Author: Diane

Diane

The hero’s journey: How it helped me find my story

• May 8, 2023May 8, 2023 • 2 Comments

Last time I updated you on progress writing my first book, I’d recently broken up with my writing coach. The upside of the experience – I emerged with a first draft of my book. The downside – it wasn’t good.

How did I know it wasn’t good? Well, I’d set out to write a memoir – a story of personal transformation – that spanned the years I’d worked as a tour guide in the Polar regions. While my first draft was packed with penguins and polar bears, there wasn’t a hint of personal transformation to be found.

I knew that at the heart of my unique journey was a universal story that others would relate to. I just didn’t know what it was. When I went searching for tools to help me find it, I discovered the hero’s journey.

The hero’s journey is a classic storytelling template first characterised by literature professor Joseph Campbell. It involves a hero who goes on an adventure, faces challenges, learns lessons, fulfills a quest and returns home transformed. Its basic structure looks like this:

Act 1: The hero’s ordinary life is disrupted by a call for adventure.

Act 2: The hero enters an extraordinary world where they must overcome challenges during an epic journey.

Act 3: The hero returns home triumphant.

If you look closely, you’ll find the hero’s journey everywhere – in ancient myths, films, TV series and novels. You’ll find it in memoir too. Because memoir is all about transformation. Whether it’s about healing from trauma, getting sober or winning Olympic gold, the protagonist of a good memoir must grow and transcend before they can triumph.

I was immediately hooked. I wanted my story to follow the same narrative arc. I mean, it already did. I literally left home on an adventure. I physically went on an epic journey for 12 years to some extraordinary places. And I returned home feeling quietly triumphant – like I’d figured out some pretty important things.

Curious to find out more, I took some writing classes that delved deeper into the hero’s journey. Then I began matching my story up with its many stages.

At the beginning, the hero is living in the ‘ordinary world’. Picture me at 24 – an enthusiastic and ambitious recent university graduate working in my first professional job.

Next, the hero receives a call to adventure. Picture me again, this time realising I don’t like my job and secretly wishing I could quit and go travel.

I didn’t though. I stayed in Australia and tried to fix things. I changed roles, moved apartments and started new hobbies. According to the hero’s journey, this is called the ‘refusal of the call’. The hero isn’t sure they should answer the call, so they sit tight.

Then a mentor figure comes along, gives the hero some counsel and convinces them to follow the call. In my case, there was no mentor. I just really didn’t like my job and I really wanted to travel. So I quit and left the country. End of Act 1.

So far so good.

In Act 2, the hero enters the ‘extraordinary world’ where they face a series of tasks and challenges that initiate their transformation. Naturally, they fail one or more of these tasks and it looks like they’ll never succeed. But then they meet allies, score some wins and things start looking up. Then there’s a big moment in the middle – the mid-point crisis – when the hero confronts the reason for their journey. This is a major turning point: every prior step has brought the hero here, and every step forward stems from this moment.

Act 2 is where I run into trouble with the hero’s journey. Because in some ways my story follows the template and in other ways it doesn’t.

I was certainty on a quest to find a new career. But I didn’t launch a single-minded mission – hero’s journey style – to find it. Not at the beginning, anyway. I remember thinking: “I have time to live a little”. So I sought out experiences that sounded fun and interesting, like working as a tour guide in Antarctica.

Becoming an Antarctic tour guide did feel like a hero’s journey though. Because when I started, I couldn’t tell the difference between an Adelie penguin and a Gentoo penguin. I’d never led a hike or driven a boat. I had to learn all of this on the job, in front of my teammates and 100 paying guests. For someone like me – who holds themselves to an impossibly high standard and doesn’t like screwing up or not having the right answer – this was a daunting task. I did it anyway and the results were embarrassing, amusing, fun, amazing and, well, transformative.

