Stephen Wainwright is leaving Creative NZ 'immeasurably richer'

Helping to pull off the Oceania exhibition - a Pacific art showcase at London’s Royal Academy in 2018 - is one of Stephen Wainwright's happiest memories from 19 years as chief executive of New Zealand's arts funding agency.

"It was quite lovely to tell our stories in a city that was the centre of English colonial power for so many years. In earlier centuries, we were not even on the map.

"To assert that, yes, we are a South Pacific nation, and our closest neighbour might be Antarctica, but we are here and we have something going on, which is nobody else's, just ours - it was lovely to assert that," he tells Saturday Morning.

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Wainwright says he was always drawn to the arts thanks to his mum - a visual artist who encouraged him to study speech and drama as a boy and later a Bachelor of Arts at Victoria University.

Although many of his uni friends went on to be actors, Wainwright says his one-and-only stage appearance was as the Second Murderer in a post-apocalyptic production of Macbeth.

The role involved swinging a heavy chain with a padlock onto a 44-gallon drum, he says, and one night the padlock ricocheted off the drum and went flying just above the heads of the audience "like a military shell".

"That would have been quite a cameo had that gone badly."

After getting an arts degree, Wainwright studied public administration and accounting, then in 1990 joined the finance team at what was then the Queen Elizabeth II Arts Council.

Up until the 1970s, New Zealand government organisations had “a Little Britain mindset”, Wainwright says. At Creative NZ, he worked to "diversify the portfolio" and support local arts companies like Te Pou Theatre and the Black Grace dance group.

International choreography star Parris Goebel is one artist Wainwright is really proud of helping to support in her early days.

“To see people like that flower and flourish is a terrific thing… we kind of do a little fist bump.”

In Aotearoa, we have such an abundance of talented people, Wainwright says, so it's disappointing that, over time, financially supporting their work has become tougher and tougher to do.

"Even though New Zealanders are pretty highly engaged in the arts, it's still extremely difficult for many of the people working in the industry to make a go of it. It's kind of gig economy work, and it's tenuous."

For our arts sector, the Covid-19 lockdowns were an "incredibly fraught time", Wainwright says, and Creative NZ had to pivot from supporting activities to helping people "keep their heads above water" financially.

"A little bit later on, we were fortunate, along with a lot of the rest of the cultural sector, that the government recognised the trauma and also recognised that nobody could quite see when the light at the end of the tunnel would be.

"We got more resources to support the arts, which certainly did a lot to mitigate the short-term harm, so that was very important."

New Zealand culture has changed drastically since Wainwright was "a lad at boarding school", and his sons' inability to name a single All Black confirms for him how much.

Over his years at Creative NZ, he's experienced a bit of personal evolution, too.

“As a Pākehā boy growing up in Lower Hutt, I didn't have much exposure to the plurality of the New Zealand world, and I'm immeasurably richer for that.

“Tohunga, community leaders… I've been extremely fortunate in my time at the Arts Council to have people who essentially were navigators, who opened my eyes to a whole other set of points of view that otherwise might have passed me by.”