Most of us, when traveling to an event, go through a similar routine: go to the airport, prepare for your talk on the plane, get to the hotel, rush through welcome drinks, go on stage, do your networking, make it through dinner, exchange cards (if you even do cards), get duty-free gifts for family, and go home. Sometimes, we get to see a local show or inject some express sightseeing. Sometimes, we go to parties with friends who are part of the same event. Usually, this is as good as it gets.

But sometimes—very rarely—you board that plane without knowing that what you’re about to experience will transform the way you see things and make you question whether the way you live your everyday professional life actually makes sense. You step onto a piece of land that unexpectedly offers you a new perspective you didn’t even know existed—but that, deep down, you always wanted in your life. When that happens, going back home feels almost as difficult as leaving this unexpected party where you met someone you feel you could spend not just a few hours with, but perhaps the rest of your remaining life.

Welcome to Oz

Western Australia is a peculiar place. Isolated from most of the Western countries, eloigned from the more popular and tourist-heavy East Coast with a concentration of fashionable galleries, progressive museums, festivals, and events, it relies on regional growth and local investment, balanced with a healthy dose of pragmatic focus on Southeast Asia and strategic exchange with select overseas partners.

Perth, the longest—and most livable—city in the world, covers some 125 kilometers of a magnificent Indian Ocean shore, offering also some profoundly soul-soothing views on the Swan River, enveloping a large portion of the town with its calm, noble presence. Most of the major cultural organisations live in the city’s central business district, which makes it comfortable and easy for a tourist like me to visit, but also creates organic opportunities for collaboration, forces cultural leaders to talk to each other instead of working in silos, and stimulates continuous growth that one can imagine happens in a similar way neighbors looking at each other’s gardens feel motivated to make sure their roses and hydrangeas stand the test of neighborly comments. When you sit at the sunny café of the AGWA you can be sure that within half an hour you will say hi to at least a couple of your friends working in the neighboring institutions (which is actually how Oron landed me a guided visit to the incredible Curtin Gallery).

In small communities that realize the power and the challenges of living in isolation, long-term relationships are everything. You don’t strategize for a season or two; the quality of your professional lifespan is decided on how much you understand that living together well is more important than achieving short-term success. You also think about things like solidarity and legacy, because you know that helping to build someone’s career is actually what your legacy will depend on. You prioritize the value of your community, because you know you are all in the same boat and your loyalty is to your shared identity, your land, and your perseverance across generations who will come after you, and who were here long before you arrived. You know that having a big ego won’t take you far in what is technically an infinite game.

Maybe this is why when you come as a visitor and carry years and years of experience that goes one-eighty degrees the opposite direction, you feel you’ve been dreaming and everything you have seen is just an illusion created by a mix of jetlag and mild sunburn from the painfully beautiful paradisiaque Rottnest Island. Working in countries that take people for granted and assume that whatever they do, they will still be “the best place” in the world (best for what exactly? Polluting the cities? Making people work longer for shamefully little? Or perhaps discrimination, nepotism and the entitlement of governmental administration?), you get used to gatekeepers, private and public, who throw all sorts of obstacles at your feet because they feel so entitled through their positions they’ve forgotten why they are here in the first place. You get used to the lack of trust, lack of generosity, your kindness being taken for weakness, constant rivalry obsession, and prioritizing short-term gains over long-term constructive collaborations that bring value to both communities and stakeholders—in this order.

Until you witness with your own eyes that a different reality is possible. That you can live in a supportive community that is at once wealthy and governed by left-wing Labour (yes, these are not mutually exclusive), that puts a tremendous amount of effort into genuine reconciliation and healing processes, that truly invests in innovation by creating opportunities for talented people, that builds and shares top-notch infrastructure without constantly looking for excuses that make people build illusionary projects and as-if prototypes instead of doing actual deep work, and that makes kindness and modesty their most important values.

Hard to believe? Very. But when you actually see it, the most painful part is realizing how much we failed in giving up on many of these values in Europe and in the US. When you think about it on a deeper level it takes you to a place when you are no longer surprised at what is currently happening in Western politics. Perhaps it’s time to put our pride in the pocket and start looking at examples of countries and cities that actually figured out how to build a progressive, inclusive society that doesn’t leave anyone behind.

Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Public Service

Briege Whitehead started her VR company many years ago and rose to success with her 360-degree documentary The Antarctica Experience, which she directed after already having a significant number of successful traditional documentaries and reportages for major broadcasters. Contrary to most VR films released to date, Briege's projects have been seen by hundreds of thousands of people, both across Australia and internationally. The success of her work comes from a combination of high content and storytelling quality and a pragmatic, audience-first approach to distribution, which, as people from the VR industry know, is the main challenge on the road to what is called the mass adoption of virtual reality films.

