Sydney's A$915m Powerhouse museum opens amid leadership crisis

Sydney's Powerhouse, a A$915m ($641m) arts, design, science and technology museum, opens on 7 November without the chief executive who spent six years building it. Lisa Havilah stepped down in August over allegations of misconduct. She denies any wrongdoing and says she has always acted with integrity.

The New South Wales government calls the museum its biggest cultural investment since the Sydney Opera House. The opening will take place amid leadership turmoil, a funding scandal and a campaign over the fate of the institution's historic collection.

Why did the chief executive leave?

Havilah had led the Powerhouse development at Parramatta, in Sydney's multicultural western suburbs, since 2019. Arts minister John Graham announced that the museum's chief operating officer, Mark Wilsdon, is on leave while the Sydney law firm Lander & Rogers investigates allegations brought forward by a whistleblower. The allegations have not been publicly detailed, but Graham has said they touch on "governance and procurement". His office did not respond before publication to a question about whether the inquiry's findings will be made public.

Some of Australia's most influential arts figures want Havilah back. A petition launched on 27 October by Kon Gouriotis, editor of Artist Profile magazine, has drawn more than 750 signatories. They include the artist Ben Quilty, the architect and arts patron Penelope Seidler, the gallery owner Anna Schwartz, and Lucy Turnbull, the former lord mayor of Sydney (2003-04), whose husband Malcolm Turnbull was Australia's prime minister (2015-18). The petition calls for Havilah to be reinstated immediately.

Abbie Galvin, the New South Wales government's architect, has taken over as interim chief executive. Louise Herron, former Sydney Opera House CEO, was appointed as a "strategic adviser". Cassandra Wilkinson, a New South Wales treasury executive, took over Wilsdon's role in July, amid constant media reports of cost blowouts before the launch.

What does the money scandal involve?

The Sydney Morning Herald reported in August that more than A$70m ($46.2m) had been spent in the run-up to the grand opening. That figure included A$10m ($7m) for LED screens, staging and backdrop for an immersive experience by the British artist Es Devlin. The museum is already widely viewed as having consumed a disproportionate share of the state's arts budget.

A five-year "artistic associates" programme introduced by Havilah, costing A$2.6m ($1.8m), employed external experts to help bring the Powerhouse to fruition. The Public Service Association, a trade union, claimed the programme sidelined long-serving and knowledgeable Powerhouse curators in favour of outsider non-specialists. The state treasury reviewed the scheme and it was scrapped in May.

Where did the museum come from?

Powerhouse is part of the Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences, which also encompasses a large site in Ultimo, a storage area and discovery centre in Castle Hill, and the Sydney Observatory. The Powerhouse Museum and its half a million objects occupied the Ultimo site from 1893 until the state government decided to distribute the city's cultural assets more equitably across the population base. In 2015, Parramatta, about 20km west of central Sydney, was selected as the new location.

The Ultimo building closed in 2024 and is undergoing a A$300m ($210m) heritage revitalisation. A public petition to save the site was launched after a newspaper report that the government is secretly considering selling part of Ultimo to cover the cost of the new Powerhouse.

The closure is a cultural "tragedy", heritage expert and former Powerhouse trustee Kylie Winkworth tells The Art Newspaper. "It's a globally unprecedented museum demolition," says Winkworth, a member of the Powerhouse Museum Alliance pressure group. She says the Ultimo site was "uniquely resonant and appropriate for the display of the Powerhouse Museum's internationally significant power and transport collections. Now the collections are dismembered at Castle Hill and never to be seen together again." She argues the new Powerhouse was "never intended to be a museum" at all but rather a function and performance centre serving the local nighttime economy.

What will visitors actually see?

The building sits on the banks of the Parramatta River. Franco-Japanese practice Moreau Kusunoki designed it with the Australian firm Genton. Its exhibition spaces cover more than 18,000 sq. m across seven vast, column-free galleries, plus a rooftop terrace and garden and temporary accommodation for students, artists and scientists. Its steel criss-cross facade has earned it the nickname "the milk crate" — a jibe with precedent, since the Sydney Opera House was called a "scrum of nuns" in the 1970s because its sails resembled wimples.

Experts told a parliamentary inquiry before construction began that the riverfront undercroft would flood in heavy rain, prompting design changes. During a site tour in June, Havilah told The Art Newspaper that "the whole of Parramatta would be under water" before the Powerhouse flooded. Winkworth says she still fears people inside the building would be at risk in overland flooding.

Campaigners are unhappy that key treasures will not be on display. The 1785 Boulton & Watt steam engine, the 1855 Locomotive No.1 and the Strasburg Clock model — like most of the collection — are stored off-site at the Castle Hill discovery centre, open to the public only on weekends.

Five inaugural shows all open on 7 November:

• Task Eternal, the main draw, traces the history of aviation and space exploration with the Smithsonian and the British Museum.
• Es Devlin: The Turning features five major works by the artist and stage designer.
• The Dark, for children, turns darkness into a "playground of curiosity" through interactive storytelling, a crystal tunnel and 100 borrowed childhood toys.
• Overflow explores the care of salt and freshwater ecosystems around Australia.
• The Mall centres on western Sydney's pioneering role in the global development of shopping malls.

General admission is free. Over-16s pay A$30 ($21) for Task Eternal. All visitors pay from A$10 ($7) for James Turrell's light installation Shangri La (Over the Hump). A 23-day opening festival features 179 events, including Space Shuttle astronaut Charles Bolden reflecting on leadership in space exploration; most events are free.

What does this change for Sydney? The state's flagship cultural project opens on time and at scale, but its governance inquiry, its funding questions and its dispersed collection will shape the institution long after the opening festival ends.