Leaving government welfare in the mid-1990s felt, at the time, like jumping off a moving train. There was relief, fear, and a slightly giddy sense of possibility. I wasn’t sure exactly what I was running towards, but I knew what I was getting away from: forms, policies, endless meetings, and a system that seemed to generate as much harm as help on some days.

Self-employment wasn’t a grand entrepreneurial vision so much as a practical decision: if I was going to work this hard and carry this much responsibility, I might as well do it on my own terms.

We built up a small enterprise offering services that sat somewhere between welfare, training, community work and consultancy. It was scrappy but effective. I drove a lot of kilometres, met a lot of people, and slowly stitched together a living.

In 1997 I moved to Berri – almost full circle, geographically, back towards Monash and Gerard. It was a convenient base with familiar landscapes and old ghosts. The business was growing, and the location made sense for the kind of work we were doing. There was something quietly satisfying about coming back to the area not as a kid or a case worker, but as someone bringing a service of his own making.

From Berri I crossed the river to Mildura, also in 1997. There I did what has become something of a recurring motif in my life: I went and got myself married again. You would think I’d have got the message by then, but apparently not. Hope springs eternal, especially in people who are good at starting things and less consistent at maintaining them.

In 1998 an unplanned opportunity pulled me further inland to Broken Hill. It was a town that suited my temperament in some ways – tough, remote, with a clear sense of itself – and challenged it in others. I arrived with naive energy and, at least on my part, the right mindset for taking on more than was strictly sensible.

The business continued to evolve. I spent a lot of time on the road, a lot of nights in motels, and a lot of days in training rooms, community centres and offices that all started to blur into one another. It was the period in which I discovered I had something like a “portable skill set” – experience and credibility that could be carried from one town, state or program to another and still make sense.

But if career and enterprise were more or less on the up, my personal life was less so.

By 1999, following what had already become a repeating pattern, I was unmarried again. This one was entirely on me and not my proudest moment. There’s a temptation in memoir to soften these things, but the simple truth is that I behaved badly, hurt people who didn’t deserve it, and made choices that looked exciting in the short term and foolish in the long.

Part of that mess involved what I later described, not inaccurately, as being hit by a lightning bolt. A new relationship arrived with such force that it blew up what was already fragile. It took some convincing but the woman at the centre of that storyline and I are, happily, still together all these years later.

Professionally, personally, geographically – by the end of the 1990s everything had been shuffled again. I’d stepped away from the security of government, built and rebuilt small enterprises, lived in multiple towns, married, separated, and re-partnered. I had children, step-children, foster children and a growing network of people whose paths intersected with mine in ways that were sometimes helpful, sometimes harmful, and usually complicated.

The next decade – the 2000s – would take that restless energy and stretch it across states, countries and continents: Adelaide, the east coast, Townsville, New Zealand, South Asia, Europe. What had begun as “going it alone” would become “going everywhere”, with all the adventure and all the consequences that phrase implies.