From Australia to Estonia

I’m from Australia.

Sunshine, abundance, multicultural noise, good weather, huge space. A country where you can grow almost anything and somehow most people still buy everything wrapped in plastic from a supermarket.

Wild food felt exotic there. Mushrooms, berries, herbs from the forest.. that was something other people did. Not normal life.

Then Estonia got under my skin.

Small country. Forests everywhere. Short summers that feel almost illegal because they are so beautiful. Winters that test your character in ways Australia never did.

My first emotional connection was The Singing Revolution. I watched a country stand in front of Soviet tanks with songs and thought, these people are crazy in exactly the right way.

That mattered to me.

Here was a place that had already proved something important: small does not mean weak.

Landing Here

In 2013, my then-partner, now wife, and I left Australia and came to Estonia.

At first it felt almost absurdly easy.

The government worked. Digital systems worked. Nature was close. Forests gave mushrooms, berries, herbs. Life felt physical again.

Then the cracks appeared.

In 2015 I had to renew my visa and ran straight into bureaucracy that felt like it belonged to another country. Which was funny, because Estonia was already famous for digital government.

So I joined the world’s first government-run hackathon to digitise visa applications.

Our team won.

Within a month I was sitting with Estonia’s head of foreign affairs. Not long after, the visa process changed.

The startup didn’t become a company. Fine. Most don’t.

But the lesson stuck.

If something is obviously broken, you can either complain about the system or build the missing piece and make the system look silly.

Leaving The Screen

After nearly 30 years around computers, startups, brands, online worlds, and digital systems, something shifted.

The virtual world stopped feeling like the main event.

I wanted to build something that rain could touch.

A home. A life. A place my sons could understand with their hands, not only through screens.

I had the vision before I had the competence, which is a dangerous order.

I thought we were building a sanctuary.

What we actually built first was a long list of mistakes.

Bad roads. Mud. Builders I struggled to communicate with. Costs going up. Taxes going up. Simple things becoming difficult. Cars stuck. Plans changing. Years passing.

I had spent my life being competent with digital things.

Then the land made me a beginner again.

Publicly.

The logical move was obvious.

Quit. Go back to the city. Or go back to Australia.

We didn’t.

The Pioneer Thing

During the harder years I kept thinking about early Australia.

The first Europeans wrote about the place like it was useless. Barren. Miserable. Uninhabitable. They looked at a continent and saw failure because they didn’t know how to read it yet.

Now obviously that history is complicated, and often brutal. I’m not romanticising it.

But one part stayed with me:

Places are not only found. They are made.

Not made from nothing. Made by learning what is actually there. By adapting. By failing. By refusing the lazy conclusion that difficulty means impossibility.

That became personal.

I wanted my boys to understand this:

It’s not the place that makes you. You make the place.

Why It Became Estland

For a while I thought this was just our family story.

Then I started taking my boy to school here.

And suddenly the problem was not abstract anymore.

I would see all these kids and think:

What are they supposed to do?

If the rational path is Tallinn first, abroad next, then what exactly are we building here?

A childhood?

A memory?

A nice place to leave?

That is not good enough.

The country digitised government before most of the world understood the internet properly. It built systems people now travel to study.

But the countryside still has no proper local layer.

Food is invisible. Wood is fragmented. Events disappear into feeds. Visitors drive through. Money leaves. Attention leaves. Then people act surprised when the children leave too.

So the work became obvious.

Build the missing infrastructure.

Not because an app is exciting. The app is not the point.

The point is whether a place like this can sustain a good life.

The Next Frontier

I think we are entering another shift.

Agriculture rooted people. Industry pulled them into cities. The internet detached work from place. AI is now detaching even more of the old logic.

So the question becomes very basic again.

Where should humans live?

What is a good place?

What should technology protect instead of replace?

For me the answer is not in some abstract future.

It is here. Roads. Forest. Food. School. Mud. Sawmills. Guesthouses. Kids. Neighbours. Local money. Local pride.

The future won’t be found.

It has to be made.