Before I left, my mother gave me one piece of advice. ‘Everybody dies,’ she said. ‘Just don’t die stupid.’ Eleven days later, having lost most of the feeling in my hands and feet, and looking across the wide and wind-barren tidal plain where the Snowy River pours into the sea, I remembered her words.

A ceaseless south-easterly had been driving rain and sand against me all day and my legs, exposed beneath the hunchback shape of my rucksack (draped with an oversized swathe of oiled cloth that served as both tent and raincoat), had suffered the brunt of the day’s assault. From where I’d been standing now for over half an hour, weighing my choices, I had seen no one. The hills upriver were shrouded in rain-mist. Away from shore, what doubtful horizon there was must have pitched itself somewhere between the shifting shades of indigo and the grey murk of storm-clouds mingled with bushfire smoke. No boats, it seems, were willing to brave the white-caps today. What few gulls were about had long since quit the flat expanse of sand behind me, fleeing to one of a few small dunes that barely served as windbreaks. Ahead was the latest obstacle to my journey, and the one that had put me in mind—and not for the first time—of my mother’s parting warning.

‘This is a violent place.’ I caught myself mouthing the words, unable to hear anything above the flapping of the cold tarp against my shoulders and the rush of water before me. I had been waiting for the current to slacken, being fortunate to have arrived just before low tide, but instead the receding water had simply been concentrated into a narrow, fast-flowing channel. The force of suction drawing the river out to sea formed streaked hummocks of foam which made it impossible to accurately gauge its depth. I paced up and down the sandy bank, careful not to stray too near its collapsing sides, hoping to find some calmer place where I might chance a crossing. I had never attempted anything like this before, and the fear of the unknown, as well as the very real prospect of being washed out beyond the breakers or pulled under and pinned to the riverbed by some secret eddy, had been mounting for some time. I was already chilled and soaking from the waist down, not a promising start when to cross meant stripping off and swimming with my bag, a simple wade now being conclusively out of the question. I made my decision.

My retreat to the campsite I’d passed through earlier that day provided the chance to reflect again on what I was trying to do and, having been newly reminded of the sorts of risks involved, why I still held it worth doing. I’ve never considered myself a thrill-seeker or adrenaline junkie. I have never believed in danger for danger’s sake, but neither should the mere presence of risk always keep us from pursuing the extra-ordinary.

*

‘Gee, it’s not just anyone who can say they walked from Melbourne to Sydney.’
‘Well, I can’t say it either—yet.’ I had been initially suspicious of him, standing alone up the beach munching on a chocolate and nut bar and looking contemplatively out to sea. His hair dishevelled, and wearing a life jacket but with no obvious sign of a boat, he looked as though he could have just washed up there. Hidden among the rocks around the point, we were easily far enough away from any fishermen and campers that no one would see if it turned out his intentions toward me were less than friendly. But I soon realised this was unfair: I probably looked just as threatening, marching solo along the sand with my five-foot walking stick in hand and wearing two weeks of weathering on my face. After a curt hello and some ground-laying small talk, I found myself confiding to him my goal.
‘How far is that?’
‘Over a thousand kilometres if you follow the coast.’ I was now close to the border of Gunai-Kurnai and Bidwell Country, deep in heart of the Croajingalong National Park, having walked hundreds of kilometres already. That morning marked the beginning of the most remote section of my route. After befriending a fisherman who kindly took me across the Snowy River in his boat, I’d travelled another three days and made two far more successful inlet crossings; wading, and then swimming, with my gear in much milder conditions.
‘You’re by yourself? What are you doing for water?’ All the major rivers in the area are estuarine, a fact I hadn’t fully appreciated just looking at the numerous blue streaks on the map.
‘I didn’t want to go alone, and I’ve had a few friends join for a day or two, but I couldn’t find anyone able to come with me for the whole trip.’
I have hiked and camped solo many times before, and for similar reasons. It is of course far riskier to walk alone, even in more populated areas, but the idea had come upon me one sleepless night only two months prior, and I barely had time to prepare and plan enough just for myself. Before setting out I had been equally concerned about the effect that weeks of self-imposed solitude might have on my mind as I had been about putting that much distance under my feet. The psychological side of the experiment was just as untested as the physical.

