In 2021–22, the British Council and the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade undertook a joint initiative to re-examine the relationship between the two countries through a program of cultural exchange. Helen Salmon, the Director, British Council Australia, explains the aims of the UK /Australia Season to Jo Litson, and discusses how it continues to bear fruit.
When a friend of Helen Salmon observed that Australia and the UK are “the two most distant but closest nations on earth”, the comment really rang true. And she should know.
Born in Brisbane, and now based in Sydney where she is the Director at the British Council Australia, Salmon has many years’ experience working in the arts in both countries.
“I spent a very small amount of my childhood in the UK and then went back there straight after university. So, I was working in the UK theatre sector for 15 years before I came back to Australia in 2005,” she says.
Before returning home, Salmon spent several years at London’s Royal Court Theatre. “The people I worked with there are now very senior in the UK industry. They’re my friends and so I’ve had a really good opportunity with the British Council to keep those professional relationships strong,” she says.
“I also have a good sense of the key issues and some of the tropes in our understanding of each other, as well as the very practical things for our sector about where the opportunities and challenges lie.”
That network and knowledge were invaluable when Salmon helped lead the UK /Australia Season 2021–22, which took place between September 2021 and December 2022. The joint initiative between the British Council and the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade set out to “reframe, refresh and re-energise the relationship” between the two countries through cultural exchange.
Posing the central question ‘Who Are We Now?’, the season included live and digital events exploring themes such as climate change; equality, diversity and inclusion; globalisation; and creative technology and innovation. More than 1,700 British and Australian artists, practitioners and academics took part in 136 projects, yielding 277 shows and events, with Australian work presented in the UK, and vice versa.
Salmon was Director of the UK in Australia program, while Michael Napthali was Director of the Australia in the UK program.
The conversation with DFAT about a possible UK /Australia Season began in 2018.
“We were coming up to the 250th anniversary of Cook arriving in Australia. A Free Trade Agreement was being discussed. Little did we know that we had COVID ahead of us, but there were also key global challenges that we were facing together, like climate change and equity in particular,” says Salmon.
“It was a way to explore a deeper, more truthful understanding of our past and present – and then look at how we work together in the future. What does that look like?”
“There are a lot of assumptions made about each other that are no longer true. When I say to a British person who doesn’t know Australia well that 40 percent of people in Sydney speak a language other than English at home, they’re absolutely gobsmacked.”
“Similarly, our orientation; we are an Indo-Pacific nation. I sometimes think that’s not really understood in the UK. So, it was a really important time to re-examine our relationship,” says Salmon. “That’s how we came to the theme of ‘Who Are We Now?’ We wanted to take the opportunity to open that out to artists and academics and ask them: Who are we now, really? Where are the shared opportunities, but also where are the differences? And where’s the nuance?”
Vicki Treadell, the British High Commissioner to Australia, summed up the UK perspective, saying, “To understand modern Britain is to understand that we must project with pride our modern multicultural reality. Our diversity and the inclusive society we strive for are who we are today.”
The UK/Australia Season spanned theatre, film, visual arts, dance, design, architecture, music, literature, higher education, training and a public engagement program.
The lineup ranged from the Australian World Orchestra performing at the Edinburgh International Festival and the BBC Proms at London’s Royal Albert Hall to This Is Who We Are, which brought together women of colour from diverse heritages “to share knowledge, foster mentoring opportunities and be stronger together”.
“This Is Who We Are was run by Kath Melbourne, who is based in Tasmania, and Renaissance One in the UK. We’ve just funded the second year for that project, so that continues on,” says Salmon.
Sync, a disability-led UK program exploring Deaf and disabled arts leadership, undertook an online program during the Season that included Australian participants. The Sync leadership program also proved so successful that it had a second iteration in 2022, with plans for more in the future.
The global challenge of climate change was addressed at a free one-day event at the 2022 Adelaide Festival called Climate Crisis and the Arts. Presented by Green Industries SA in collaboration with the British Council, Creative Australia and Julie’s Bicycle, a pioneering UK not-for-profit that mobilises the arts and culture to take action on the climate crisis, it brought together the arts and sciences to share successful initiatives and develop connections across sectors between the UK and Australia. This gave rise to Creative Australia and Julie’s Bicycle’s recent Creative Climate Leadership Program.
The UK /Australia Season toured major productions and organisations from one side of the world to another. Counting and Cracking, the epic, award-winning Sri Lankan-Australian saga by S. Shakthidharan and Eamon Flack, originally produced by Belvoir and Co-curious as part of the 2019 Sydney Festival, toured to the UK. After the huge response to performances at Edinburgh’s Lyceum Theatre and the Birmingham Rep, the production has received further offers from the UK and Europe, with more touring planned for 2024 and beyond.
