I shared a coffee with a friend of mine late year and he was recounting an all too common story of being tailgated by a young 'hoon' in a hotted-up ute with 'mag' wheels. At the traffic lights, the music was blaring and the young man was proudly flashing 'tatts' on his sun-bronzed arms and played with his 'goaty' beard as he tapped the steering-wheel aggressively. As the lights turned green, the ute raced-off, wheels screeching. Stupid! My friend and I agreed that whilst this sort of behaviour is indeed ‘s…
...They live everywhere, but belong nowhere. It is perfectly normal to feel foreign in a foreign country. What is not normal is to feel foreign in your own country. “Going back ‘home’ was the hardest journey of all because I didn’t belong, and felt even more alienated than going to a completely new land .”- Jason from Canada. Welcome to the world of the Third Culture Kid , or TCK as they are now known. So what is a TCK and what are the positives and challenges of finding oneself as a ‘Global Nomad’? A TCK can be defined as a p…
Magic mushrooms made me sick. It was 1972 and I was sitting on an almost deserted beach called Kuta watching two sunsets at the one time, thanks to the effect of the ‘magic mushrooms’ that I had consumed. It was a stupid thing to have done, but I was 20 years of age and living in this paradise called Bali. As many baby boomers who travelled overseas in the seventies would know, as a traveller in those days, you were very much on your own and being in Bali was no different. There were no flights between Bali and Australia, no iPa…
New Year’s Eve, 2012. A lovely still, balmy night and one of Australia’s iconic beaches: Cottesloe. We arrive at ‘Cott’ around 10pm to see young people splashing in the calm waters below us and other kids playing cricket on the sand under the lights. The beachfront lawns are packed with families sitting on rugs, enjoying a glass of wine and food; either fish ‘n chips Aussie-style or some of the delicious ‘hawker’ food being sold by the vendors who had been given council approval to bring their food-carts to the beach for th…
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