I am not especially well-travelled, but I have been to the other side of the globe a couple of times, although still in the Northern Hemisphere. I have had no particular curiosity to visit Australia, possibly clinging to the arrogant Pom belief that Australia's best find their way over here, and citing examples from Clive James, Robert Hughes and Germaine Greer to Kylie Minogue, Nick Cave and The Go-Betweens. Nonetheless, one must congratulate Edinburgh Fringe boss Kath Mainland on her appointment as chief executive of the Melbourne Festival, working alongside Jonathan Holloway (once a theatre director in England, but not the Red Shift Theatre Company one who recently served on the Fringe Council) at the head of an event which began the century under the aegis of Jonathan Mills, who moved on from there to direct the Edinburgh International Festival.

She is, however, as others have pointed out, a real loss to Edinburgh and Scotland, as she is both universally well-liked, and hugely experienced. In the hothouse atmosphere of the capital's arts scene, Mainland has been a behind-the-scenes dynamo at the Assembly Rooms (in its Assembly Theatre/William Burdett Coutts regime days), at the Edinburgh International Book Festival, and then at the Fringe, which she took over at a difficult post-box office system collapse juncture and re-presented in a very quirky individual way. Her apparently unflappable practical approach was also a huge asset in the presentation of Edinburgh to visitors and overseas, in partnership with Faith Liddell, director of Festivals Edinburgh. It is typical of her thoroughness that she took classes in French before joining a delegation to Avignon so that she could address her audience in their own language, and in words entirely of her own composition. Liddell's successor Julia Amour and whoever takes over from Mainland have a tough act to follow.

Although Glasgow's arts scene can be streets ahead in its resemblance to a viper's nest when it puts its mind to it, the cultural community in Edinburgh remains oddly compartmentalised for a relatively small city, with areas of arts activity operating in distinct silos that are disinclined to interact with one another, not to say fiercely independent and even dismissive of others. At a strategic level, Festivals Edinburgh has done much to demolish suspicions between Festival and Fringe, but it is still true that one of the reasons Mainland will be missed was her natural ease in any company and popularity across the board from diplomatic to community level. Nurturing the best people for leadership in the arts is a mysterious process, and one that Creative Scotland, and before it the Scottish Arts Council, has often got badly wrong, showing a preference for "chief executives" with administrative backgrounds over those with proven artistic records when there are many compelling examples of successful companies where the strong artistic voice gives leadership and direction, with capable managerial talent providing essential support from a structurally subordinate position. It is a model that the business minds in government and quango-land seem disposed to mistrust, yet it is one that, for example, has kept the Citizens Theatre on track over the years and has been successfully adopted by the National Theatre of Scotland. Kath Mainland's career has developed along that supportive, if usually less high-profile, track, and she is hugely respected and loved for it. There are, sadly, as many examples in Scotland where people with her skills have been thrust into the top job over more flamboyant artistic personalities and suffered as a result of that promotion.