I recently found my soulmate in a hat.

I don’t really know what happened. The other day I was dehydrated and felt pretty nauseated, so I got in the car, cranked up the air con, blasted Sheryl Crow as loud as my car’s speakers would go without crackling (but Sheryl’s got some bass yo) and found myself at my Akubra dealer.

I spent a fair hunk of time with the salesman trying to work out what suited my needs. Because, while my head was pretty easy to fit, my needs were complicated. I didn’t really need the hat per say, but I was feeling fragile and I wanted it. My needs were strictly frivolous and spiritual.

I don’t really know how to explain that to a sales assistant. How do you ask another person to suggest a hat that is an extension of your soul? How do you phrase “I want a hat that would look poignant on my rustic headstone” without sounding insane? Because these hats are generally for agricultural people, but I had a higher purpose for mine.

I didn’t want to tell him that I grew up “in town” and the height of my agricultural experience was dumping fodder in a bathtub-cum-trough and sprinting to the gate because I was convinced the calf that lived in our spare paddock had a vendetta against me (I got mine in the end though, literally eating the flesh of my enemy).

You see, I’m from the country, but I’m not from a farm. My parents came out here for the cheap land and stayed for what I can only imagine was the heavily discounted peanut shell mulch and the hot chooks a surly legend called Barry would sell. I don’t have sheep to muster or crops to harvest.

I guess I just liked the idea of having a signature hat. Sure, sun safety is important and my skin is so pale that my neck is going to look like the skin that forms on custard when I’m 40. But it wasn’t about that. What I wanted was to be identified by a hat. Like if my plane disappeared over the ocean and my hat washed up ashore. I would want someone to see it and crumble into a fit of tears.

I don’t know how I got here. It was a strange journey. People stopped wearing hats as soon as they left school. For some reason, wearing a hat wasn’t cool – but for some reason ear stretchers were, go figure. The No Hat, No Play rule was the bane of our existence. Teachers didn’t seem to care that you could potentially asphyxiate on that whole donut you shoved in your mouth during an eating race or the innocent but disturbing display of sexual harassment in the school yard during kiss’n’catch, but if your hat fell off your head even for a second, a teacher would be on to you quick smart. Somewhere along the line, the idea of practical yet stylish sun protection crept into my head, built a nice three bedroom brick house and settled in. Maybe it was love of playing up to the country stereotype to my Sydney friends, maybe it was my desire to stop the part in my hair being forever pink, or maybe it was my yearning to have a wide-brimmed stamp of authority. But I found myself ending up on the Akubra website, trawling through the company’s Instagram feed, drooling over each picture in the dead of night too many times to ignore the call. And with my tax return burring a hole in my pocket and my credit card debt FINALLY paid off, I was in the mood to be reckless with my money but sensible with my purchasing.

Eventually the world’s most patient salesman and I can come to a consensus: a dusty dark brown cattleman.

Looking back, it was so simple, poetic even. Dusty was how I felt at the time. Dark, well that’s the general shade of my soul. Brown is essentially my trademark. As the only brunette amongst three blonde sisters, it was my identity: My oldest sister was The Smart One, my second sister was The Pretty One, my younger sister was The Cute One and I was The Brown One. Sure, it was comically soul crushing but at least it made me memorable to senile, vision impaired relatives. Then there was the Cattleman aspect – while not a legit cattleman, I did technically feed one once so it still counts.

It all fit. It was fate. It was me. And I’m not saying that Australiana headgear makes miracles, but when I walked out of that shop I didn’t need to vom anymore.