I had a mid-point crisis too. It came about three years into my journey. I remember thinking: “Time’s up!” I’d had my fun and now it was time to decide where to live and what career to pursue. I made a list of options and put an immense amount of pressure on myself to choose one even though I knew in my heart of hearts I wanted to keep travelling and guiding. It was then – three years shy of 30 and looking anxiously at the clock – that I became aware of my inner conflict. It was then that I realised I had a choice: I could live according to someone else’s definition of success or I could go find my own. This was huge – the major turning point in my story. And it’s definitely a hero’s journey kind of moment.

I tried, repeatedly, to write this story.

I plotted it all onto one narrative arc using the hero’s journey as my guide. But I kept running into trouble. My plot points didn’t seem to match up. I’d write a new outline and start a new draft only to get stuck again. The biggest problem – my becoming-an-Antarctic-tour-guide story didn’t line up with my big turning point. It was like they belonged to different stories. Something just didn’t add up.

I began to wonder if the problem was the hero’s journey template. Maybe it was too restrictive. Maybe I was trying too hard to make my life fit into the hero’s neat, linear path. Real life is messy and complicated. Maybe I needed to let my book be messy and complicated too.

So, I made the call. I finally decided to part ways with the hero’s journey – to thank it for all it had done for me and let it go. I sat down at my laptop and wrote this blog post. After declaring my decision, I wrote a conclusion and put the blog post aside. I’d come back to it after the weekend and edit it with fresh eyes.

But then something happened on the weekend.

I was at the gym, running on the treadmill and trying to empty my mind. Instead I began pondering my next move now that I’d ditched the hero’s journey.

It’s funny how aha moments work. You can study a problem a million times in a million different ways and not find the answer. And then it seems to come out of nowhere, the same way mine popped up while I was running on that treadmill.

My story isn’t a hero’s journey.

It’s two hero’s journeys.

One is a young woman’s journey to find a meaningful and fulfilling career. The other is the journey of a rookie Polar guide who’s determined to be a pro.

One is about redefining success. The other is about redefining failure.

They run in parallel, inform each other and sometimes intersect. But they each have their own challenges, turning points and triumphs. Because they’re two separate stories.

So it looks like I’m not parting ways with the hero’s journey just yet. It seems it wasn’t the tool that was the problem but the apprentice who’s still figuring out how to use it.

And now that apprentice has to go figure out how to write two stories and then weave them into one.

It’s bound to be a transformative experience.

You say smokve, I say smokava: A tale of grammar, marmalade and the taste of victory

by Diane

• October 20, 2022May 8, 2023

On a recent trip to a Croatian island, I visited a small store selling olive products and fruit preserves. I waited in line at the front counter as a gregarious Croatian man in his 30s served the tourists ahead of me. When it was my turn, I asked him in Croatian for a jar of fig marmalade.

‘Molim Vas jednu marmeladu od smokava,’ I said.

The cashier paused, seemingly taken aback by this Croatian-speaking tourist.

‘Brava, brava!’ he said loudly with a chuckle. As he walked over to the shelf behind him, he asked me where I’m from.

‘Australia,’ I replied.

‘But you’re Croatian?’

‘Yes.’

‘Aha,’ he said, as though he’d figured something out.

He then returned to the counter, congratulated me again on my effort and held up the jar of marmalade.

‘It’s marmelada od smokve,’ he said, correcting me. ‘Not smokava.’

He didn’t stop there. As he put the marmalade into a paper bag and took my money, he gave me a lesson in Croatian grammar.

‘Marmelada od koga? Od čega?‘ (Marmalade made of whom or of what?’), he asked, as though he was talking to a six-year-old. He let his question linger unresolved in the air for a moment before answering it.

‘Od smokve’ (Of fig), he said looking pleased with himself.

Then he handed me the marmalade and waved me out the door.

‘Send my regards to our diaspora in Australia,’ he called out as I left.

