How a career pivot made me feel better about the world

perspective How bush regeneration helped to restore my faith in the world As a kid, I had a pretty clear idea of what was in store for us in 2026: world peace, flying cars, a fully restored Amazon rainforest and teleportation. Even in the mid-90s as an anxious 11-year-old, climate change, inequality and war after war led me to hope for a world that would look very different by now. Captain Planet was our hero, after all. Of course, my predictions did not eventuate. Sometimes I still feel like the powerless and anxious child I once was. So I spent the best part of two decades working in health and community services. While it took me to interesting places and introduced me to some extraordinary people, I left that chapter of my life as a sad husk and I felt like my capacity for empathy had all but dried up. I'd come to a dead patch in my career. I was running an accommodation business in the hills behind Byron Bay but it had become frustratingly repetitive. I needed to restore my faith in humankind A couple of months later I heard that a local bush regeneration business was looking for staff. I knew they killed bitou bush and camphor laurel, and that was the extent of my knowledge, but being paid to exercise sounded good, and I gave them a call. Within a week, I was somewhere in the hills behind town, neck-deep in a lantana patch. I was sweating buckets in the midday sun, wondering whether I had reception to call an ambulance if my chest pain became a heart attack. This was all new to me. Had I just replaced one kind of dead patch with another? But I persevered with it, which is not something I'm known for. What followed was a summer of tending to newly planted sites, hiking through forested water catchments, hunting out the latest weed scourge (tropical soda apple) and tedious hours spent cutting and poisoning cat's claw vine. In many ways the work suited me well. I prefer to feel physically tired at the end of the day and this job has that in very heavy buckets. I like being outdoors but in shade, and we often work under a forest canopy. I might spend half a day talking to a colleague about the fungi he supplies to research labs, or in silence spending hours carefully identifying and poisoning weed seedlings amid a carpet of almost identical natives. But I also noticed something that surprised me. I was enjoying life and work, while meeting new people. Was this the summer of my content? Removing weeds and planting trees was somehow helping to undo the disillusionment that had taken hold in me. As a gay man who had spent most of his life deliberately choosing to work with women and other queers, to my surprise I began enjoying the company of my straight male colleagues. I looked at my familiar surroundings with new knowledge. "That'd be an easy bit to regen," I'd point out to a friend when we were driving past paddocks lined with straggly remnant bush. My horizons shifted and also I joined a volunteer committee responsible for putting on events for LGBTQIA+ folk. This was something I'd loved doing in the past, but for some years did not have the confidence or drive to involve myself in. I now felt ready to put myself and my skills out there again. In short, I came back to life I think about the psychological process I went through. The fundamental connection between my wellbeing and the land I live on. These were hills and valleys I'd grown up loving and now it seemed they were loving me back. It's not work that I can keep doing forever. It's very physically demanding, has some risks in terms of slips and slides and often requires the use of a variety of frankly quite nasty herbicides. But I'm going to treasure it while it lasts. And hopefully I'll head back out there if I ever feel like the bad guys are getting me down. Bruce Cherry is a writer and bush regenerator living and working in far northern New South Wales on Bundjalung Country. Loading...