The impressive numbers behind Briege’s work are not coincidental – her team developed and mastered a system that allows for an unlimited number of headsets to be synchronized and used together in museums, cinemas, or even football stadiums, connecting audience members through sound delivered by surround speakers rather than built-in headset speakers or headphones. Now, you might be wondering why this is even important, but when you work in the VR space, especially post-COVID-19, you know that the sense of isolation in VR discourages many people from engaging with the technology. Having a shared experience that connects you with other audience members through sound seems like a no-brainer, yet aside from Briege’s company, I haven’t seen many similar examples of successful cinematic VR distribution that create the communal feeling of being together in a cinema or theater. This offers a valuable lesson, especially given the challenges facing narrative VR in the young XR industry and the concurrent crisis happening in cinemas and screening rooms, which have experienced a steady decline in numbers since the pandemic.

Briege’s latest production, The Great Kimberley Wilderness, is another successful non-fiction experience that takes viewers on a journey to the heart of sacred ancient land, bursting with incredible natural beauty and dense, omnipresent spirituality. The project premiered at the Western Australian Museum Boola Bardip, the largest local museum celebrating regional stories and heritage. The museum not only dedicated a spacious, stand-alone wing to host the VR production but also actively supported the director and her company across a three-year period of R&D, story development, and production.

The museum’s investment in Briege’s company is estimated at around $1M, though the true value of their day-to-day support is probably much higher and can’t be taken down to a set amount of dollars. How often do you see a powerful legacy institution standing behind an independent artist, fully trusting her and offering long-term collaboration in a risky, innovative process? How often do you hear the leadership of such an organization speaking about the artist during an official opening with utmost pride and respect, calling her “a true creative genius” and humbly expressing how valuable it was for the museum to assist her on this journey? How often do you see decision-makers, institutional leaders, and independent entrepreneurs working hand-in-hand on something they all truly believe in and are proud of? I stood at the opening reception with some of my OG friends from Europe and we felt almost like crying, thinking – how is it that we missed this opportunity at home? And if that weren’t enough, the story itself is so well told – bridging conservation, First Nations’ wisdom, and the effort to battle climate change without creating a sense of frustration or loss that often makes us feel too overwhelmed to engage with the work in the first place.

This is just one of the many examples of how Perth cultural leaders strategize—no, sorry—how they actually understand their mission and duty, making their day-to-day work the best example of public service you could think of.

Australian Lifestyle For Beginners

The city of Perth has five universities, each one offering a compelling set of opportunities for their students and community members, with beautifully designed facilities, galleries, innovation labs, and vast green spaces to rest and replenish. New investments are on the way, creating opportunities for the next generation and for the healing community: ECU Campus ($900M investment, due to launch in 2026), a new impressive cultural hub hosting three major ECU schools with a mission-driven approach to public art commissions and digital curation; and the Aboriginal Culture Centre, due to open in 2030. All of these existing and new spaces design their architecture and missions around nature in one way or another.

What struck me is that every single person I met in WA spoke about the Australian lifestyle, which is something that, initially, you imagine as a mix of windsurfing and sunbathing. But after a couple of days, I began to understand how impoverished my initial notion was. The genuine, profound connection with nature and land, respect for ancient spirituality and wisdom, and appreciation of the way you spend time as part of these two realms is where the Australian lifestyle really begins. No wonder all of the people I’ve met, who are all terrific, talented professionals, openly declare how emotional it is for them to return home every time they travel. I must also mention that, contrary to where I live and work, the presence of respect for elders and senior leaders is profoundly moving. I was raised with the notion that you recognize a community (or a family) by the way it treats its senior members; unfortunately we all know that in Europe, this approach has almost completely disappeared.

This kind of embodied, organic patriotism is something that you don’t see often in our part of the world, where the word patriotism has not only been compromised but also is rarely related to making yourself just a tiny part of the eternal natural circle of life rather than your bombastic skyscrapers, looted art collections, and overhyped sports teams. Being proud of having healthy food, crystal-clear water, and incredible flora and fauna you are responsible for makes people look at each other differently. It places their ambitions and goals on a different spectrum of values. This is how healthy communities start—and this is how you keep them going in a world where the infamous "move fast and break things" philosophy is coming to set fire under everything we used to love and cherish.

I want to thank Peter and Simon for inviting me to Perth to be part of their brilliant Remix Summit; Shelagh, Nikki, and Marty for generously allowing me to witness their work and better understand the why’s and how’s of Perth’s cultural strategy; Oron for being the best host and friend during my short UWA Institute of Advanced Studies Visiting Fellow adventure; Briege for sharing her inspiring journey with me; Helen and Jason for a terrific exchange and their passion for innovation in culture; and all the WA leaders and culture workers who offered me their time and attention.