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.
I got an Australian guidebook and we looked up all the places where Mum had been offered work. We decided on Melbourne, because it seemed to be the cultural capital of the country. Whatever you are into it has it: sport, art, music, theatre. They cater for everything and all the big bands come here, too. Whereas Sydney is more expensive, there is a higher standard of living there and it’s similar in a way to London. Melbourne, like Middlesbrough, has a more regional feel.
Mum got a Business Class visa for professional migrants and my sisters and I came out on the back of that. I was 22 when we arrived here six years ago, and I enrolled to do a Masters in Art and Public Space, which focused on developing and executing artworks for public places. This was a real springboard for my career, and also a fantastic opportunity to travel and work with a very diverse group of people.
There are lots of international students here. I was working with people from Taiwan, China, Israel and Afghanistan, for example. And the universities here really want that connection with other countries, so they are very open to you going away and studying. As part of the course I did three projects that took me to Turkey, Italy and China."
Read more in the April 2010 issue of Living Abroad magazine
