Australia international border closures: My gap year changed my life. Now many Australians will never get one

I wore shorts just once in Scotland. Once, in four months of living there during summer, working on a farm up near Aberdeen. Once. And that one time I did get to wear shorts was not because the sun had decided to make some sort of miraculous appearance and warm the air to something approaching double digits – it was because the local nightclub was having a beach party.

Every other day of that summer, every day of May, June, July and August, I wore long pants and a jumper, and usually something waterproof, because it was cold, and it was raining. It was, to keep things briefer, Scotland.

I was 17 then, probably far too young to be wandering the world without responsible supervision. This was back in the day when you finished high school in Queensland at that tender age, and as someone whose birthday falls late in the calendar, I would spend my entire first year of adult freedom as not really an adult.

And so I did what only a few people were doing back then, and I took a gap year. I spent my last year of high school peddling Big Macs and saving money and then I escaped, with my mate Karl, for a year of discovery, of joy, of confusion, of fascination, of fear, of freedom. We flew to the USA and stayed with family friends, we went down to the Bahamas, we jetted across to the UK, we settled ourselves to work in Scotland.

The weather there was awful, and it turns out I'm not a particularly talented or enthusiastic farmer. But oh the times we had in that small Scottish town where people are friendly and bartenders never ask for ID. We formed a group of lifelong friends there on the other side of the world. We worked, we drank, we explored, we shivered.

I lost plenty of things during my gap year: a few socks, a Metallica CD, a daypack, my innocence, my virginity (finally). But I also gained an immeasurable amount: friends, experience, knowledge of the world, and confidence to move through it.

You only get to be that young and impressionable, malleable and entirely carefree once. And then the chance is gone.

I came home, finally 18, a different person to the one who had left. I had to make friends again with my old friends, to get to know who they had become, and to try out the things that had changed in me – and that was everything.

I find myself thinking about that gap year a lot recently. Partly because I have plenty of time to think about everything in lockdown, but mostly, really, because I'm aware there's a whole generation of kids right now who are not having that same opportunity. As borders have closed, so have opportunities: those who might once have gone to pull pints in London, or clean hostels in Berlin, or work on volunteer projects in Cape Town are stuck at home now, unable to travel, some unable to even leave their homes.