Ignorant bliss

For the first 18 years of my life, I was blissfully unaware of Croatian grammar. I spoke how I spoke, and I was happy if I could string together a sentence. I knew that the same Croatian word could have different endings. Water in Croatian is voda but a glass of water is čaša vode and to drink water is piti vodu. But I didn’t know why the end of the word changed, and I didn’t think to care.

The more time I spent in Croatia, the more I encountered these different word endings. It turned out that water wasn’t just voda, vode and vodu. It could also be vodi, vodom or vodama among other things. And it wasn’t just nouns that changed in this way. Adjectives and a bunch of other words had multiple different endings too. When I asked Croatian people why, they answered with one word: padeži.

The P word

Padeži, or cases, are grammatical categories that signify the role a word plays in a sentence. There are seven cases in the Croatian language and they’re even harder to learn than they are to explain. Ask any Croatian learner the hardest thing about the language and they’ll tell you it’s the padeži.

After discovering them, my relationship with Croatian grammar shifted from ignorant bliss to bewilderment. It was hard enough trying to remember and pronounce new words without having to learn all the different versions of each word and which one to use in each context.

For years I tried learning padeži through osmosis – by going to Croatia as often as I could and immersing myself in the language. But that only got me so far. I picked up some basic declensions (the changing of a word to indicate its grammatical case) through conversation but mostly it just made me more confused. Whenever I got frustrated about it, people would insist that my Croatian was good enough and that I shouldn’t worry about grammar.

‘We understand you,’ they’d reassure me.

It didn’t make me feel any better. I didn’t just want to be understood in Croatian. I wanted to express myself as clearly and articulately in Croatian as I do in English. And I wanted to speak grammatically correct Croatian. After years of hoping and wishing my Croatian would improve, I finally decided to find a teacher and take some private lessons.

Thursdays with Bojan

My teacher’s name is Bojan, he lives in Zagreb and we’ve been meeting on Skype most Thursdays for the past two years. At first, I felt self-conscious speaking in front of him and exhausted at the end of every lesson. Each class seemed to highlight how much I didn’t know and how many things I was getting wrong. Even several months in, I wondered if my Croatian was getting better or worse.

Padeži were the hardest part of all. Whenever I tried to construct a complex sentence, I’d have to consult my notebook, which is filled with pages of tables and lists on the grammatical cases and how to use them: When to apply which case; how to apply them to different genders and in the singular or plural form; which cases go after which prepositions; how to decline adjectives, numbers and units of measure. I wondered how I was ever going to learn all these endless rules.

I stuck at it and gradually it started getting easier. I began incorporating the grammar rules into my speech. I felt less self-conscious when I spoke and less tired at the end of each lesson. Bojan corrected me less often too. Not because I was making fewer mistakes but because he’d make me find them and correct them myself. And usually, I could.

Speaking Croatian in the wild

When I returned to Croatia this June, my first visit in three years, I wondered whether anyone would notice the difference. As I went from house to house, visiting my relatives and answering all the usual questions, I patiently waited for someone to comment on my improved Croatian. No one did.

Are you kidding me? I thought to myself. All those hours of talking and reading and writing and dissecting this godforsaken language and no one notices any difference? Why do I even bother?

Then again, my relatives have never cared about my grammar. They care that I spend time with them. They care that I’m there.

Over the past five months, I’ve met dozens of new people who have complimented me on how well I speak Croatian. ‘You even know padeži,’ some of them have pointed out. This is always nice and reassuring to hear.

What’s most important, though, is that I feel different. While my grammar is far from perfect and I still stumble through sentences most of the time, it’s starting to make sense. I’m more confident with the basics, and curious, rather than bewildered, by what I still have to learn.

I love that I have a teacher who guides and encourages me, and bears witness to my growth. And I love travelling around Croatia, meeting and talking to new people, and trying my best to apply all those rules swirling around in my head. Sometimes I nail it. Sometimes I fail miserably. But I always try to have fun.

So when I meet someone like that cashier who sold me the fig marmalade, I try to have a laugh about it. Relax, I tell myself. You’re going to screw up. People are going to point that out from time to time. It’s all good.

