landing in Hamilton

I’d taken a promotion to Senior and Office Manager at a small child protection office. It sounded grander than it felt. In reality it meant a tiny team, a lot of responsibility and not many places to hide when things went wrong. You were the person people rang and the person they expected to sort it out.

It was a different pace to Dandenong and South Melbourne. Smaller town, smaller office, but the problems didn’t shrink to match the postcode. If anything, the gaps in services were more obvious. You still had the same mix of neglect, violence, poverty and chaos, just without the range of specialist programs you might find in the city. A lot of the time it came back to the basics show up, listen, do what you can, document everything and hope the next call wasn’t worse than the last.

My wife was posted there with the Police Force as a new graduate. So you had one of us in child protection and the other in uniform. That combination made for the occasional overlap at work. We were careful about what we talked about and how, but in a small town you couldn’t pretend the systems were separate. Everyone was connected one way or another.

Hamilton was another version of the same pattern I kept falling into. Regional town, frontline work, limited resources. The promotion was a step up on paper, and it did give me more say in how things ran, but most days it still came back to the basics. Keep the office functioning, support the staff, and try not to drop the ball when the stakes were high.

It wasn’t glamorous and it wasn’t heroic. It was just the next step, in another town, in a line of roles that slowly added up to something, even if I couldn’t quite see the shape of it yet.

Divorced .. just kids really
Looking back now, the divorce feels almost inevitable, but at the time it still hit hard as it was not of my choosing.

We were just kids, really. Twenty-one and two days when we got married, and for the better part of nine years we did what young couples do – moved houses, changed jobs, shifted towns, tried to make sense of money, work, and whatever “the future” was meant to look like. From the outside it probably looked fairly normal. On the inside it was a bit more erratic.

Those years were scattered across suburbs and country towns – Adelaide, Melbourne, back again, places in between. Different roles, different postcodes, but the underlying cracks in the marriage travelled with us. We didn’t suddenly fall apart in one big argument. It was more a slow drift, punctuated by the usual stresses: work pressure, relocations, long hours, and two people growing in slightly different directions without really naming it.

By the time we got to the end, the signs were all there. I can see that clearly now. At the final hurdle though, it still wasn’t my choice. That part is worth saying. I might have sensed it was coming, but I didn’t call it. Someone else did.

There’s a strange mix that comes with that – a kind of dull shock layered over something you half-expected. You’re not surprised, exactly, but you’re still winded. One day you’re in the middle of your “normal,” however shaky it is, and then suddenly the decision is made and you’re standing outside of it.

Around nine erratic years is probably the best way to describe that first marriage. Not all bad, not all good, and not something I want to rewrite. We were too young, not particularly well-equipped, and doing the best we could with what we knew at the time. It didn’t last, but it shaped a lot of what came after – how I saw relationships, work, responsibility and the simple fact that things can end even when you’d planned, at least in your head, for them to keep going.

A FORK IN THE ROAD

By the close of the 1980s, the first big arc of my adult life had, more or less, played itself out.

If you drew it on a page, “Round One” would look reasonably solid. Teachers college, odd jobs in strange places, mineral exploration in the Woomera Restricted Area, Mister Minit booths in shopping centres, a move interstate, child protection and adoption work, a promotion to Senior and Office Manager, a marriage, a railway station turned into a home, a few cricket premierships, and that first trip overseas to Singapore. On paper, it wasn’t a bad effort.

Inside that list, though, it felt a lot less tidy. I’d built a life on movement and adaptation – new towns, new roles, new responsibilities – without ever learning how to sit still or look too closely at what I was doing and why. I was good at turning up, stepping into the next thing, and pushing through. I was less good at asking what it was all costing, or whether any of it lined up with what I actually wanted.

When the marriage came apart and work started to feel like one long, blurred crisis, it became obvious I needed a spell. Not a weekend away or a few days off, but a proper break from the version of myself I’d been running as for most of the decade.

So I did what I usually did when I didn’t know what else to do: I travelled for a while.

BACKPACKING

This time it wasn’t another country town or a different office. It was a backpack and a rough trail through Southeast Asia – Bali, Java, Singapore, Sumatra, Malaysia. Nothing flash. Just cheap guesthouses, buses, ferries, and the usual mix of heat, noise and confusion that comes with travelling on the smell of an oily rag.

Bali was first. For a boy from the bush who’d spent most of his life in dry places, the green felt almost excessive. I wasn’t there to “find myself” in any grand way. Mostly I walked, sat, watched, and let the days pass without rosters, case notes or court deadlines hanging over my head. That alone was unusual.

From Bali I bused through Java, crowded streets and the steady feeling of being completely anonymous. Nobody knew my job title, my history, or my mistakes. I was just another traveller trying to work out where the bus left from and what I’d just eaten.

Singapore sat in the middle of that trail like a familiar marker. It had been the site of my first overseas trip, the second defining moment in my life, and coming back through it this time felt different. The city hadn’t changed much, but I had. The first visit had opened the world up. This one quietly underlined that it was still there, regardless of what was happening in my personal life.

Sumatra and Malaysia rounded out the trail. Ferries, small towns, bigger cities. Nothing especially dramatic happened on paper – no great accidents or revelations – but the ordinary details mattered. Waking up in a place where nobody expected anything from me. Sitting in cafes with a cheap meal and no particular timetable. Watching other people get on with their lives in languages I didn’t understand.

It wasn’t an escape in the pure sense. You can’t outrun yourself with a backpack and a few stamps in your passport. But stepping out of my usual circuits gave just enough distance to see that the way I’d been living wasn’t sustainable. Not disastrous, just off-kilter. Too fluid, not enough reflection. Too many decisions made on the fly that carried longer-term consequences than I’d been willing to admit.

By the time I drifted back to Australia, the backpacking trail hadn’t solved anything, but it had marked a pause. A line in the sand between the first big swing at adulthood and whatever came next.

Looking back now, I can see that “Round One” ended not with one big event, but with a cluster of them. The divorce, the pile-up of work stress and a bloke in his late twenties wandering around Bali, Java, Singapore, Sumatra and Malaysia trying to catch his breath.

On paper, the decade still looks busy and respectable. In reality, it closed with me realising I’d made it quite a long way without ever really stopping to ask where I was going – and that the next stage of life would need something more than just changing towns and working harder.

The 1990s would be a different kind of stretch – stepping up into disability work, into parenthood, into grief, into self-employment and out the other side. But before any of that, there was that short, uneasy, necessary spell with a backpack and no fixed plan.

I didn’t know it then, but that pause was the reset button.