WHY I'M LEAVING SYDNEY WITHOUT A RAFT (Ian Fairweather Tried First)

Ian Fairweather lived a life that looks extreme until you realise it was organised around one very simple priority: painting.

Born in Scotland, trained formally, he fought in the First World War, was imprisoned, wandered through Asia for years, absorbed calligraphy, Buddhism, and Indigenous Australian art, and eventually settled in Australia. He stripped painting back until it was almost writing, then stripped that back again. Figures dissolved into marks. Marks became rhythm.

He lived frugally and mostly alone, not out of romance or misery, but because painting needed space and time and not much interference.

At one point, Australia became too much for him. So in 1952, he tried to leave.

He built a raft and attempted to sail from Darwin to Indonesia. He ran into a monsoon, nearly died, and was intercepted and deported back to Australia. If you want a reminder that intention is not the same as outcome, that’s a good one.

Ian Fairweather: Monsoon (1961-62) Picture credit: https://collection.artgallery.wa.gov.au/objects/505/monsoon

Fairweather did not leave the country. He left the structure.

He went to Bribie Island and built a hut. No electricity. No plumbing. No interest in how it looked from the outside. And there, in conditions most people would describe as unworkable, he made some of his strongest paintings.

That detail matters.

Why Sydney feels stifling now

I want to say this clearly before anything else: I am grateful.

I have an affordable mortgage. In Sydney, that already puts me in a category people react to strangely. Either impressed, suspicious, or quietly recalculating their own life choices.

I don’t dismiss that. I know how rare it is.

But affordable does not mean workable. And it does not mean fit for the kind of life I am actually living.

Sydney now feels like a city that demands constant negotiation. Space is tight. Time is expensive. Systems are rigid. Everything is linked. Housing, money, healthcare, compliance. When one thing falters, the rest lock up.

Australia is very good at risk management. Less good at trust.

In a city this expensive, there is very little slack. Delays become crises. Oversight becomes suffocation. You spend more energy navigating systems than making anything inside them.

This is not a moral judgement on Sydney. It is an observation.

Fairweather did not rage at Australia or try to fix it. When leaving outright failed, he stepped sideways until the system thinned out enough for him to breathe and work.

That feels increasingly relevant.

Where to next, and why New Zealand feels like home

These photos - taken by me - are not arguments. They’re signals.

A handmade mailbox in a garden. Oars mounted on a wall like they still remember water. A public arch made of timber and story. Murals that feel considered rather than cosmetic. Awe walking instructions embedded onto electricity boxes. Old buildings standing, not erased.

I’ve just come out of an involuntary hospital stay in Christchurch. Disorienting. Not gentle. A fucking shit show. Not something I would ever choose.

And yet, despite that, Christchurch still feels like home.

Not because it was easy. It wasn’t.But because even inside that experience, I didn’t feel endlessly managed. There was space. Literal space. Emotional space. Mountains. Lakes. A sense that adulthood was still the default setting.

New Zealand feels like a place where making things is still visible. Where craft, repair, and slowness haven’t been completely flattened by optimisation. Where cities still feel scaled to humans rather than systems.

It helps that, for now at least, the dominant structures still look like people, timber, and weather, not data centres humming quietly somewhere out of sight.

That said, I’m not pretending this is a binary choice: regional Australia is also possible.

It has space. Air. Proximity without suffocation. A sense that you could build a life that isn’t entirely consumed by rent, traffic, or administration. It feels like a sideways move rather than a retreat.

So this isn’t a dramatic exit. It’s a calibration.

Fairweather didn’t disappear. He repositioned himself until the conditions matched the scale of his life and work.

I’m doing the same.

I don’t need luxury.I need space that works.I need systems that assume competence.I need room to make things without constant negotiation.

Sydney no longer offers that to me in a sustainable way.

New Zealand does. Gosford might.

I’m paying attention to that, because Fairweather’s life suggests something simple and useful:

When the sea turns you back, you don’t stop moving. You just choose a different direction.