In 2011, I left Melbourne and took a job as an electricity meter reader in the country. The offer came from an ex-bandmate of mine, working in administration at the meter-reading company. They were desperate: the person before me had only lasted a month. During my undergraduate years, I’d walked the inner suburbs on meter-reading beats, so had a fair sense of the challenges ahead. But navigating the rounds of central Victoria’s Macedon Ranges in a beaten-up ute with more than 300,000km on the clock was, as I was to learn, a different beast entirely.
If the company was desperate to fill the position, I was equally desperate to take it. I’d spent the previous four years attempting to write a novel as part of a postgraduate degree. It hadn’t worked out for various reasons and the experience left me in a state of mind that, looking back, was scary. I wanted as much distance as I could from the literary world. I craved movement, the outdoors, freedom from living inside my head. Above all, driving that white Holden Rodeo in the shadow of Hanging Rock, I wanted to rid myself of the desire to write.