But something about this interaction made me pause for thought.

Maybe it was because he made a big deal about a small thing. I’d said marmalade of figs instead of marmalade of fig. Most people would have let that slide.

Maybe it was because he’d been so patronising. Nice try diaspora girl but you can’t speak Croatian.

Or maybe, just maybe, it was because I knew I was right.

The proof is in the marmalade

I searched my memory for the exact grammatical rule. I tried to picture my notebook and my pages of tables and lists. I scanned through all the conversations I’d had with Bojan. I remember one that involved products made from fruit but I couldn’t recall it well enough.

Then I reached into my paper bag and pulled out the jar of marmalade. Most of the labelling was written in English. But then I saw it, written on the lid in small, cursive font: Marmelada od smokava. Marmalade of figs. I was right.

Validation tingled through my body and a smile spread across my face as I figured out what to do with this information. Should I let it slide? Take the high ground? Give myself a quiet pat on the back?

Hell no.

I marched back into the shop with my jar of marmalade. I waited for Professor Fig to finish serving a customer. Then I held the jar up to his face and told him to read it.

‘Hmmm,’ he says as he studied the delicate cursive font, a resigning smile appearing on his face.

But the good Professor didn’t concede defeat right away.

He called over his friend, Šime, and asked him to tell us both how he would say fig marmalade. As though Šime was the authority on the standard Croatian language.

‘Marmelada od smokve,’ Šime replied.

To this, Professor Fig looked at me with a pleading face as if to say, ‘See. It’s not just me.’

So then I gave him a lesson in Croatian grammar.

We parted on good terms, the Professor and I. He thanked me. We had a laugh. I promised I’d send his regards to the Croatian diaspora in Australia.

Then I walked back to town through olive groves and paths lined with fig trees, soaking up the autumn sunshine and savouring my victory.

It was almost as sweet as the marmalade.

What’s in a name and does it even matter?

by Diane

• August 18, 2022April 22, 2023

Diane. Dijana. Dijan. Dajen. Dajana. Daniela. Dani.
In Croatia, I get called so many different versions of my name.
Does it matter?

Me at the Fortress of Sveti Mihovil (St Michael) in Šibenik.

Croatia is one of the few places in the world where people don’t ask me how to pronounce my last name – where I don’t have to explain that you roll the r and pronounce the c like the ‘tz’ in tzatziki.

It is also, strangely, the place where people most often mispronounce my first name and where there are more versions of my name floating around than I can count.

I’d like to say that I don’t think about it much. That it doesn’t bother me. That people can call me what they want so long as they call me. The truth is, I think about it a lot. And yeah, sometimes it bothers me.

It all used to be much simpler.

When I was a kid, there was a clear dichotomy between what I was called in Australia and Croatia. In Australia I was called by the name on my passport, Diane. In Croatia, I was called Dijana, presumably because someone decided that it was easier to remember and pronounce the Croatianised version of my actual name.

For many years, everyone followed along. Australia = Diane. Croatia = Dijana. It was a neat and tidy system that worked.

Not only that, I liked having a second name. It was like having an alter ego. There was the Australian me and the Croatian me. I belonged to two worlds, and I had a separate identity in each. It was kind of nice.

But then things started to change.

Some of my relatives in Croatia started calling me Diane, or their version of it, which sounded more like Dajen or Dijan or Dajana or Dani. I didn’t correct them, but I continued referring to myself as Dijana in the hopes they’d get the hint. They did not.

Then I started meeting more Croats who speak English and with whom I speak English either part of, or all of, the time. It seemed to make sense to introduce myself to them as Diane, even though we were in Croatia.

Until now I’d always thought of the Diane/Dijana dichotomy as being split geographically, but now I was starting to think of it as a linguistic split (English = Diane; Croatian = Dijana).

