The twenty-four hour “overseas” journey is the modern hardship of middle-class Australia. We, who have grown soft in our prosperous cities by the seaboard, know little of the difficulties from which famed characteristics of earlier generations grew and that those living in “the other” Australia, of remote and very rural communities, still live with. We are neither so hardy nor so self-reliant, but we have at least a shadow of those great men and women whose nation we now claim. We can drink admirably and often, we can watch a good five full days of cricket without issue, we can shrug off diseases that a European  would take ill from, and make home improvements with a measure of duck tape and WD-40 which would surely cause an American to  seek professional help. We can also walk off a twelve-hour flight and straight onto another just the same without a second thought. This is one of the last remnants of our island heritage.

It is on the second such leg that I now find myself, feeling the strength of my people. It will be my first return to Europe since I left last June, bringing a three and a half years stint in Amsterdam to a close, and ending seven years off island. In the three short weeks on Continent, I shall be visiting fine cities- London, Bucharest, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Berlin, Amsterdam- and a finer group of old friends. I will witness weddings and children, career changes and life choices, all of which mark these rare individual who I’m at most privilege to name as friends. I will pull into my organisation’s offices in Berlin and London for a weeks work that I look on with the same eyes as I see my friends, engaging emerging leaders in their fields whose personal and professional passions are delightfully and often necessarily interlinked.

My main ambition is to share authentic experience with these people and places and to make good proof against “the tyranny of distance” that claims so much as the years fall away.  As for places, none of the great cities mentioned gives me a moments pause but fairest Amsterdam. Oh, to imagine walking down the glorious canals, which was my sport, my hobby and my muse over thousands of hours, of afternoons and evenings, as the seasons rolled all around, and within, my self. I imagine strolling thus whilst thinking of a younger Arthur canal-side, and that Arthur envisioning the older in turn reflecting upon the former. Across this veil of time I sense communion in this serene aesthetic of Amsterdam.

The last six months is the longest duration I’ve spent in one country since 2001 and has passed with the speed of a new role in a known land. This trip will be a chance to break from that engagement, to take an account of that which I’ve not allowed myself in my months returned home.  I will pursue a closer examination of the journey that I’ve undertaken in the years since I left, to take some better measure of who now lies behind these eyes, of who it is that returns, of what has been gained and lost, and what quiet space remains ever present.