Meanwhile, Britain’s Chineke! Orchestra – which has a majority of Black and ethnically diverse classical musicians – toured to Australia for the first time. The program included two newly commissioned works by William Barton and Deborah Cheetham Fraillon, which the Chineke! Orchestra premiered at the 2022 Adelaide Festival and then showcased at the Edinburgh International Festival.
Bilateral collaborations were key to many of the projects. The Javaad Alipoor Company, founded in 2017 by its British-Iranian, Manchester-based namesake, came to Australia to co-create a new work with Riverside’s National Theatre of Parramatta. Titled Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World, it investigated the unsolved 1992 murder of Iranian popstar and refugee Fereydoun Farrokhzad, and the nature of investigation.
Salmon explains that the British Council, which has supported Alipoor for some years, took Joanne Kee, Executive and Creative Producer of Riverside’s National Theatre of Parramatta, to Edinburgh in 2017 as part of an Australian delegation. While there, Kee saw The Javaad Alipoor Company performing as part of the British Council Showcase.
“She loved Javaad’s work and they formed a relationship. She commissioned him to develop a new work with artists from the Western Sydney community. And so, we supported that. He was the first British artist to come through the border when we reopened after COVID. It was amazing!” says Salmon.
"Who are we now, really? Where are the shared opportunities, but also where are the differences? And where’s the nuance?”
“He had a month in Western Sydney working on that piece, which was shown as a work in progress at the 2022 Sydney Festival. He took it back to the UK and toured it. It was listed by The Guardian in the top five shows of the year. Then it came back here to the Sydney Opera House [as part of the 2024 Sydney Festival].”
“It was a really transformative experience for us to be part of the [UK /Australia] Season,” says Alipoor. “We had toured to Australia before, bringing the first part of our trilogy, The Believers Are But Brothers, and sitting in this Season really helped solidify our relationship with Australian artists, co-producers and audiences. It was an amazing jumping-off point for us. The final part of our trilogy, Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World, was our first international co-production made with Riverside’s National Theatre of Paramatta and a brilliant team of diverse UK and Australian artists.”
The British Council has spent many years connecting First Nations artists in Australia with people in the UK through its ACCELERATE program. Ten years ago, West Australian First Nations singer/songwriter Gina Williams took part in the program, visiting Wales where she connected with a number of local artists who use music and the Welsh language to promote and sustain the Welsh culture. Inspired by their work, she made the decision to start recording in her own language, Noongar.
Williams and her collaborator Guy Ghouse have used Noongar in their work since 2012. They have recorded four albums, written two operas and regularly conduct workshops with school children.
As part of the UK /Australia Season, they performed at the Wales Millennium Centre. This October, they are performing at Llais, Cardiff’s International Arts Festival, where they will spend a week conducting workshops with young people, culminating in a performance featuring a choir of around 150 children.
“Being part of the British Council’s ACCELERATE Arts and Cultural Leadership Program in 2012 was a life-changing experience,” says Williams. “And ten years later, almost to the day, standing on stage in Wales for the UK /Australia Season, performing [in] Noongar language and thanking the people there for inspiring our work was like a dream come true. I’ll always be grateful for these remarkable opportunities to learn and to give back to the communities here and abroad who have inspired us.”
In a major international partnership, devised specifically for the UK /Australia Season, this time connecting Australian and Scottish artists, contemporary Australian circus company Gravity & Other Myths collaborated with critically acclaimed First Nations dance company Djuki Mala from Elcho Island in the Northern Territory, composers Ekrem Eli-Phoenix and Aidan O’Rourke, five Celtic musicians, Adelaide’s Aurora Vocal Ensemble and the National Youth Choir of Scotland.
Together, they created a large-scale, multi-artform production called MACRO. While Gravity & Other Myths had combined circus and live music in the past, this was their most ambitious project yet. MACRO opened the 2022 Adelaide Festival and then went to the Edinburgh International Festival, in both cases as part of the UK /Australia Season program. Country Arts SA also toured MACRO to regional South Australian venues.
At the conclusion of the UK/Australia Season, a detailed report found that its aims were “resoundingly achieved”. Seventy-eight percent of participants said it had enabled them to find new opportunities to work in the UK or Australia, while 96 percent said it had helped them develop their existing professional network. Two years on, the Season continues to bear fruit with various tours and collaborations happening as a result.
As she discusses many other details of the UK/Australia Season, Salmon emphasises that it was never just “a presentational festival of what the UK can offer. It was about building relationships that will continue to be creatively interesting for artists and generate new opportunities for them.”
“Australia is economically the third largest financial market for UK arts and culture in the world, after the US and Europe, so although we have a small population, we’re a really significant market. One of the key reasons I wanted to do a season here is that there are real opportunities. I didn’t want to just bring the really incredible British artists that are already on the touring circuit. I wanted new people to have the opportunity to access this key market,” she says.
“That’s one of the things that I am most proud of. The Season was not just a public-facing thing; it was important from a sector development perspective. I’m really thrilled that was one of the most successful outcomes.”
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