Travels with my aren't: a journey along the east coast of Australia

Why aren't travels an everyday part of life? Leisure travel, that is. In year 11, on the Gold Coast, Queensland, in 1988, a teacher promised that by the time we were in the workforce, robots and computers would have made many of us redundant and that we would have to focus on our tennis skills – whether we liked tennis or not. The other would have to specialise as accountants from an early age.

Travelling is something many of us do when we are are not working. It's something we do for leisure, for experience, because we can, and broadly agree that the working life is something one needs a break from.

In my twenties I was on the dole in various places across Australia. The Gold Coast, Melbourne, Byron Bay and Newcastle – with a brief stint travelling up the east coast of Australia, with a lovely Swiss woman called Corinne, including Fraser Island, Nimbin and Hervey Bay, as far as Airlie Beach, where her marriage became an issue I wasn't willing to ignore, a decision which is amongst the few in my life that I revisit on occasion wondering what it would be like if I hadn't made it. I had another brief stint hitching the same east coast roads a few years prior to Corinne where I ended up in Hervey Bay for a while, swimming in the tropical waters of the pool each morning, and having fires on the beach in the evenings, before getting a lift back to the Gold Coast with another Swiss woman I fondly remember, named Petra. At some point I ended up in Ireland on their dole, staying on bio-dynamic and organic farms, earning a little extra that allowed me to travel to France and get most of the way back to Australia. I did get back, with a little kindness from friends.

Sure, there were lots of drugs, pot on the whole, though many fond memories as well, parties, festivals, fishing with Kosio my Bulgarian friend – on another east coast adventure – and times where I just got to hang out in Melbourne dreaming of hair-brained schemes to make a living interestingly, like writing a film script and making a fortune (the first bit happened, I think I may have given up on the second bit).

Having recently turned 40, wife, kids, a large income, mortgage on a house I am unlikely to ever pay off, and credit card debts climbing into the tens of thousands, where I get the four weeks off a year, where I drive up the east coast of Australia, visiting Newcastle, Byron Bay and the Gold Coast (missed Nimbin this year), I wonder: where the hell has my leisure gone? I now spend most of my year earning money to escape the drudgery of working occasionally. The things I want to do, I have little time for. The writing abandoned to watching SBS television documentaries about sex in Uganda, or Danish crime dramas like The Protectors, except where I 'give up' my holidays to pursue it, as now.

Life might be better with no job and no money – it does have the advantage of time. Life wold be better with time, to do nothing, or something. There is no time like now, to waste it on pursuits of money gives me the feeling of getting older, not wiser or enriched. On SBS I see the gold collectors sweeping the streets and emptying the mud of the drains of Calcutta (can't spell it's new name off the top of my head and I don't feel like turning Google on) to collect the specs of gold that fall between the cracks. Rubbing mercury into pans with their bare hands. Or the squatters of the beaches of Mumbai, whose homes are destroyed but the council every now and again, whose life are in the hands of the gods, who send their children to skills in ties with neatly done hair, though, one presumes, having to crap in the sand dunes. They work with little hope of leisure.

By comparison with the rest of the world, I can't complain. Perhaps it is not leisure that I seek at all, it may just be fulfilment. Fulfilment, this Western, middle-class ideal, that comes from having too much and not knowing what it is you have, whether you want it, or whether it is worth working to get more of it.

It wasn't just my high school teacher who promised a life of leisure, it was a big thing in the early 70s. Many respected academic journals wrote about it. It was kind of Utopian, caught up a bit in the hippy dream of living together in perfect harmony, growing vegetables and overthrowing capitalism. It petered out, losing steam come the end of the Vietnam War, and almost totally forgotten about with the get-rich-quick 80s, except for the teachers with the long-socks who perhaps didn't have to live in the real world.

Whether it is fair to the poor, struggling for existence, or a cop-out, I like the leisure time to dream away from work. I can see why the Buddha would have given up all the world's riches for it. We come from nothing and go to nothing, and, like holiday memories, it all seems like a dream, unreal, when you look back on it. The ten days trip to Byron Bay already over, the week in France gone, or just the time to sit around the house away from work fluttered away.

We travelled for hours from Canberra to Nambucca Heads. Had Christmas dinner with the rellies on the Gold Coast. The kids caught three bream at Brunswick Heads. My son had chocolate-pudding fruit flavoured ice-cream at Tropical Fruit World outside of Murwillumbah. My daughter and I reached the peak of Mt Warning. Photographed a green-tree snake popping it's head out of the grass at a cafe by a creek. Almost eaten by a bird-eating spider at our rainforest retreat in Coorabell. Survived the Mammoth Drop at Sea World. Swam in the clear-blue waters of the bay in the mornings. Climbed the path to the lighthouse on Australia's most easterly point. Drank Dom Perignon at the little felafel place near the Beach Hotel at Byron Bay at New Years Eve. All enjoyable experiences.

And after it all, I'm left with the feeling of being poorer because of my riches, thinking next time I shouldn't save for the holiday (or put the whole thing on credit), I should just quit the job in Canberra, move up north, perhaps not simply for the leisure, for I am not adverse to work, preferring it to the boredom of unemployment I had plenty of experience of, more just to get the opportunity to plant a chocolate-pudding fruit, to start a little cafe, to dream again rather than succumb to my crippling sensibilities.

If we were all sensible we wouldn't have the likes of the Buddha, and Jesus. We would just live and die. Come from nothing and go to nothing, without ever knowing where we are. Travel should be life, life's journey, not a part-time destination – instead it should be an ideal, that enriches our inner nothingness.