Life after the 9 to 5What you do with your time when you stop swapping it for money
Most people's week goes like this: work forty hours for someone else, sometimes sixty or ninety, come home, watch TV, watch the footy on the weekend, have a few beers with your mates, and once a year take the family away for a week. That is not a life, it is a timetable.
When you stop swapping your time for money you get the time back, and the question becomes what you want to do with it. For me it has been travel, boats, bush tracks and a lot of ordinary days with my kids. For you it might be painting, or a pet shelter, or building something, or learning. The point of these photos is not that my life is better than yours. It is that there is a lot more available to an ordinary person than the timetable suggests, and I would like you to go and get your version of it.
To be clear about what this looks like: I don't drive a Ferrari, and I don't live in a house with a big pool, a servant and a cook. What I have is this. I don't worry about the power bill or the phone bill, whether the kids need dental work, the rego on the cars or the insurance. Day to day I live how I'd like to live and buy what I'd like to buy to have fun. Yes, I still work, on different projects, ideas and businesses, but only as much as I'd like to.
By the numbers
At least 27 overseas trips
More than 1,100 days outside Australia, in about 20 countries: from the eight-week trip around the world with my wife when I was 26, to Kuala Lumpur and New Zealand with the kids when they were small, to a year and a half in Vietnam. Those are the ones with a date on them. There are more.
Nearly 60 vehicles
Not fancy ones. Cars, utes, a long line of trucks, a Unimog, a six-wheel Land Cruiser, a double-decker bus, a tractor, a Bobcat, mostly bought at auction for whatever I was doing at the time.
18 boats
From a 3.1-metre dinghy to a 40-foot cat, a 22-foot plate boat and three trimarans, the latest a 35-footer I rebuilt myself. Ten months living aboard one of them with the family.
18 months in Vietnam
I married a Vietnamese girl during COVID and lived there, in the customs and the culture, not as a tourist, before we moved back to Australia together.
Nobody with a 9-to-5 and four weeks' leave gets to do that, and I was a kid who couldn't read. Your version will be different. The point is that it exists.
These counts come from old booking emails, the location tags on my photos since 2013, and a list I wrote in 2016. The early years are thin: the email addresses from the 2000s are long gone, and the cruise around the world, the trips to the Tip in the Unimog and the sailing with my parents as a kid were never in an inbox. The real numbers are higher than these.
These are the real years after I stopped working for money. Not a brochure, just the camera roll.
The family
Time with the people you love is the first thing a job takes and the first thing freedom gives back.
See the other 4 photos
The toys
Buses and trucks turned into homes, boats, a trimaran. Bought with cash flow, not wages, and used, not polished.
See the other 9 photos
The time
River crossings, beach camps, a kid with a remote-control boat at the back of the property. None of it fits around a 9-to-5.
See the other 7 photos
The travel
Asia for business and for fun: contracts in India, products in Beijing, the bullet train, the Great Wall.
See the other 4 photos
Read the book, then come along for the ride
The adventures live on my other channel, Pacific Trading Post: the Darwin to Groote Eylandt sail in a 24-foot Seawind with my brother (eight episodes, start here), the Vietnam years, the COVID months. Subscribe there to keep tabs on what I'm up to.
The videos that used to sit on this page have moved: Peter on the books that built him and why patrons matter.