In what ways does hard work make you feel fulfilled?
I was fifteen the first time I met hard work face to face.
Not chores, not the jobs around home that I already knew. This was something else—intensely hard work, the kind that strips you back, leaves you empty, and then fills you with a new kind of pride.
It was the Australia Day weekend when a friend asked if I’d be interested in a job at the Anzac Rifle Range in Malabar, Sydney’s eastern suburbs. I said yes straight away, not knowing what I was agreeing to.
Three days of work: a practice day, the preliminary rounds, and then the final.
The system was simple but relentless. A shot fired, the target yanked down on its pulley. Patch the previous hole with paper and glue. Mark the new one with a cardboard disc. Push it back up. Wait. Another shot. Again and again, under the blazing summer sun.
We stayed on site, sleeping in dorms with the other markers. By the end of each day, we were schoolboys turned hollow, our bodies drained by heat and repetition. The sleep that followed was the deepest I’d ever known.
And yet, there was something else happening too. Malabar was my first taste of surf culture—the young blokes who worked hard by day, then disappeared to the beach as soon as the shift ended. Long hair, bronzed skin, carefree swagger. A world away from my own home turf, where we made pocket money caddying at the golf course.
By day one, the novelty kept me going. By day two, I realised how hard this really was. By day three, I learned exhaustion. I did it again the next year, knowing full well what I was signing up for.
Those days didn’t just pay pocket money. They taught me something that has never left me—the strange fulfilment that comes when your body is spent, your energy poured out, and you fall into bed knowing you’ve done a solid day’s work.
The first rungs of a ladder I’d climb for the rest of my life.
The Afterword 
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