This would have worked fine if I only speak Croatian with some people, and if I only speak English with others, and if those two groups of people never meet. This, fortunately or unfortunately, isn’t the case. I constantly change between the two languages and so do many of them.

Basically, it’s become a big old mess. My beautiful, neat, two-name system has collapsed, and I no longer know how to introduce myself to people in Croatia.

At times, I wonder if it’s time to ditch Dijana altogether. My real name is Diane after all. So what if it gets slightly mispronounced at times. Is that really such a big deal?

But I realise that it’s not just about that. I like having a Croatian name. Maybe it’s because I’m not from here and I still, at times, feel like I don’t fit in. Maybe all those slight mispronunciations of my name remind me of that and make me secretly wish my parents had given me a Croatian name.

And then I remember that you should be careful what you wish for.

My parents were going to name me Zorka, which was the name of both my maternal and paternal grandmothers. Let me tell you that names don’t get more old-school Croatian than that. And while I reckon, at this age, I could rock a name like Zorka, high school would have been a very different story. I could just see myself demanding that my bullies roll the r when they call me ‘Zorka the Porker’.

I’m still not entirely sure how best to introduce myself when I meet new people in Croatia, but lately I’ve been giving them a choice. ‘Call me Diane or Dijana’, I tell them. ‘Whichever you prefer.’

Let my worlds collide and we’ll see what happens.

Uncovering my parents’ home ground with the Sveti Mihovil Mountaineering Club

by Diane

• July 4, 2022April 22, 2023

I visit Croatia every few years. Sometimes my visits last a few weeks, sometimes they last a few months. Either way, I always stop in Šibenik, where my parents were born and raised, and where most of my relatives live.

I’ve been known to call these visits Le Tour de Šibenik because they can feel like an intense circuit requiring great mental and physical stamina. The tour takes in many of my relatives’ houses and apartments, stretching from Baldekin to Dolac, across to Šubičevac and up to Meterize, before veering out towards the villages of Goriš and Ercezi. It involves being overfed while reporting on life in Australia and on whether my marital status is likely to change any time soon. Two loops of Le Tour, a few dips in the Krka River or a nearby beach, and I’m off to some other part of Croatia.

This time, I decided to do things differently: to base myself in Šibenik for four months and better acquaint myself with my parents’ home ground. I want to hike up Dinara and through the Čikola canyon, and to kayak the Šibenik islands. I want to try new things and uncover places I didn’t even know existed. And I’d like to forge new friendships along the way.

It was while I was searching for a way to make all this happen that I came across the Sveti Mihovil (St. Michael’s) Mountaineering Club.

Last Thursday, I went to my first club meeting to find out more. When I arrived at 8pm and found hardly anyone there, I wondered if this was some three-member club. But the president, Mate Protega, assured me the club had around 270 members. Sure enough, more of them began to show until there were more than 20 of us, sitting on the steps outside the club house with a beer in our hands and Sibenik’s old town as our backdrop.

For the next two hours, members reported on the expeditions and travels they’d returned from over the past week. We heard stories of alpinism in Slovenia, of walking for 40 days in Nepal, and of scaling the via ferrata of the Dolomites. There was joking and laughter, and plans were made for the week ahead. I didn’t talk to many people that night, but I watched on and saw a group of positive, active people who valued nature, adventure, and each other.

The next day I signed up as a club member and registered for my first excursion with the club: a 22-kilometre hike to Babić Lake that coming Sunday. I’d never heard of Babić Lake. Nor had any of the relatives I mentioned it to. When I looked it up on the internet, I saw that it was about 50 kilometres north of Knin, on the border with Bosnia, and that it was neither popular with tourists nor easy to get to. I was intrigued.

After leaving Šibenik at 6am on Sunday, 17 of us assembled on Ljubina poljana (Ljuba’s Meadow) ready for our guides, Marica and Jelena. We began out hike by crossing the bright green meadow and entering a forest full of wild strawberries. Naturally we chatted as we walked and picked strawberries along the way.

