The 1990s began in Hamilton again, but with a different feel.

“Somewhere along the way I stopped being single,” is how I eventually put it. Then, after a while, I was partnered again. My personal life had never been straightforward; now it became more layered. Different relationship, similar restlessness, and a work life that was both demanding and oddly compelling.

In 1990 I left child protection and, after a false start or two, took my first real leap into what would quietly become my main career path for many years: Disability Services.

On paper it was another lateral move in the welfare world. In practice, it shifted the lens. Disability work demanded patience, problem-solving, and a willingness to sit with situations that weren’t going to “get better” in any conventional sense. It wasn’t about rescuing people or delivering happy endings; it was about negotiating daily life in bodies and systems that weren’t built to make things easy.

Around this time I also took a trip to Fiji – my first Pacific island experience. The mix of warmth, poverty, humour, and the quiet resilience of people living in conditions most Australians never see added another layer to my understanding of what “support” and “service” might mean. Travel and welfare work were starting to braid together.

Back home, life became more complicated in the best and worst of ways.

We fostered a young Aboriginal boy for quite a while. It was not a simple arrangement. Fostering never is, especially when race, history and community are all threaded through the placement. But it was also one of the most meaningful things I’ve ever been part of – a practical expression of all the abstract talk about care, responsibility and second chances.

Into this mix rode the horses.

My partner was an accomplished horsewoman, and I found myself drawn into that world almost by default. Before long, weekends and holidays revolved around shows, events and the circuits of a completely different subculture: horse floats, stables, early mornings, late nights, long drives.

We competed at shows, including the Royal Melbourne Show, and were involved with Driving for the Disabled. That program brought together everything I’d been dipping a toe into – disability support, animal-assisted therapy, rural life, and the sheer stubborn determination of people learning to navigate the world differently.

I dabbled with our horses but never developed real skill. At one point I had a serious fall, one of those accidents that could easily have put me in a wheelchair. I was lucky to be walking. It was a literal head-smack reminder that bodies are more fragile than we like to think, and that risk isn’t an abstract concept reserved for kids in case files.

Then tragedy struck in a way no training or theory could prepare you for. My partner’s son died in an accident. There isn’t much to say about that that doesn’t sound either hollow or intrusive. It was a hard line through our lives: a before and an after. Everything we were trying to build had to be held up against that loss, and much of it couldn’t bear the weight.

In the midst of grief came parenthood of a different kind. In 1993 and 1995, two children arrived – very much wanted and, despite the chaos around them, pretty cool. Becoming a parent changes your relationship to time, money, sleep, and fear. It also changes how you see the kids on your caseload. They’re no longer just “clients” or “young people at risk”; they look an awful lot like your own.

Career-wise, I made a move to Horsham in 1993 – a “step up” that was, in reality, a bit of a step backwards. Too much responsibility, too soon, in a role I wasn’t fully prepared for. On the outside it looked like progression; on the inside it felt like being handed a heavy load with not quite enough muscle to carry it.

By 1995 I was back in Hamilton for a time, then on to Shepparton, doing work similar to Horsham but living a strange commuter life – driving home at weekends and living in a hotel during the week. It was an arrangement that made sense on a spreadsheet and less sense in lived experience. Families aren’t designed to thrive on half-weeks.

Eventually I took long service leave for six months. Towards the end of that break, I realised I’d had enough of welfare – or at least, enough of the government version of it. I resigned.

Stepping away from the security of a government job was not a tidy decision. But it was a necessary one. I was burnt out, tired of policy that didn’t match reality, and weary of being the person who turned up to say “this is the best we can do under the circumstances” when the circumstances were of our own making.

What followed was a shift into self-employment and small enterprise, a move that would eventually take me full circle back towards the Riverland, and further out into places like Berri, Mildura and Broken Hill – with more marriages, more mistakes, and more attempts at starting over than I care to admit.

The 1990s, in other words, were not just “stepping up”. They were also falling down, getting back up, and discovering that there are some hits you never quite recover from, even if you learn how to walk around with them.