EXCLUSIVE

As it prepares to reveal a $5.9 million makeover, the Australian Museum has made a dramatic financial turnaround by posting a small annual surplus, despite cuts in government funding.

Less than 18 months into the job, director and chief executive Kim McKay has wiped out the $745,000 deficit recorded by the institution, Australia's oldest natural history museum, in 2013-14.

"I have turned that around in the 12 months to where we will be recording a small surplus," she said.

The Museum's return to profit comes as builders put the final touches on its new $5.9 million entrance on William Street, which will be opened by NSW Premier Mike Baird on September 9.

The Museum will also open its Wild Planet exhibition of 400 extinct and endangered animals in the old entrance area. A new exhibition, entitled TrailBlazers, featuring 50 top Australian explorers will open later this year, with explorer and environmental scientist Tim Jarvis the Museum's inaugural TrailBlazer-in-residence.

The strong financial result, which will be reported in the Museum's yet-to-be-released 2014-15 annual report, contrasts with poor results posted by other state cultural institutions including the Art Gallery of NSW and the Museum of Arts and Applied Sciences.

McKay said it was a "big turnaround in 12 months, especially with efficiency dividends imposed".

"It has been because the staff and everyone have really gotten on board with the mission to save money but at the same time develop the Museum and transform it," she said.

It represents another success for McKay, who has reinvigorated an institution that had been demoralised by job losses, poor management and scandal over thefts from its vast collection.

The new entrance features crystals from the Museum's collection as well as casts of 20,000-year-old Indigenous footprints from the Willandra Lakes in western NSW.

"For the first time in our history we have an accessible entrance so now people with strollers and prams and people in wheelchairs can actually get into the Museum quite easily," McKay said.

In the past, she said: "We'd have security guards carry them up. There was a funny little walkway … but not easy to use."

McKay said the new entrance to the 1850 building also realised the original intention of its builders to open onto William Street: "It was always an accident of history that it ended up on College Street."

That accident lasted 145 years until the Museum's "hidden" entrance on College Street was closed earlier this month.

Like the state's other cultural institutions, the Museum has building plans to expand on its current East Sydney site, with the NSW government providing $4.7 million to develop a master plan.

McKay said there would be "major announcements" later this year regarding philanthropy.

"I'm very committed to getting more corporate partnerships and more donors involved in the Museum long-term."

The Museum's entrance fee for children was abolished in June. But McKay also hopes to completely remove the admission fee, which she said had halved attendance when it was imposed in the 1992.

McKay's previous work includes co-founding, with Ian Kiernan, the Clean-Up Australia campaign and managing Oprah Winfrey's 2010 Australian tour.

She felt "scared" when she took the museum's top job – as the first non-scientist to do so – and it was her first time as a bureaucrat.

There have been a "few little run-ins, baptisms of fire", but McKay said the experience had otherwise been positive.

"I'm a marketer by background, as you know, so I'm looking at this museum with a different eye than has normally been cast over it previously," she said.

"I don't know whether it was a bit tired and dusty but now it's alive with great things happening here and a great plan for the future."