Christine Bacon
When Christine applied for an MSc. in Forced Migration at Oxford University, she didn't expect the university to write back, and almost dismissed the invitation as junk mail. After a hectic couple of moths of packing up her life and borrowing money from family and friends, she stepped on the plane in Melbourne, Australia with just one backpack on her shoulders. It was 15 years ago. Since then she finished university, created a job for herself here, met her husband and had two kids.
Christine is a person full of energy and ideas. One of her more recent ideas was to create a podcast series called "I am an immigrant" to transform the representation of immigrants in the UK. When the pandemic hit, Christine was furloughed from her work as Artistic Director of ice&fire theatre. A planned production was postponed several times and is now rescheduled for a year and a half after it was supposed to happen. "I read a report about the media largely framing immigrants as either victims or villains", she says, "and I thought: that doesn't apply to me, but I am an immigrant, too. What can I do to change this perception?" Interviewing people who have come to the UK from somewhere else, Christine aims to make the vast majority of immigrants living here more visible as "people who live regular lives, subscribe to streaming television services, work in a variety of jobs, socialise with friends, fall in and out of love, say and do stupid things and pick our kids up from school".
Talking about the differences between Britain and Australia, Christine mentions that "Back in Australia I used to watch British TV series and films, so I was exposed to the way things work here. Yet I was still surprised to find the distinct class divisions in real life". Christine says she was primed, as someone born to Irish parents and as someone who had read a lot about the impact of colonialism in Australia and around the world, to be suspicious of the British and to expect they might regard her as inferior, but she hasn't felt that in any way since she arrived (although she still has a very healthy suspicion of the British state and its institutions). "I am sure that I would have had a great life if I stayed in Australia, it's a lovely place to live. But I am very happy with my life in Britain and I do not wish to go back in near future", she says. The only thing she missed in the early years was good coffee. She would regularly travel for 45 minutes to the only decent place, Flat White in Soho, to get her fix. Thankfully, she says, antipodeans have made London a mecca of 'overpriced but great quality coffee' in recent years.