Rises and falls at the Powerhouse WHEN Dawn Casey fronted a staff meeting at Sydney's Powerhouse Museum last Wednesday to confirm her departure after five years as director, the announcement had been a long time coming. Having reached the end of her contract, Casey became the first Powerhouse director not to be offered a renewal. Instead, in February the NSW government advertised the job and Casey endured the ignominy of lining up alongside outsiders to re-apply for it. Unsuccessfully, as it turned out. She will depart at the end of July to make way for Rose Hiscock, 20 years her junior yet a veteran of the museum sector, having worked her way through Museum Victoria over 16 years. Most recently, Hiscock has had a senior role overseeing arts development at the Australia Council. Despite presenting a summary of her achievements to staff at Wednesday's meeting, Casey declined numerous invitations from The Australian to discuss her tenure at one of the nation's more unusual museums. A museum spokeswoman initially suggested three senior cultural figures who could speak about Casey, but none of them proved willing. The Powerhouse Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences in the urban jungle of Ultimo, adjacent to Sydney's CBD, is barely a quarter-century old in its present form. The director also has oversight of the Sydney Observatory, the NSW Migration Heritage Centre and a regional program. Despite having held three of the biggest museum jobs in the country - Casey was director of the Western Australian Museum and inaugural director of Canberra's National Museum of Australia - she will finish with an uncertain future. Her critics were not surprised her contract was not renewed. In late 2010, just two years into her term, a nine-year veteran of the Powerhouse's inaugural board of trustees, Leo Schofield, denounced her directorship. The former ad man and latter-day impresario bemoaned, among other things, Casey's decision to remove the design exhibition Inspired! Design Across Time to make way for a non-design element. Then a withering report from the NSW Auditor-General in late 2011 likely sealed Casey's fate under the new O'Farrell government. The report castigated Powerhouse management for, among other sins, a 19 per cent drop in the audience over two years and for allowing the value of donated collection items to drop by 70 per cent on the previous five-year average. The Auditor-General's 2012 report was neutral. A few months after the Auditor-General's damning comments about audience decline, Casey told The Australian: "I'm more interested in looking at the quality of the experience and engaging or bringing back some of our education audiences." Meanwhile, stakeholders have been grumbling about the number of curators being reduced from 39 to 31, and that the permanent collection has been largely relegated to storage. The successful Asian gallery has gone, likewise the award-winning Migration Heritage Centre. Parents cried foul when popular interactive children's spaces were junked, most significantly the construction space Zoe's House, which was shuttered in favour of a huge, high-decibel monument to the Wiggles. The Wiggles exhibition initially had an entry charge, but despite the unpopular fee being dropped, it is attracting few visitors; fewer than five children were in the space when The Australian visited on Friday. State government annual operational funding has been largely static at $28 million during Casey's tenure, which has necessitated rounds of redundancies in the face of rising costs. Philanthropic donations have dwindled but government capital funding of $2m to $7m a year has enabled building works designed to improve traffic flow and allow space for temporary exhibitions. Those works have attracted criticism as being costly. The Australian has spoken with some dismayed former board members who cite the series of pop-culture temporary entertainment exhibitions Powerhouse has staged as symptomatic of what's gone wrong: ABBA, Top Secret, Star Wars, Wallace & Gromit. Schofield, who had campaigned with Paul Keating and Bob Carr for former deputy director Jennifer Sanders to get the job when Casey was appointed, is withering. "I put nine years into that place and (then) I've just watched aghast, watched it go to pieces from the sidelines," he comments. So much work has been needlessly undone. There's this wonderful collection that's just been relegated to storage. Another former board member fumes the current director "has not presented a single major exhibition based on the collections in her five years, save the 80s exhibition, and even that was stripped of historical context on the director's instructions." There are also those who praise Casey for maintaining the regional museum program, which they say is vital to outlying audiences. The new lace exhibit is beautifully presented and Powerhouse's Harry Potter show last year was the most visited paid exhibition in the nation, with 383,000 visitors. Gross revenue of $11.7m from that exhibition helped meet a reduction in general revenue that resulted in a $2.7m fall in net income overall. Membership and visitor numbers have bounced around radically during Casey's tenure. They are influenced by temporary exhibitions, building works and discount annual family memberships. As a result they do not provide a clear picture of whether audiences are enjoying the museum as they once did. Casey's legacy is a more open museum building capable of presenting big temporary exhibitions, but walking through those light-filled rooms is a sad experience - so many of them are all but empty.