With international travel off the cards, more people are looking at ‘van life’

As a stand-up comedian, Matt Watson is well-versed in the art of the joke.

But as he arrived in Australia from Canada for the trip of a lifetime — only for the nation to shut its borders, rendering travel all but impossible — you’d be forgiven for thinking he’d become the punchline.

“My goal of coming to Australia was to tour all over, but my home base was going to be Melbourne,” he laughs.

Watson is part of the nation’s burgeoning “van life” community — a social movement of travellers, shirking their reliance on houses and hotels for life on the road.

Taking root in the 1960s,…