cobalt blue handshake

last night I went to the inaugural Arthur Boyd Lecture presented by Barry Humphries at Australia House in London. This is a new event on the London cultural scene, and one intended to provoke further debate about the changing role and impact Australia arts and culture has on the UK, and to some extent vice versa. Barry was really great actually, extremely articulate and very funny, and talked about his close friendship with Boyd both in Melbourne and London from the 1950s on. Rather touchingly, the final time they saw each other and for their final handshake, Boyd's hands were covered in cobalt blue paint having just started a canvas to cap off an interview with Barry for an ABC documentary.
While to my mind the lecture did not really provoke much discussion about the impact of Australian arts on the UK, one thing that I did take away is how perceptions of gaining international experience away from Australia continue to change. Barry reminded everybody that his generation called Britain home, so visiting or emigrating was perfectly natural. The generations that followed were more sceptical of people who left Australia to live and work 'overseas' - that big nebulous part of the world defined as 'not Australia'. My feeling is that international experience is almost expected these days, although I have yet to experience The Return. But in a room full of rising ends-of-sentences and thoroughbred accents, and with so many Australians now a formative part of the UK arts scene (a topic that has been written about vehemently and extensively by the British press), there remains a large part of me that wonders whether overseas experience is all a bit of a one way ticket.