As someone who’s spent a fair bit of time in transit lounges, outback communities and places most Australians would need to look up on a map, I’ve landed on a conclusion that might sound odd to some:

I often feel more at home in Singapore than in Australia.

It’s not a simple “I like X more than Y” comparison. It’s more that, at this stage of life – early sixties, a lot of miles on the clock, and not quite as keen on chaos as I used to be – Singapore fits me better than the place on my passport.

Part of it is purely practical. Singapore is compact and organised in a way Australia simply isn’t. Things are close together. Public transport works. You can get from one side of your day to the other without feeling like you’ve done a minor expedition. For someone who has already done his fair share of long drives and remote airstrips, that has its appeal.

Australia’s sheer size, which is wonderful when you’re twenty-five and keen on the road, can start to feel isolating and wearing when you’re past sixty and looking for things to be a bit simpler. The distances that once felt like adventure now feel a lot like time you don’t get back.

Then there’s the culture piece.

Singapore is a deliberate tangle of Chinese, Malay, Indian and Western influences, all somehow crammed into a small, humid island that runs on rules, food and efficiency. You can walk a few blocks and pass multiple languages, religions, smells and noises. There’s always some festival, some speciality dish, some little corner you haven’t quite figured out yet. It’s busy without always being frantic.

Australia likes to describe itself as multicultural, and it is, in its way. But the way it plays out can feel, at times, more homogenised and cautious. Less layered, less dense. That’s not a criticism so much as an observation. After years in and out of remote communities, big cities, prisons, welfare offices and suburbs, I’m probably more sensitive than most to where the texture is and where it’s missing.

Another thing Singapore has going for it – and this becomes more important once you start counting decades, not birthdays – is the sense of safety and order. The place is clean, well-maintained and generally predictable in the right ways. Public spaces are looked after. Crime is low. People mostly follow the rules, and the rules are clear.

Some people find that stifling. At twenty-five, I probably would have too. At sixty-plus, with a lifetime of working in chaos, crisis and under-resourced systems, the idea of things just working has a certain charm.

The health system is another factor. Singapore’s hospitals and clinics are modern, efficient and geared towards getting things done quickly. As someone who has seen plenty of health systems from the inside, both here and overseas, that matters. Australia’s system is good in many ways, but access, distance and delay can be real issues, especially outside the big cities. In Singapore, the distance from “I think I might need a doctor” to actually being in front of one feels shorter.

Then there’s the climate. Most Australians will tell you Singapore is too hot and too humid. They’re right. It is. But it’s consistently hot and humid. Once you adjust, you don’t spend a lot of time wondering what the weather is doing. In Australia, the weather can’t help itself – it has to make a statement. For daily life, boring weather has its advantages.

On top of all that, Singapore is a global hub. Planes go everywhere. The rest of the world feels close. Australia, for all its charms, is geographically off to one side. You’re always a long flight from somewhere.

So yes, for all those reasons, Singapore feels like a better fit for me at this point in my life.

But here’s the thing: I didn’t plan any of this.

I didn’t sit down at twenty and map out a strategy that ended with me preferring an island city-state in South-East Asia to the country I was born in. Like a lot of the better things in my life, Singapore was an accidental win.

I first ended up there because of a chain of choices that, at the time, felt completely unrelated: job moves, travel opportunities, cheap flights, work that took me north instead of south. I went because I could, then I kept going back because it felt good. Somewhere along the way, without my noticing, it shifted from “interesting stopover” to “one of the few places I feel completely at ease”.

Life does that more often than we admit. You wrestle with a problem for years, push hard in one direction, wear yourself out – and then one afternoon you trip over the solution by accident while looking for something else entirely. It’s like finding the missing puzzle piece under the couch while you’re actually searching for the TV remote.

I’ve had projects that I planned carefully, resourced properly, and pushed with great determination – only to watch them collapse for reasons that made perfect sense in hindsight. I’ve also had jobs, friendships and opportunities that turned up almost by accident and ended up shaping whole decades.

If you listen to the way we talk about success these days, you’d think it’s all about setting goals, visualising outcomes and grinding your way up a well-marked path. In my experience, it’s messier than that.

Churchill supposedly said something along the lines of success being the ability to go from failure to failure without losing enthusiasm. I think there’s some truth in that. Most of what’s worked in my life has been surrounded by things that didn’t. If you took out the failures, the half-starts and the misjudgements, there wouldn’t be much left on the page.

The trick, I’ve learned – slowly, and not always gracefully – is twofold:

• First, you keep going. You don’t pretend failure is fun, but you don’t treat it as a full stop either. You take the hit, you adjust, you carry on.

• Second, you leave a bit of room for serendipity. You don’t cling so tightly to your plan that you miss the quiet, sideways opportunities that turn out to matter more than the big, loud ones.

Singapore, for me, sits right at that intersection.

It’s the place I stumbled into often enough that it eventually felt like home. It’s also where a lot of my “accidental wins” seemed to land or pass through: chance meetings, unexpected work, small decisions that ended up tilting the map.

At the same time, a lifetime of going from failure to failure without (completely) losing enthusiasm has made me less worried about whether I “fit” anywhere perfectly. I’ve failed enough, and moved enough, that I no longer see feeling out of step as a moral failing. It’s just data. It tells you something about you, something about the place, and something about the time you’re living in.

These days I’m less interested in whether I count as an “expat”, a “local”, an “insider” or an “outsider”. The reality is I’m a compilation:

• a bit of remote Australia and dust,

• a bit of airport lounges and boarding passes,

• tropical humidity and European side streets,

• community clinics, welfare offices, prisons and meetings,

• and a lot of long drives with okay music and terrible coffee.

All of that travels with me, whether I’m in Katherine, Mataranka, Melbourne, or standing in the humidity outside an MRT station in Singapore wondering if I’ve got the right exit.

So when I say I feel more at home in Singapore than in Australia, it’s not a rejection of where I’m from. It’s more an acknowledgement that, through a mix of deliberate choices, mistakes and good old-fashioned serendipity, I’ve become someone who fits better in a place that feels like a well-organised crossroads than in a country still trying to work out what it wants to be.

Singapore, at this point in my life, offers a blend of things that line up with who I am now:

• manageable scale

• real diversity

• safety and order

• decent healthcare

• predictable weather

• and easy access to the rest of the world.

Australia offers other things I still care about deeply, especially in remote communities and small towns that don’t make the brochures. Both matter to me. I just feel, increasingly, like a visitor in one and at ease in the other.

In the end, the question of where to call home is personal, and the answer can change over time. If there’s a point in all this for the kids and grandkids, it’s probably this:

• Don’t be surprised if the place you end up belonging to isn’t the one you were born in,

• Don’t panic when plans fall over – some of the best bits arrive sideways,

• And don’t assume that failures are anything more than rough drafts on the way to whatever comes next.

Sometimes you grind your way forward. Sometimes you stumble into a win. Sometimes you discover, late in the piece, that an island city half a world away from your birthplace feels more like home than the suburb you grew up in.

If that happens, it doesn’t mean you’ve got it wrong.

It might just mean you were paying attention.