From Beijing to Canberra: New head of Canberra Museum and Gallery Sarah Schmidt on her dream job

Having been on a posting in China, she soon found herself ensconced at home day after day, in conference calls with Beijing, and unsure when she'd return to the mega-city she and her family had called home for the past seven months.

But then, her dream job became available, right here in Canberra. And so her direction changed.

She's now the director of Canberra Museum and Gallery, a role she'd been coveting for some time.

"I've always been a regional gallery director, and CMAG has a regional remit," she says.

She had, until recently, been working as the Australian Embassy's Cultural Diplomacy manager in Beijing - not as a career diplomat but as an arts administrator. Before Beijing - one of the world's largest cities, she was the director of Hamilton Gallery in Western Victoria.

"That has a $29 million collection in a township of 10,000 people and that dichotomy between scale of a small population and a large collection of value, it's really interesting to work with," she says.

"That comes out of the wealth of the region from wool grazing from its early history. So that was an extraordinary role, and bought me in touch with a lot of early settler and decorative art collections.

"And yes, it was quite an unusual step in a way, to move straight to Beijing from a population of that size."

The Hamilton collection had sparked an interest in Asian ceramics, and her position in Beijing arose out of a Gordon Darling Fellowship to learn more.

But finding herself unexpectedly in Canberra - not as tiny as Hamilton, but barely a speck compared to Beijing - she quickly fell in love with the place.

Being able to take on the role at CMAG has a hint of inevitability to it, even though, pre-COVID, she had every intention of staying in Beijing for a three-year posting.

This will be her fourth directorship; she has also been deputy director at the Art Gallery of Ballarat, director of the Post Master Gallery and Ararat Gallery.

But she says CMAG is one of the few museums that holds both visual art and social history collections, and she's excited to see how they work together.

"I'm really excited by that dialogue, and the way that often you will intersperse visual arts and social history," she says. "Many institutions are doing that now and breaking down the boundaries, and it is really an exciting opportunity."

Growing up in a mix of regional and city settings in Victoria, she first trained as an artist, before switching to museum studies, and did a PhD in art history, focusing on Australia's first art fraud case involving Aboriginal art. Marcia Langton - whose portrait hangs in the National Portrait Gallery - was her supervisor.

It's funny where life takes you. Since finding herself in Canberra with her family, she's taken to walking around the lake in the evenings with one of her three high-school-aged sons.

"Back in May, I went for a walk with my son, and he said, 'It's just too congested here on the path, mum, let's walk up these little steps'," she says. "And suddenly, I was in the National Gallery sculpture garden."

She remembers once interviewing a former National Gallery director Betty Churcher when she came to Broken Hill as a visitor, and spoke to her about the tension between arts administration and practice.

"I can remember her saying that it's challenging as a painter, when your mind and your eye start to have a gap when you lose your practice being an arts administrator, because you just see so much high quality work around you that you start to second guess your own practice."