:: Hypnology :: | In the News

Sunday Life - The happy wanderers.

They have homes in both hemispheres and jobs that travel. The modern nomads are the latest tribe to sweep the globe.

Henry isn't just angry, he's livid. And lately he has developed a reputation as the neighbourhood bad-arse. He regularly headbutts the kitchen door. He recently killed an owl. He is, as his sitter attests, "like the Eminem of cats".

The trouble is he just isn't getting enough mother love. And it isn't because his owner, Jessica Adams, doesn't love him. It's just that the mothering bit is a little tricky when Henry lives in her house in the northern NSW hamlet of Bellingen and Adams splits her time between there, Sydney and London and Brighton in England... The list goes on.

A writer and trustee of the war charities War Child and No Strings, Adams, who is also this magazine's astrologer, is a local example of the latest lifestyle trend to sweep the globe, a trend that challenges the long-held dream of the White Picket Fence. She is a Modern Nomad, one who regularly wanders the earth, hopping from city to city, country to country, living life on the run.

And according to Allison Arieff, editor-in-chief of American lifestyle magazine Dwell, more people are choosing this unconventional way of life. Arieff recently dedicated an issue of her magazine to the hordes of "regular people" who live the modern nomadic life. "With globalism has come this interest in moving around, and what fascinates me is it's both global and local. People aren't put off by the idea of moving around a lot. They want to feel they can be in two places at once."

Architectural firms around the world are helping to make this a reality by focusing on mobile home solutions. Arieff says that in the US, living in trailers is a more popular choice than ever. A New York company has even come up with the idea of creating moveable homes out of shipping containers. In Australia, ABC-TV recently explored how the trend to move around is taking root here in the documentary Grey Nomads.

The focus of the nomads I spoke to, however, is very much on making practical changes that enable them to live nomadically while dwelling in traditional abodes.

Deborah McLean, a food and interiors stylist, regularly moves between a home she owns in Melbourne, another she rents in Los Angeles, and friends and agents' dwellings in Sydney and San Francisco. (Last year she flew between Australia and the US 12 times.) How does she do it? Well, she is happy to crash at other people's homes, has a suitcase "partially packed all the time", and keeps in storage in each country a styling kit of generic props, cookbooks and materials that can be used in any photo shoot. She has also devised a complex cocktail of vitamins to take before each trip to help ensure she never (again) has to endure the ordeal of being treated in a foreign hospital.

"Yes, it's difficult to juggle," says McLean. "But it's a blast, it's enlightening. I'm always inspired by the new, and I make friends all over the world." More than that, the lifestyle gives her an almost spiritual satisfaction that nothing else in life has matched. "This has given me the self-confidence I never knew I could have, and the sense that nothing's impossible. As kids, we get told you can't do things, and it's a really incredible gift to have given to yourself - the sense that you can make it happen."

It could be that she is, as British researcher Terence Watts recently postulated, hard-wired for travelling. Watts, principal of The Essex Institute of Clinical Hypnosis in England, believes that some people have in their genes the desire to keep moving. His theory is that we're all born with "embryonic characters", such as the "warrior", the "settler" and, yes, the "nomad", who traditionally took to the road to avoid a sedentary life or taking orders from more aggressive types. The key to successful modern living, he says, is to discover which "character" is predominant in ourselves and embrace it. "Only by understanding our inner warrior, settler and nomad selves can we be truly happy," Watts told Britain's The Observer.

Who hasn't harboured the pipedream of mixing into one neat package the serenity of country life and the buzz of big-city living? But how do people afford it? McLean is lucky - her agents often foot the bill for her plane tickets. But for other nomads, it's a matter of settling for more modest homes in cheaper cities, renting instead of buying, and spending one's entertainment budget on plane tickets and long-distance phone bills rather than on new clothes and eating out. Jessica Adams has opted for buying "two cheap but great places in two countries". Elsewhere, she crashes with friends or at private clubs.