It didn’t take long for people to pick up that I wasn’t a local. My accent and my funny grammar always give me away. And so the questions began. Where in Australia are you from? What is Perth like? Is it true that kangaroos attack people? What are the mountains like down there? And lots of questions of comparison that ultimately seem to boil down to one question: Where is life better – Here or elsewhere?

From the forest we emerged out into a green mountainous landscape. Everywhere around me I saw lush green hills and mountains decorated in white and yellow flowers. If I didn’t know where we were, I’d have thought we were in Austria. I had no idea Croatia could look like this. And so it seemed that my wishes were already being realised – I was discovering places I hadn’t known existed.

After a steep descent and an even steeper climb, we reached a lookout and got our first glimpses of the lake – a blue gem in the centre of many layers of green. I couldn’t wait to jump in, although we still had a long walk to get there.

I met and talked with several people in the group as we made our way down. Mirjana, a retired doctor from Vodice, was a new member like me. Jelena, from Šibenik, had worked on cruise ships for several years, and recalled how the worse storm she’d ever experienced was in Tasmania. Krste, a taxi driver from Murter, told me of his ambitions to be a seaman. Stipica, who introduced himself as an expert in chatter, asked me about my hiking experiences and told me about some of his.

All this chatting got us to the lake, where we settled in for lunch and a swim. We set up a picnic spot in the shade, pulled out prosciutto, cheese, cucumbers and cakes, and shared them around. Then we settled in for a rest or peeled off our layers ready to dive into the cold, blue water.

By now it was 2pm and I noticed that feeling I get on a great hike – when the kilometres, hours, effort and reward begin to do their work. We’d transformed from a group of individuals taking a walk together to a group that has created and shared a special experience together.

I wanted to stay at that lake forever, to swim around and across and through it. But eventually the time came to make out return.

At 4pm, we began crossing in reverse order all those ascents and descents that got us here. While I was feeling happy and satisfied at this point, I was also feeling hot and tired. I put my head down and walked alone in silence through the toughest of it, until I reached a gravel road where we all threw ourselves on the ground for a much-needed rest. I was quite sure I was done with meeting new people for the day.

It was right then that I met Doris from Dubravice, who was sitting on the road beside me. She told me she kept bees and made bee products. She also organised events at Krka National Park among other things. Doris and I fell easily into conversation, which continued as we walked the final stretch of the trail. I was so engrossed, I don’t even remember being hot or tired anymore. By the time we got back to the car, we’d already organised our next adventure: competing in an 18.5 kilometre tandem kayak race on the Zrmanja River.

I returned to Šibenik and declared to my family that my hike to Babić Lake had been a success. It had reflected the landscape surrounding us: full of layers that kept unfolding and surprising right up the end.

I don’t know when I’ll get to Dinara, Čikola or Žirje. I also don’t know if I’m capable of kayaking 18.5 kilometres. But I know the next few months are going to be active, fun and illuminating, and that the Sveti Mihovil Mountaineering Club will play a big part in that.

Read the Croatian version on the Sveti Mihovil Mountaineering Club website.

The tale of Miss Erceg and the Kindy kids

by Diane

• January 4, 2021May 8, 2023 • 8 Comments

The classroom cascaded with activity.

A pack of Disney princesses wrestled themselves into glittery dresses while debating whose turn it was to be Elsa. Dinosaur World roared to life as a tyrannosaurus came head-to-head with a flock of pterodactyls. A highway of building blocks ran through the centre of the room, past a table of huddled children squishing playdough and sploshing watercolour paint. Above them, a large banner declared ‘Yippee! We’re in kindy!’ in bright, playful font.

Surveying the scene with trepidation was me, Miss Erceg, the new kindergarten teacher.

While I’ve had some interesting jobs in my time – Antarctic tour guide and Kimberley cattle station worker spring to mind – I never saw this coming. Me, working in a kindergarten? How did that happen?

