When Helen Pollard swapped Middlesborough for Melbourne, she found an environment where she could really blossom as an artist, as she tells Anna Tobin“We made a family decision to move to melbourne from Middlesbrough. I’d just finished a Fine Arts degree at university and moved back home, and my Mum had been through a messy divorce from my Dad and was finding it hard to make ends meet.
We’d always talked about working abroad together. Mum is a psychiatric nurse and we knew her skills were in demand in Australia and the country appealed to us because of the language and other cultural similarities with the UK. My sister Elisabeth was 11 at the time and Lucy was seven. Neither had started senior school yet, so we decided it was the right time for all of us to give it a go.
Mum put her CV up on the Internet and got job offers all over Australia. The salaries she was being offered were almost twice as much as she was earning in England, whilst the rent and cost of living was much cheaper too. If nothing else, financially we were going to be much better off. So we rented out our house in England and decided to give it a year to see if we could make a go of it.
Beginning a his new life in Australia moved Lee Martin-Seymour’s career in a very unusual direction, as he tells Anna Gizowska
When former teacher Rebecca Frith swapped Northants for Australia’s Sunshine Coast in 2007, she not only changed careers but tied the knot, too, as she tells Richard Webber
Cathy and Ian Finlay, and their two daughters, 9-year-old Lauren and 2-year-old Jessica, have only been living in Canada a few months, but they spent years planning the move. Words Anna Tobin
