Welcome to
the Game

"Welcome to the Game, Brian."

I remembered those words as I lay in my swag beside the upper Murray River, inside the gorge walls of Kosciuszko National Park, staring up at a sky thick with stars. I'd spent the day fly fishing for wild trout in the high country. The day before, I'd been inside a roadside motel in an outback town, watching road trains thunder past broken glass on the footpath, abandoned buildings staring back at me from across the road with hollow eyes.

Same trip. Same life. Completely different worlds.

Patrick — as I'll call him — was the kind of boss who'd tear strips off you in the boardroom and then five minutes later be in the cafeteria asking how your parents were getting on. He'd been CEO of major trading banks across Asia and London. The sharpest end of the sharpest end.

"You just never knew when you'd get a tap on the shoulder," he told me once. "We'd have the next candidate waiting in the lobby before you'd even cleared your desk. You learn fast. You develop a thick skin. You understand — that's the game."

I was fresh into the company as a technical consultant when he sacked the manager who'd hired me and then rewrote my job description. I was now Sales Manager for Queensland. My task: convince deeply conservative Queensland sugar cane farmers — men who shot pigs on weekends and perhaps an odd back packer — to buy what was collectively thought of as communist snake oil hippy juice. Organic stuff that made the soil warm and fuzzy.

Paddy had just looked at some numbers on a screen and made a simple calculation without any idea of the task at hand.

"Alright, I get the situation. And I'm in a personal position to make it happen. But I'll need support for the weekends while I'm up there."

So I loaded the ute and drove north. For months. I attended Townsville Cowboys games with clients and attempted to match their obsene alcohol intake. Slowed myself down to match the heat-and-lunchtime-beer pace of the cane cockies in the Burdekin. And gradually it worked. Eventually, the company couldn't keep up with the demand.

And I was also living my backpacker dream on the company dollar. I'd arrived in Australia and started working within two days — no Byron Bay, no Blue Mountains, no Barrier Reef pilgrimages. I'd gone straight to organic farms, factory production lines, HR-patrolled air-conditioned offices. But being the lucky country, that devotion to accept the situation now turned to opportunity. A chance to see Australia. A chance to scratch a few itches.

So I scratched them from Brisbane to Cooktown and back on that 3 month trip. Fly fished for rock cod on the Great Barrier Reef. Fly fished for Giant Trevally around the Whitsundays. Hiked through the oldest rainforests on the planet. Dodged Cassowarys and Crocodiles in the remote Daintree, and caught jungle perch in tropical gorges. Adventure dream. Modest luxury. All while carrying the constant tension of needing to get sales on the board.

Leaving a pristine beach to stand in a sugar cane paddock was a swing I resisted strongly. I drove 2,984 kilometres over the last 10 days — Melbourne airport back to the Sunshine Coast. Flat cropping plains through central Victoria with my new team, checking 60-foot seeders ahead of the winter planting season. Up through central New South Wales on the edge of the sun-baked interior. Then into the Snowy Mountains for some fly fishing. Through the Pilliga. The cropping capitals of southern Queensland. And finally home to refresh myself in some beautiful surfing waves — 32 degree air temp, 25 degree water temp.

The inland cropping farmers I work with are facing serious headwinds right now — input costs, diesel. But they are still showing up. Still cracking jokes. They carry the weight of their grandfathers' harder stories for internal calibration — we've been through worse, and here we are. That's a particular kind of toughness that I find genuinely admirable. Sometimes, with my yoga practice and pianist's hands, I feel like a walking contradiction among them. An imposter. But I'm still here a decade later, apparently providing some sort of value, still travelling, still sleeping in different beds.

In the gorge that night, I was reading Hermann Hesse's Siddhartha. If you haven't read it, the short version is that its about a man that spends his entire life lurching between extremes — asceticism and indulgence, spiritual devotion and worldly desire — trying to find meaning. He doesn't find it in any of them. He finds it, eventually, sitting beside a river. Listening to it. Watching it carry everything — joy, grief, beauty, wreckage — downstream with complete indifference. The river doesn't judge what flows through it. It just flows.

Hesse's point, as I understand it, is that our suffering often comes not from the experiences themselves, but from our attachment to them. The highs we chase and the lows we dread. This is good, this is ugly, this is wrong, this should be different. That practice widens the gap between where we are and where we think we should be.

I feel the pull of the dramatic swing — the pristine gorge versus the broken glass. My instinct is to rank them, to grieve the one while I'm in the other. To be somewhere else in my head while my body is exactly where it is. Sometimes in the beautiful place wishing to be somewhere else more beautiful!

But the river doesn't play that game. It doesn't prefer the high country over the cropping flood plain. It just moves through both.