Here’s how:

I had a plan for 2020. I’d begin the year by writing the first draft of my book while working a casual job in hospitality. The first draft would be done by May, just in time for my ten-week trip to Finland, Italy and Croatia. When I got back, I’d revise my draft and continue bartending until the book was done.

Coronavirus had another plan for 2020. As a result, my hospitality work came to an abrupt and indefinite end and my ten-week trip was cancelled. While unemployment and a travel ban might have been the perfect excuse to keep writing, the book wasn’t going that well either. I was tired, unsure of how to revise my draft and really needed a break from writing.

All of this left me unsure of what to do with myself. I knew for certain that I didn’t want to mope around the house doing nothing, or to whittle away my savings, so I decided to get another job. When I turned to friends and family for suggestions, I got this swift and intriguing response:

‘My school is looking for a teacher’s aide. You should send in your CV.’

Two weeks later I was standing somewhere between Dinosaur World and Disneyland, surrounded by a sea of four-year-olds.

My first assignment as Miss Erceg, the teacher’s aide, was to get each of the 27 kindergarteners to paint a portrait. Unsure how hard that would be or how long it would take, I quickly set up my easel and paints and went to flag down my first volunteer.

‘Do you want to paint a picture?’ I called out sweetly to a boy passing by.

‘Nope,’ he fired back confidently as he walked straight past.

I brushed off the rejection with a smile (four-year-olds are insanely cute in case you didn’t know) and walked towards the Disney crowd with a new strategy.

‘What’s your name sweetie?’ I asked Cinderella, who looked the most approachable.

‘Bridget,’ she replied gently.

‘Well Bridget, you get to come paint your very own picture with me. Let’s go!’

To my relief she followed.

As soon as we arrived at the easel, and without waiting for instruction, Bridget grabbed a paintbrush overloaded with green paint and drove it into the centre of the page. With unflinching focus, she smeared paint from one corner of the page to another before returning the brush to its pot and launching for another. I watched on with wonder as she grabbed for yellow then blue then pink, drops of paint falling to the floor in the transfer, as she fearlessly filled the page. Then, after about 90 seconds, she stopped to study the mass of multi-coloured stripes and splotches before her.

‘Is it finished?’ I asked, genuinely unsure.

Bridget studied the painting for a moment longer before smiling and nodding her head. Then she scrawled her name unevenly across the top of the page and skipped back to her castle.

One down. 26 to go.

I managed to get through a dozen portraits that morning. And while I continued to marvel at the confidence of these budding artists, I took the liberty of giving Bridget’s successors some direction and critical feedback. Like maybe have a think about what you want to create before attacking the paper with paint.

My other duties that day included cleaning up, helping prepare the next day’s activities and supervising in the playground. The latter seemed to mostly involve policing hat-wearing, settling minor disputes and administering band aids and hugs. I went home that afternoon exhausted but with a huge smile on my face and a few drops of paint on my sleeve.

Over the next six months, I worked three days a week in kindergarten, my days filled with arts and crafts, literacy and numeracy, and teaching the science of putting shoes on the correct feet. I quickly got into groove of kindy, a world whose KPIs include learning to hop and skip, dancing the dinosaur stomp and writing the number 3 the right way around. I read the kindy kids stories, protected them from dragons and made them eat their carrots. Naturally, I told them about Antarctica too.

Every day I learned something new. How to teach kids to sound out the alphabet and say sorry when they’ve done wrong. What to do when they bump their head or drop their lunch all over the ground.

I took note as my colleagues navigated the trickier stuff too. When to save the day and when to let children solve their own problems. When to enforce strict structure and boundaries and when to let things flow. And how to manage undesirable behaviour without crushing anyone’s confidence or self-worth.

I loved kindy so much that I began to wonder whether maybe I’d found the perfect day job for an aspiring writer. While the pay wasn’t great, it was fun and meaningful with little stress or responsibility. And working three days a week left me some time to write.

