Four years ago I quit my dream job and moved to Australia — here's why I'm back in Ireland

In 2021, Holly Hughes quit her job. In a world that glorifies the grind and rewards hustle, she pressed stop, and gave herself permission to just 'be'. Four years on, she tells her story

Holly Hughes: ‘I searched for the elusive thing Australians were good at: taking it easy.’ Picture: Dan Linehan

In 2021, I emigrated to Australia. In the middle of the pandemic, I quit my “dream job” – a role with the UN Environment Programme that would take me first to Jamaica and then onto countless other greener pastures, professionally and environmentally speaking. I gave up affordable Dublin rent I knew I would never find again and spent my life savings on a one-way ticket to the only airport in Australia that would let me in.

While in mandated quarantine, I wrote an article for this paper about the enormous gamble I had taken; a gamble I was by no means certain would pay off. I talked about being stuck in the ‘middle’ bit of my decision – how I was suspended in the ugly, tumultuous purgatory between the hopeful ‘before’ and the self-satisfied ‘after’. 

I was 27, alone, and unsure of everything except this: that I didn’t want to live to work. I wanted to be happy, exactly as I was, irrespective of a job title or how many promotions I’d been given.

I am now 31. After four years travelling around Australia, I am firmly in the ‘after’ life. And I can confirm, with all the smug arrogance of hindsight, that I made the right call.

The past four years have transformed my life, redrawing the boundaries of what I believed possible and reconfiguring the constellations of my dreams.

Holly snorkelling at Rottnest Island.

I am a millennial and crawled through early adulthood in post-recession Ireland. The pressure I felt to succeed was ubiquitous and unrelenting. I felt suffocated by a culture that determined my worth according to my occupation, my intelligence according to my salary, and my capability according to how many hours I worked or how busy I appeared to be. Rebelling against this, I decided I wanted to be a bartender.

Not a bartender financing their PhD. Not a bartender saving up to travel the world. Not a bartender also moonlighting as a photographer/designer/model/artist. Just: a bartender. 

At 27, that felt revolutionary: to allow myself to just be. To exist as a complete, self-actualised individual unruffled by the pressure to deliver, upskill, or prove themselves. A woman unbothered by her allegedly wasted potential.

So, that is what I did. I moved to the land of lifestyle over job title and became a bartender. In fact, over the past four years, I have been not only a bartender but a motel cleaner, a labourer (not suited to my skill set, it turns out), a waitress, a very brief “shot girl” (non-alcoholic and fully clothed – I prepared espresso shots for fastidious and terrifying baristas), a grain harvester (complete with high vis and protective helmet), and a pet sitter. 

I have monkey-barred my way from one transient job to the other, travelling the vast expanse of Australia on planes, trains, automobiles, and too many 22-hour Greyhound buses.

I have worked in Melbourne’s bustling CBD, and a rainforest hotel overlooking the reefs of Far North Queensland. I have scrubbed showers and stripped beds in the outback’s most infamous rural pub; I’ve shaken margaritas at a beach bar in Western Australia. I have picked up my life and dropped it into every bizarre location I could find, starting again and again and again as I searched for the elusive thing Australians were so good at: taking it easy.

Holly at Cradle Mountain, Tasmania

It wasn’t easy – particularly as an Irish woman with a healthy inheritance of Catholic guilt. Giving yourself permission to be – in whatever form that may take on any given day – feels radical in a world that glorifies the grind and rewards hustle. 

Yet, cradled in the red-rock canyons of Karijini National Park, held aloft by the lapping waters of the Tasman Sea in Binalong Bay, and empowered by the view atop the Sydney Harbour Bridge, I found what I was seeking: the unfettered, euphoric freedom of a happiness that was tethered to nothing but the glory of the present moment.

I have just moved back to Ireland. Yes, at a time when emigration numbers are their highest in a decade, I am the contrarian salmon swimming upstream. I left my idyllic beach town in Western Australia, a Utopian place where I would cycle to work in a bikini and spend my days swimming until my skin and lips were so puckered by saltwater that only an ice-cold beer could revive them. 

I abandoned this to move to Limerick, a city I’d never been to before and in which I knew no one. And I’m the happiest I’ve ever been.

I reject the idea that one needs to travel to become a better version of themselves. However, when you consistently find yourself meeting new people in strange environments, something interesting happens: you have to explain yourself. ALL OF THE TIME. 

Backpacking around Australia I was ceaselessly confronted with questions about who I was. Once people had ascertained my name and nationality, the next question would be, “what do you do?” Most times I was asked this question, I was unemployed. Without the crutch of a job title to shield or endorse me, I had to find new ways to define myself.

After a barrage of these interrogations, I had my answer. I wanted to be a poet. Worse again, I wanted to be a poet who performed their poems aloud. Once this seed of truth settled inside me, it grew roots, shoots, blooms. 

Holly Hughes: 'I have travelled the vast expanse of Australia'

I began performing poetry at any open mic night I could find, throwing myself in front of anything resembling a microphone and unleashing my stories, secrets, and conspiracy theories about the diminishing portions of brunch on a roomful of strangers.

It’s funny how once you take that first tentative step forward, a path naturally emerges. I realised, as I wrote and performed while still polishing wine glasses, that I wanted to go back to college.

I have always fantasised about being a writer and have spent the past decade dreaming of studying a Master’s in Creative Writing. However, already replete with an Arts degree, undertaking yet another qualification that offered no definitive career path nor financial security felt grossly extravagant. The only way I could justify doing something so intoxicatingly indulgent and unprofitable was to know I would succeed at it. 

To legitimise a year of making up stories, I would need to graduate with a bestselling novel, a book deal, a gaggle of lauded literati heralding me as The Voice of A Generation. That was my pre-Australia mindset.

Now, I am entering the second semester of my Creative Writing MA. I’m considering trying stand-up; I might write a travel memoir. In other words, I once again have no clue what I’m doing and how it will end. 

I am frequently scared. Scared that I’m wasting precious time on a dead-end journey, one that will find me back in my childhood bedroom, sitting defeated on the familiar duvet as my parents gently ask, “what now?” I am terrified that I am choosing a life of loneliness – most of my peers are settled in long-term relationships, stable careers, are beginning to buy homes and start families while I bumble on, single, renting yet another room in another overpriced houseshare, and taking any job that will pay the bills. 

Holly Hughes has just moved home from Australia. Picture: Dan Linehan

I am petrified that I am being silly and embarrassing – the girl with the little poems, god bless her! – and everybody knows it, except me.

These fears calcify the older I get, as I feel pitted against the rapid passing of time and the spectre of other women more successful than I am. However, when it threatens to overwhelm me – the big question mark of my life – I remember the young woman who got on a one-way flight in 2021. 

The young woman who made one promise to herself: that she would prioritise pleasure, in all its small, inconsequential, miraculous forms and have the gumption to take bold steps towards it, not worrying about where she might end up but committed, body and soul, to the adventure of the journey.

So, here I am, committing. There are no thoughts of novels, book deals, or literati (but if you’re reading this, I’d be delighted to send you something as I might be, at the very least, A Voice of A Generation). There is, however, the unbridled, incommunicable joy of looking at my life in all its chaotic wonder and thinking, I chose this. 

There is the splendour of being stuck in the uncertain ‘middle’ and knowing I wouldn’t have it any other way.