And now my life has changed in oh so many ways

They say that travel changes people. This goes doubly so for living abroad. I’ve been living in Vanuatu for more than nine months now, and so there have inevitably been a number of lifestyle changes.

Walking

Yes, there is a thriving (if random) bus “system” here, but 99% of the time I have walked to and from work. At the moment, it’s about 35 minutes door to door - or a little bit longer if I go on a side quest to the shops - with a couple of steep hills either way. It’s been a great daily dose of moderate exercise. Of course, I miss my previous routine of riding my bike 15-20 minutes to and from work, but looking back on my ‘steps’ history, I averaged around 5,100 steps a day in June 2025 compared with around 7,800 now. In the absence of other cardio exercise (no spin classes here!) it’s more than adequate as a substitute.

Diet

This has probably been the biggest impact on my lifestyle here, and it’s been a mixed bag through the year. I rarely eat out these days - mostly because the options are limited either with expensive western food that is often greasy (mostly pizza, burgers and deep fried things) or local food which can be cheap and tasty but my appetite for rice, boiled tapioca and island cabbage only goes so far. Most days, we’ll cook at home, and this will often be determined by what’s available at the local markets (at the moment, it’s bok choy and eggplant!), plus some imported staples (onions, garlic and carrots) from the supermarket. Before Vanuatu, we definitely ate out more, and often if we cooked at home, we’d use meal kits that were delivered weekly - which worked best for our busy lifestyles. I definitely appreciated how privileged we were living in Australia with the range of groceries and cultural cuisines that are available.

Drinking

Before Vanuatu, we’d often have a bottle of wine or a few beers with a meal, or maybe a drink or two with a movie on the couch. That’s pretty much stopped now. Partially because when we first arrived, we were on a tight budget and alcohol was one of the first things to go, and it’s much more thrifty to have a few shells of kava to wind down. But to be honest, once you get into your 40s, you start to notice how something like alcohol starts to slow you down, interrupt your sleep, make the next morning more difficult than it needs to be. Not that I’ve gone full-time on the water-wagon, but it’s definitely more of a very occasional part of my lifestyle now.

Health

All of the above factors, combined living in a tropical developing country is bound to have some physiological impact. And I can comfortably say that this year has been one of the most challenging for me in terms of health issues. Nothing life-threatening, but it’s been one little thing after the other - and it’s been exhausting. It does remind me that I’m not as young as I used to be, and my body isn’t as great at automatically looking after itself like it used to when I was in my 20s.

All in all, perhaps an unintended consequence of living in Vanuatu is that I’ve become a lot more mindful and sensitive to the lifestyle factors that can affect my quality of life. I hope that, if nothing else, I can take some of these lessons learnt back to Australia when it’s time to return.

When the stakes are so low...

Over the last few days, my feed has been filling up with musicians posting about recent revelations (via The Atlantic's AI Watchdog tool) that their creative work has been taken and used to train music-making AI platforms - without the creator's permission.

Unfortunately, none of this is surprising. We've already seen the publishing industry rocked by reports of similar uses of millions of pirated books in 2025 to train large language models for generative AI platforms. Yep, that is the thing that's used when you ask your AI platform of choice to draft / summarise / edit / rewrite your written work.

And remember a few years earlier when everybody got onto that fun trend of getting AI to generate a whole suite of fun profile pictures based on some headshot photographs? Yep - creative works by visual artists all stolen for the purpose of training AI to generate art. (Also, if you did that, they now own your face as well.)

The thing that strikes me about all this is that the people who are exploited are already some of the lowest-paid professionals. An article in 2024 reported that income from creative work in Australia (books, music, visual art, theatre, etc) averaged at $23,200 a year. Half of Australian musicians earn less than $6,000 from their craft. The average Australian author earns around $18,200 from book sales, with 75% of them earning less than $15,000. And the average visual artist in Australia earns even less, with an average income of $13,937 from their arts practice.

And yes, it is exploitation. AI technology is a multi-billion dollar industry, sponging from the life's work of others with no consent or compensation. And when the stakes are so low, and the vast majority of artists cannot even make a living wage from their art, it's just adding insult to injury. 

Alongside all this AI news, and depressing news about the continued cost of living crisis, people are more and more turning away from supporting the arts, with regular stories about music festival cancellations and major theatre productions being cut short.

If generative AI is a technology that we want to adopt and implement in our daily lives and workplaces, then what does this say about how we support our creative industries? Who would want to be a creative in this day and age when this is how we as a society are valuing their creative work?

