From the AMPAG archive — restored from a 2014 media item on the retirement of the long-standing AMPAG Chair.
The AMPAG Chair retired in late 2014 after a multi-year tenure that had encompassed the post-GFC sector-fight, the development of the National Cultural Policy Creative Australia, the establishment of the AMPAG Tracking Survey as the sector’s principal data instrument, and the build-up of the development infrastructure across the major company members that produced the structural shift from corporate sponsorship to private donation as the sector’s principal non-government revenue source.
The retirement notice and the subsequent announcement of the incoming Chair signalled a generational transition in the AMPAG governance and reflected the broader pattern through the 2010s of leadership transition across the major performing arts companies — Stephen Page eventually retiring as artistic director of Bangarra after thirty-two years; David McAllister succeeding Maina Gielgud as artistic director of The Australian Ballet and then succeeded by David Hallberg; Lyndon Terracini’s succession at Opera Australia and the subsequent transitions; and Donald Runnicles and Vladimir Ashkenazy at the Sydney Symphony Orchestra succeeded by David Robertson and then Simone Young.
Why this matters in the longer arc
The 2014 AMPAG Chair retirement was part of the broader generational transition across the Australian performing arts sector through the mid-2010s. Read in 2026 hindsight, the sector that emerged on the other side of those transitions was substantially different in artistic leadership composition from the sector that had pushed back the 2009 GFC and won the Creative Australia commitments — though the institutional continuity of AMPAG itself, the Tracking Survey, and the funding framework persisted across all of those changes.
Original release: AMPAG (2014), “AMPAG Chair retires”. Restored from the AMPAG site Wayback Machine archive.