Then came a familiar pause in our conversation, and I could hear the next question before he asked it.
‘Why are you doing it?’
This had always proved a difficult one. The simplest response is I wanted to be in Sydney for Christmas; my dad and much of my extended family live there, and it is always too long between visits. But of course this is no real answer at all: I wasn’t part of some Bronze Age migration; there are many more efficient and reliable ways to get between Australia’s two largest cities. Yet looking around, in some ways the answer was obvious. Hooded plovers industriously scurried about the tideline in their tireless search for food, the mighty Tasman Sea was eternally breaking onto the golden shore where we stood, gently shrouding us in fine drifts of ocean spray, through which could be seen cormorants and other seabirds fearlessly bombing the surf against a rain-washed sky. Deep ranks of gnarled banksia trees and squat acacias stood in stalwart alliance with hollowed rock formations against an unending siege of wind and wave, while above soared a white-bellied sea eagle, Australia’s second-largest raptor. Later that day I was to spot seals and dolphins off-shore, and discover the secret bays and hidden pools around the Rame Head, the most desolately beautiful place I have ever been.

Even so, this answer too is inadequate, as my route featured many less astonishing places, though each still possessed its own particular joys and a humbler form of wonder. Personally, the idea of such a journey was compelling enough. I have been raised on stories of heroic travels, of epic passages into distant lands, of quests through dark forests, under ancient mountains, or across uncharted seas. Countless cultures today and in ages past have viewed time in wilder places as an essential component to rites of passage, while many different religious traditions advocate both pilgrimage and periods of seclusion as immensely beneficial to our spiritual formation. Many people long for a deeper connection and engagement with the wider and less populated (by humans) parts of the world, with those of us living in cities and built-up areas finding it increasingly easy to become detached from the basic cycles and changes of the lands on which we live, or even to be ignorant that we are experiencing such a loss. For Australian twenty-somethings like me, it is hugely compelling to search for adventure in far-off places: to get on a plane and fly halfway around the globe seeking new experiences and testing ourselves through travel. Around the world, hundreds of millions of all ages hop on planes every year wanting to meet new people, to see breathtaking sights, to escape from our everyday lives, or simply take things a little slower.

But, in my lifetime, the global community has become increasingly aware that our current travel culture exists in an ecological time capsule with post-dated consequences. More and moreof my generation are coming to terms with the fact that we and our children will be the first ones to meet face-to-face with the full legacy we have left in the past 200 years, that of our climate destabilising patterns of life. The current rate of technological innovation and implementation in aviation, as elsewhere, is too slow to avert decades of disastrously rising emissions, while offsets are of dubious merit and lack big-picture efficacy. The growing movement toward ‘flight-shaming’ may serve to curtail certain cases on the periphery of the problem, but shame and guilt are mediocre motivators in the long-run. For decades we have been told by environmentalists what we must not do, but it is comparatively rare to be shown a way to change that is not only commendable, but desirable.

*

The fact is, I would have chosen to travel by foot even if there were no climate crisis. No doubt serious action on Climate Change necessitates significant shifts on both the individual and societal levels; it will certainly involve sacrifices and principled choices, but this cannot be our only narrative of change. And it need not be. G. K. Chesterton once wrote that ‘An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered.’ At least since Al Gore, so much of the story we tell of climate action is one of inconvenience: that we must do things ‘the hard way,’ or perhaps not at all, that we must use less, have less, be less. But our current circumstances are also a call to adventure: an invitation to explore and more wholly reconsider the lives we lead—their form, the kinds of fruit they bear when fully ripe, and whether this is truly acceptable to us. While walking hundreds of kilometres between cities may remain beyond the practical horizons of many, all of us have the capacity to boldly chart another course. Our acute need for a different way provides both the opportunity and motivation to interrogate whether the ways we have hitherto decided to arrange our lives—our values, our habits, our assumptions—are, on balance, the best we can come up with.

By some measures, at least, walking is inconvenient. It is undeniably slower than almost any other mode of travel. Yet, if I were pressed for time, but still refused to fly, I could have gone by train, bus, car, bicycle, boat, or perhaps even horse. As it turned out, after a connecting train journey across open farmland, my route included two and a half magical days crossing the Gippsland Lakes in a borrowed kayak. It took even less time than this to become thoroughly converted to a form of travel I had previously barely considered. Still further possibilities abound, awaiting only our creative (re-)discovery of them. There are people around the world today who find the idea of jogging many miles to visit friends or relatives entirely unremarkable: for them, that’s just how you get there. For me, who runs mostly for fitness and not very far, I find this prospect near-intoxicating—to cover ground at the same speed (or faster) as city traffic, but in the free air and carried along by nothing but your own limbs and natural vigour. None of this is to disenchant or devalue the miracle of flight or the various perfectly fit uses for plane travel (here in Australia, the Royal Flying Doctor’s Service comes to mind), but why let planes occupy such a hegemonic place in our travel plans? In some sense then, I walked to see whether flying less necessarily means missing out, really, on anything. After all, I chose walking not for the things it isn’t, but for what it is.