Regardless of whether you use AI or not, it's never been a more important time to go and support the arts - go and buy some Australian books, go to a live music gig, theatre production or dance show. Buy visual artwork. Let our creatives know that we still value their contribution to Australian society.

Nobody likes you when you're 23 (things)

I recently read an article The Generative AI Conversation Hub of the University: Positioning Reflection and Skill-Building in the Daily Work of Library Practitioners in the Journal of Library Administration.

It explores the approach that a library team at the University of Western Sydney has taken in bringing their staff on board their AI learning journey, and then positing the library as being the subject specialists for the university community in facilitating  ongoing conversations around AI.

There's a lot to unpack in that article. It filled me me with a combination of hope, dread and elements of "I'm glad somebody's taking this work on but also I'm glad it's not me."

The mention of the "23 things / learning 2.0" triggered a very specific memory for me. Back in the late 2000s, when I was working in public libraries, there was a big push to deliver this training to all library staff through online training modules focused on 23 different social media tools. Personally, I was all for it. I felt very passionately that, as information professionals, we needed to be on top of social media trends as an integral part of our professional work - and as a way to stay relevant to a constantly changing information society.

There was, of course, pushback at the time. Plenty of librarians saying, "it's just a fad" or "this has absolutely nothing to do with my professional work" or "I've got actual work to do, please stop trying to waste my time with this nonsense." I was pretty disparaging of these attitudes. I had so much hope for the future of social media - a people-led information utopia where gatekeeping was shunned and we lived in a community-led participatory online society.

Yet, 20'ish years later, here we are. Social media is not what we hoped it to be. Maybe the naysayers were right.

And now, the next big disruptive technology event has arrived in the form of AI. I daresay that we're all a bit more pessimistic about the opportunities that it will provide - especially with all the ethical problems that generative AI have already caused. I wouldn't judge anybody for wanting to push back and ask if this is the kind of technology that we want to rule our future way of life. 

I am all for maintaining professional knowledge through curiosity, experimentation and play - a big theme for the 23 things approach. However, we also need to consider - is this technology doing any harm? What consequences will there be for adopting this as a mainstream technological tool. Before we get too preoccupied on whether we could, can we stop and think about whether we should? (To paraphrase Dr Ian Malcolm).

Too late to catch up…

I think I picked the wrong year to go and work in a developing country.

One of the constant worries I have is that, despite my efforts to stay across global trends in the workplace, the working world will “move on” without me and I won’t be able to catch up.

A year ago, shortly before I left Australia, the literature world was rocked by the revelation that millions of creative literary works has been used for the purposes of training generative AI platforms - without the consent of the copyright owners. Even now, there is a general consensus across my networks (predominantly people connected with the Australian publishing and literature sector) that this was a bad thing, and we should not be supporting industries that steal with impunity from creatives who are already underpaid for their work. And then there’s the environmental impact of data centres.

And yet, I’m hearing report after report about the implementation of Gen AI in the workplace back in Australia. The common phrase I hear is that AI will empower us to take care of banal, mundane repetitive work. I also hear comments from comms workers that the work that they do is shifting drastically from the creative process of planning, writing and editing content to the more mundane and banal act of generating and assessing AI-created content.

I also hear anecdotes from people who now use gen AI platforms to draft their documents and even write their emails. I read an article today about news providers who are moving to AI to draft all their scripts for news reporting.

I have a lot of complicated feelings about all this. I’m all for free access to information, but the scope to bulk-mine creative works for commercial gain is testing my idea what is fair and accessible. What’s more, we were warned years and years ago (arguably since the birth of science fiction writing!) of the ethical questions around the use of AI. To push back on it now is a case of closing the proverbial gate when the horse has well and truly bolted.

My fear is that we at the very least keep educated on how to use AI in our work and set some values-based parameters on how we can do so that is the best use of our skills and time whilst still producing quality work. At worst, we just need to suck it up and get on board or get redundant.

I still don’t know what this is going to mean for my work when I return to Australia in the coming months. I’m already feeling like the job market is much harder to get a foothold in now than it was a few years ago. I find it fascinating that the APS has released a policy around the use of AI in applying for jobs - acknowledging that some people will use AI to write their job applications, and expecting them to declare it if asked. I don’t use AI to write my applications - I value my ability to write applications in my own voice and apply my own values, not that of an algorithm. But it won’t be long until it is assumed that any given job application has been AI generated (and probably shortlisted using AI). As the cost of living pressures push government to create more efficiencies, this all feels a bit too inevitable.