But I couldn’t deny that I also felt a familiar restlessness creeping in. The one I get in most jobs after a few months. When I constantly look at the clock as I count down the hours to home time. When I get that craving for autonomy and an intellectual and creative challenge. When I long to own my own time and be my own boss. No matter how much I try, I don’t seem to belong to a permanent job. Not even in a place as brimming with goodness as kindy.

A few weeks ago I said goodbye to my kindy kids, who have now all turned five and are ready to take on pre-primary, if not the world. Whenever I see a rainbow or a lizard, I’ll think of them and hear their squeals of delight. They reminded me to notice the magic in the everyday and that sometimes you have to stop thinking and just smear the damn page with paint.

As for Miss Erceg, she’s hatched a brilliant new plan for 2021. It mostly involves sitting at her desk, writing, and taking life a day at a time.

I’m sure this plan will be as bulletproof as the last.

Finding adventure closer to home on the Cape to Cape track

by Diane

• November 19, 2020April 22, 2023 • 4 Comments

Western Australia’s border closed in April with a deafening thud.

I could handle all the other ways in which this pandemic had interrupted my life. The social distancing, empty supermarket shelves, closed gym, and my work in hospitality completely drying up overnight. I wasn’t even that fussed that I couldn’t travel interstate.

But no international travel? That was a different story.

No sitting in departure lounges, wondering where everyone around me is going and why. No first impressions of a new place, soaking up every inch of its captivating unfamiliarity. No traipsing around foreign countrysides, charming the locals while enthusiastically sticking my nose into their business. No Antarctic Treaty meetings. No taking my nieces out for gelato in Rome. No Croatia.

It took some serious Power of Now thinking to accept my new reality. Not dwelling in the past or stressing about the future. Embracing the present moment. All that good stuff.

Plus, I’m hardwired for positivity – to respond to delays and disruptions with defiant upbeatness while hunting down shiny, silver linings among those ominous clouds.

So it didn’t take long for me to reframe this travel ban as an opportunity to right a lingering wrong.

You see, I moved back to Western Australia – my home state – three years ago. And for those three years, while living in its capital, Perth, I’ve largely shunned the rest of the state in favour of more exotic, international destinations.

Despite my best intentions to seek adventure closer to home, I always came up with valid reasons why I wasn’t exploring my own 2.6 million square kilometre (1 million square mile) backyard. Everything was too far away – remote, isolated, expensive. I didn’t own a tent or a car. I didn’t have anyone to travel with. And it was dangerous. I’d get eaten by a shark, bitten by a snake or killed by that guy from Wolf Creek. Possibly all three.

And so three years passed by with little to show but unacted intentions.

When the border closed, and all other options were off the table, I reassessed my list of ‘valid reasons’. Curiously, they began looking more like lame excuses so I gave myself a stern talking to. It went something like this: You can keep coming up with excuses or you can decide what you want to do and make it happen.

That’s how, a month ago, I found myself standing at Cape Naturaliste in the southwest corner of Western Australia. With me were my backpack and the 12 strangers with whom I’d spend the next seven days walking 123 kilometres (76 miles) of rugged coastline on the Cape to Cape track.

I chose the Cape to Cape track because it’s beautiful, iconic and challenging, and because I could do it fully supported as part of a small group tour. This meant I didn’t need any fancy equipment – just some good shoes, a day pack and my defiant upbeatness.

In a nutshell, the Cape to Cape track delivered rugged beauty, peaceful solitude, thigh-burning uphill slogs, and great companionship. I’ll let the photos and captions tell the rest of that story.

I still miss international travel and look forward to the day it returns to my life. Until then, I have plenty to keep me busy.

The list of excuses are out, replaced by a list of adventures – some big, some small, all of them closer to home.

p.s. If you’re interested in walking the Cape to Cape track, get in touch with Gene Hardy and his team at Cape to Cape Explorer Tours. They’re amazing!