For Australia: Seventy-five years on (#569)

March 6 arrives first there, as it always does.

The continent leaning into the new day while the rest of the world is still finishing the last.

And so, somewhere back home, it is already my birthday.

Seventy-five.

A number that lands with a little weight if I say it out loud, and yet feels oddly light when I hold it up against memory.

I imagine Australia in the earliest hours of this morning.

Not the Australia of postcards, but the real one. The one I still carry in my senses. The faint chill that sits over the paddocks before sunrise. The crispness in the air that smells of eucalyptus and earth. The first birds beginning their chatter, as if they’ve been waiting patiently for permission to start.

A kookaburra clearing its throat for that first laugh that doesn’t ask whether you are ready.

Somewhere, a kettle rattling onto a stove. Somewhere else, a gate swinging open with that unmistakable creak, metal on metal, a sound older than most of the conversations we call modern life.

Birthdays in the country always felt different to me. Not louder. Not grander. Simply… clearer.

In a city, a birthday can feel like a line on a calendar. In the country, it feels like a day you can step into. A dawn you can feel, a morning you can breathe.

The land doesn’t care about your milestones, and that indifference becomes a kind of gift. It tells you what matters: light, weather, work, kindness, the steady presence of those who show up for you.

Seventy-five invites a particular kind of inventory. Not the brittle kind, not the tallying of regrets, but the quiet looking back that comes when you realize how many versions of yourself you’ve already been.

A boy who belonged to certain places before he understood what belonging was. A young man leaving home with ambition in his bones and wonder in his pocket. A veterinarian learning, mistake by mistake, how fragile life can be and how resilient it often is. A teacher discovering that the true privilege is not to speak, but to be listened to by people who are trying to become something better. A traveler collecting landscapes and faces, learning that the world is vast and yet the human heart keeps repeating the same themes: love, fear, loyalty, loss, laughter.

And now, at seventy-five, I feel less interested in the performance of living and more devoted to its essence.

There is a softness that comes with age. Not weakness, but discernment. A willingness to let go of what doesn’t matter. A hunger for what does. For beauty. For honest conversation. For quiet mornings. For the kind of friendship that can hold both seriousness and mischief. For work that still has meaning. For the ability to be moved by a photograph, a sentence, a memory, a piece of music, the sight of an animal in its element.

Perhaps that is the true gift of this birthday.

Not the number, but the clarity.

In Australia, while it is already March 6, someone might be stepping outside into the morning and seeing the light spill across a yard in a way that makes them pause. Someone might be driving on a country road with the window cracked, letting that clean air wake them properly. Someone might be thinking of me - briefly, kindly - and that thought, even at a distance, would feel like a hand placed gently on the shoulder.

I think of the family farm. I think of frost on grass, the sun lifting itself over the horizon, birds chattering, sheep and cattle calling across the paddocks. I think of the way a new day waits there - unhurried, unsentimental, full of small tasks and unexpected moments.

That is how I want to meet seventy-five.

Like a country morning.

Awake.

Grateful.

Expectant.

Because even now, after all these years, I still believe in beginnings.

Not the dramatic ones, but the small beginnings that happen every day: a sentence started, a photograph framed, a conversation that turns unexpectedly intimate, a decision to be kinder, a decision to be braver, a decision to say what is true.

In Australia, it is already my birthday.

The day has already opened its door.

And wherever I am, I can feel that pull of the sun coming up behind the hills on the family farm.

With the sense that something good may be waiting, just beyond those hills...

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