All this said, I firmly believe that the thing that will never be replaced is our capacity for human connection, through crafting creative works, our social interactions and having integrity in the values that underpin our work.

I'm only happy when it rains

Typically in Vanuatu, June marks the beginning of the dry season, where the temperature is also noticeably cooler, dropping down to around 20 degrees.

Seeking shelter from a mid-day downpour.

It's not dry. It's been bucketing down at least once or twice a day for the last week. But at least it's cool.

Learning to drive again

I have less than three months left in my current role. Typically, the kinds of jobs I have applied for have taken around 8-10 weeks from the application deadline to a formal offer. So I'm keenly aware that now is the time I need to start applying for jobs.

I haven't been an active jobseeker for a few years and everything I'm hearing is indicating that the job market is a lot more limited in Australia that it was back then. It's a source of some mild anxiety, but I'm not hitting the panic button quite yet.

So, on Wednesday I tuned in to an online panel session hosted by ALIA, entitled "Driving your career: you've got your first job, what's next?" It seemed apt, since I feel like this past year has been largely about getting back to principles and realigning my professional skills, and now I'm feeling the need to dive back in and take the next step. The panel, comprising of leaders from public, academic and state libraries, had a stimulating discussion, with many excellent recurring messages, including:

• Your career is your responsibility, not your employer's.
• Don’t pursue a role just because it’s on a trajectory that you think you need to be on. It's not the best use of your time or talents.
• If you don't ask, you don't get. Let your supervisor / manager know that you're interested in opportunities. They're not mind-readers.
• Commit to lifelong learning and changing trends. The workplace in 2036 will be very different to the workplace today - show that you can adapt and be ready and open to change.
• Be aware of your personal brand. How people see you online and in person can influence your career opportunities.
• Form the relationships *before* you need them. Be proactive in networking and meeting people now.
• Make human connections. People don't remember what your said - they remember how you made them feel.

There was also some discussion about the value of LinkedIn in networking and staying engaged in the professional sector. I thought this was interesting - if we'd had this discussion 5-10 years ago, they'd definitely be talking about Twitter in this context. And whilst many former library tweeters have moved to Mastadon or Bluesky, it hasn't quite replicated that level of connection that I used to feel in the Twitterverse.

It was a good reminder of a great many things that I should be mindful of when thinking about my career back in Australia. It's definitely feeling like a lot to take on board, tone-shifting from 'aelan laef' back to the 'big city' hustle culture.

On privilege

Rarely a day goes by that I’m not reminded of how immensely privileged I am to be an Australian. I was born in a country where I have access to clean, drinkable running water, quality public services, world-class education, affordable public health care, and a thriving job market (okay, things got a bit hairy in the early 90s). During my student days, I had access to government financial assistance through a student allowance, and could defer my fees for what were already heavily-subsidised university courses. There are so many excellent career opportunities for those who study hard, work hard and are at the right place at the right time, and we get to do amazing things that continue to build the society that we live in, from quality essential infrastructure to thriving cultural scenes. We have quality food produce and a multicultural community that serves some of the best food in the world. I have a passport that allows visa-free access to more than 100 nations across the world, and the strength of the Australian dollar allows for affordable and comfortable travel in many of those countries. 

Frankly, in the scheme of things, I’ve won the lottery without even asking for it. Are there other “better” countries? Absolutely. But it’s a relatively short list, compared with the rest.

And yet, living in Australia, I do think it’s really easy to not see the forest from the trees. Living overseas changes that.

Living here in Vanuatu, I often meet locals who benefit from participating in the Pacific Australia Labour Mobility (PALM) Scheme. For many, it’s an opportunity that they never get here in their own country - the chance to go and work as a labourer in another country and bring back money to support their community. It’s also a scheme that’s widely reported as fraught with many issues, from accusations of “modern slavery” to family breakdowns, reduced community numbers and other unintended consequences. Despite all this, it’s still a scheme that is seen by many as preferable to working a job in Vanuatu - especially where unemployment is particularly high, and the minimum wage amounts to about $2.50 AUD an hour.

It is such a privilege that I can do the opposite - put aside my career and all the opportunities that life in Australia provides and come and experience life here in Vanuatu for a year. And then move back to Australia and continue my life there. An absolute privilege.