACT Centenary of Federation Committee and the National Council for the Centenary of Federation.
Work cited
Monica Raszewski, ‘Churcher, Elizabeth’, in The Encyclopedia of Women and Leadership in Twentieth-Century Australia, Australian Women’s Archives Project, 2014, https://www.womenaustralia.info/leaders/biogs/WLE0515b.htm, accessed 16 January 2022.