Travelling on foot allows you to experience a place more directly, thoughtfully, and persistently than anything else I know. More so even than cycling or running, you feel as though you are part of the landscape for a time—like you are inside of it, a participant—not just an observer who briefly skates across the surface on their way to somewhere else. It is our native and most basic way of moving through space, and the mind is thus freed to focus its attention on the hundreds of other things going on around us all the time. The morning light shafting between pale columns of mountain ash along a forest highway, the fresh touch of ocean breeze after a cloistering tea-tree copse, the silent permanence of a boulder nestled in the undergrowth, the fervent cries of a pied oystercatcher seeking its mate before nightfall, the rust-rose glow as the sun’s last rays mantle the crest of a great dune. The world between my doorstep and my destination is so full of marvels that I had never known—nor could have known—had I settled for a seat on a plane. Travelling this way I found wildness, adventure, novelty, beauty, and serenity in my home country in equal measure to anywhere I have been overseas. Even after more than a month on the road, I felt as though I’d spent too little time in each place—as though 4km/h wasn’t slow enough.

Some days on foot were like meditation, and I often found I was singing or humming softly to myself, prompted by the simple pleasure of being about and alive in the world. My mind emptied, to be filled again with fresh things clear and wonderful. Walking is of course physical too: such a simple motion that, when repeated, engages and dignifies the whole body’s essential role in the accomplishment of distance. It was endlessly gratifying to learn and re-learn what I am capable of—this frame of flesh, bone, and sinew working in concert to deliver me each day to somewhere new. I also gained an unexpected appreciation for food: the vital fuel that enabled and renewed my efforts, transformed by internal alchemy to reinforce tissues and become new muscle.

*

‘Yeah, I’m the ranger for that whole area, yeah. What can I do for ya?’ The voice through the phone was frank and unadorned, with an economy of pleasantries that spoke of a thousand more pressing matters to attend. I took the hint and tried my best to be brief.
‘Hi. I was just wondering about some of the tracks through the northern section of the park, I know everything’s closed south of the Braidwood Road, but from the maps I can find there seems to be a path through the—’
‘You want to go walking?’
‘Yeah, I was hoping to—’
‘Now?’
‘… yeah.’
‘I don’t like your chances.’
After hours of trying to get onto someone who knew the area, I once more reaped the benefits of local advice. Of course he was right. There was a bushfire the size of a city burning just fifty kilometres south of the route I was considering. It involved steep, isolated ascents and descents, with multiple gorge crossings and no indication of how they might be accomplished, except two tantalising words in tiny print beneath a thin black line: ‘Flying Fox.’
Could I..? No.
But just think how amazing it would—
No. Don’t be stupid.

The changing wind settled it. None of this was in my original plan: I never intended to come through Canberra at all, let alone spend days attempting to re-route around the region’s worst bushfires in memory. With a string of hot days nudging 40º C to come, coupled with a steady northerly breeze, I was forced again to compromise. This too is the nature of adventure, and a timely reminder that we are not in control. But even my new, patchy itinerary held many latent pleasures. One such was the sleepy town of Penrose. Just 5km from the M31 under the eaves of a mixed woodland of native flora and radiata pines, the town plays host to a burgeoning little community project, boasting its own market garden, beauty salon, and music performance space (among other features), complete with adjacent café. As the café owner was generously refilling my water bottles, I found myself drawn toward the sound of spirited improv rock drifting across from next door. Before I knew it, I was shaking the hand of Craig, himself a visitor, who was within a minute offering me a beer and handing me a bag of free, locally-grown oranges. His enthusiasm was contagious, and as he showed me around the place I started to wonder whether I really needed to walk any further that day. But, after being introduced to some of the others and catching the tail-end of their jam session, I reluctantly decided that I ought to be on my way. Craig’s cryptic farewell still rings my ears: ‘I reckon you’ll be back. I don’t know when, but I got a feeling you’ll be back.’

When walking in the bush, the most common reason to check your current course is the discovery of unexpected and unmarked paths. They can be old roads overgrown from disuse, or perhaps new ones never quite followed through. Normally, due to the quality and definition of the primary track, they can be comfortably dismissed as dead-ends or minor trails. At other times though, when the way forward is far from clear, these new routes prompt us to look more closely, unsure of which to take. Occasionally, another way is found—one not on any of the usual maps—and, over time, as more and more people try it and judge it to be better, they begin to ignore the old one. Through a collective change in the inclinations of many, a new path opens, soon becoming more distinct and well-trodden than the other.

These paths of our choice have a name: desire lines. As we become ever more convinced of where our current path ultimately leads, we are being called to forge new ones.

***

In the late spring of 2019 the writer set out to walk from Melbourne to Sydney to see his Dad for the holidays. Due to severe bushfires in many areas, he was unable to walk the full distance, but managed over 600kms of self-powered travel, mostly on foot. His experiences and reflections are further documented in a forthcoming film series, available for free online.