Writer Anna Johnson, 37, is able to move backwards and forwards between her rented New York City flat and a home she owns in country NSW by forfeiting luxuries and having an almost slavish devotion to work. "It costs so much to live and travel in this way, you need to work very hard in almost every place the plane lands." But, Johnson, whose new book is Handbags: The Power Of The Purse, says she still comes out on top. "You have something else, a sort of patina and the satisfaction of your childhood curiosities."

Johnson, whose Irish mother and Australian father (painter Michael Johnson) met in London and later lived in Sydney and New York, grew up in New York, north Queensland and Sydney. She recalls spending "a lot of time driving through the bush in an army jeep. I got the impression that school was just an obligatory formality in between journeys."

Other Modern Nomads BECAME MOBILE LATER IN LIFE. John Adam Golding, 43, began to regularly live on the move around Australia and Thailand, England, France and Canada 10 years ago, after his divorce. A TAFE laboratory worker, he manages this by house-sitting for others. (He finds home owners looking for house-sitters on Australian website www.housecarers.com.au). As Golding's work is in Bundanoon in the NSW southern highlands, he usually house-sits in places that are at a commuting distance; or, if further afield, he takes leave without pay. A holder of a British passport, he has, on occasion, combined house-sits in the UK with research projects. This way, he says, he can maintain his career while fulfilling two of his life's passions - caring for animals and discovering other cultures. "It's important to meet people where they are, rather than impose our culture, religion and [politics] on them. And I'm one of those who loves looking after others' houses, gardens and pets."

But are short-term relationships like these the only kind that can be incorporated into this lifestyle? Time apart from loved ones can be a godsend - absence makes the other person's heart forget that you threw out their prized stamp collection. But time zones apart?

Andrea Zittel knows about the subject. A US artist who builds mobile living units that operate as both her homes and exhibits, she splits her time between a homestead in California's Mojave Desert, a three-storey shopfront block in Brooklyn, and wherever else she takes her exhibits. The variety, she says, "rocks". The disjointed relationships with loved ones do not. "I have friends who get really frustrated because I'm not around for them enough. And while I don't think it would be a major problem having a relationship and seeing somebody half of the time, other people have problems with it."

Dave Thomas, 51, can go one further. He says living and travelling around the world for Consultants Exchange, the accounting firm he established in 1993 (there are now 15 offices in nine countries, all of which he visits regularly), have contributed to his three divorces. "[My hours were] very, very long and hard... It's certainly not conducive to a close or a young family." Thomas now has a girlfriend in Australia who flies to meet him in cities around the world.

The nomadic lifestyle, though, concerns Amanda Gordon, vice president of the Australian Psychological Society and director of her own clinical psychology practice. She praises those who refuse to "allow the old pressures - like settling down and having children - be the deciding factor in their lives", but cautions that some who constantly move around may be using such a life as "a way of avoiding conflict and difficulties, dealing with the things we have to deal with".

Still, many nomads agree that their lifestyle is quickly becoming less an off-beat choice and more a necessity. Thomas initially established Consultants Exchange to service the accounting needs of growing numbers of contract workers (mostly in IT, engineering and mining) who, as a result of a general tightening of market forces, were forced to travel the globe seeking work. "This huge mobile flexible work force is a global phenomenon and it's here to stay," he says.

While many friends and family members of the nomads I spoke to couldn't fathom living this way (Thomas says friends "think I'm crazy"), there is a growing number of companies catering to this lifestyle. Ian White, who established www.housecarers.com.au, says he has gone from 100 registered users in 2000, to 1500 current users, 20 per cent of whom use the site to live a nomadic life. Magazines such as Modern Nomad and HoBo (whose philosophy is "Follow your bliss. Imagine. Seek the high road ... Embrace the earth") keep springing up.

Oh, and you can officially start preparing yourself for the next generation of nomads. Because Anna Johnson, for one, fully intends to rear her yet-to-be-conceived children in the manner to which she's become accustomed. "I'm not sure where we'll live, [but] I hope they like travelling and hate school like me, because they're going to have to learn to wave goodbye and write postcards from a very early age."