Visit the future of awildland

It all began here at our long-serving, hard working little blog page - a free, open access site detailing our many Australian adventures. But now...we are mixing things up a little and we have (finally) launched our own dedicated website with a changing gallery of never before seen images, new stories and even (possibly) prints and gifts - awildland.com.au. 

But we still love this blog page. It's not going anywhere. Our first blog was published here in 2012. Now the page boasts 137 posts detailing adventures from every state and territory in Australia. It has always been a place for us to hone our crafts and express our love of adventure, exploration and the Australian landscape. 

But, if you have been a regular visitor to this blog or followed our socials, you probably noticed that it all went really quiet in 2020.  

The lapse had many causes - changes in writing motivation and writing time were the main two. Even the simplest of blogs takes many hours of research, writing, and compilation but our commitment to spreading the word about adventure and nature also earnt us nothing. We have always kept this page ad-free and subscription free. And for the blog to continue, we felt we needed something to supplement or supercharge the motivation required to keep blogging. 

So we took a step back, enjoyed our adventures for a while, wrote and photographed for ourselves. Thinking all the time of how to mix things up.  

The end result is a new website! A fresh look and a slightly different approach. 

You can visit us at awildland.com.au

The website gives us greater flexibility and the chance to be more dynamic and varied as well as giving us a platform to promote our professional writing and photography. 

At awildland.com.au our plan is to make the photo gallery ever-changing; with the best on offer and not always tied to a story. We've started small, with themed galleries, but already it contains many never-before-published images. These images stand alone as things of beauty and exploration. The blog posts may be less frequent but still informative with a stronger focus on the story they have to tell, the histories in place and the things we can all do to ensure nature thrives into the future. 

awildland.blogspot.com.au will continue to exist as an archive, as long as blogspot exists. We may move some of the more relevant pieces to the new website and all new blogs will appear there rather than here. 

The idea is to evolve - us and this site; for the blog to evolve with nature and its voice.

Kalbarri National Park, Western Australia

We arrived during a wicked thunderstorm; driving headlong into clouds the colour of the bitumen road. Then, torrential rain and the wipers banging madly left to right. The unsettled weather lasted three days. The rainfall meant dirt roads to the Murchison River gorge walks were closed. So, we began our explorations of this national park along the coast. 

We had stumbled into Kalbarri National Park, following a tip-off from a friend who rated this park as their favourite in the entire state of Western Australia. A vast state, in our vast continent, with this astoundingly unsung pocket of country. The coast walks showed us shifts of colour, brilliantly combined. Then we finally got access to the Murchison River gorge and the dramatic, swirling cliffs and flooded Murchison River took this park to a whole new level of scenic. The impressive beauty was deeply surprising and the sense of discovery hugely satisfying. 

Capturing the Ephemeral - mist and fog in the Australian landscape

This is an old, but strong, memory: Caz and I standing on the edge of an extinct volcano at dawn. Mist, settled in the valley below. In the distance, the volcanoes remnant central vent, Wollumbin (Mt Warning), and 600m below my feet lush farmland now covering the ancient crater. We are at Pinnacle Lookout in Border Ranges National Park, entranced and awestruck by the day’s first casting of shadows. 

The sun’s morning light is soft and golden. Birds are calling in the rainforest behind me. The metal lookout fence is cold beneath my arms. The sky is clear. And, the mist is making this moment magic. It has thrown a thin veil over the landscape below. The trees, the paddocks, the farmhouses and dams are a mosaic of light and dark - long rays of shadow streak across the hills like the strands of a fine and delicate tapestry still being woven.

Marching Orders - Cape Le Grand National Park, WA

It takes time, to find the emotional distance one need's, to re-tell a traumatic story. Finally, I am ready to write about the first and only time Caz and I have been kicked out of a national park. 

And not just any national park, but the stunningly beautiful Cape Le Grand in the south-west of Western Australia with its granite peaks and deserted white sand beaches, its turquoise ocean; whales frolicking in deep bays, its unique flowers decorating the low heathlands and our overnight off-track adventure that was, at the time, an absolute joy.

Koi Kyenunu-ruff - the Stirling Range Ridge Walk, Western Australia

The track notes say to expect the following: narrow ledges, much scrambling over rocky peaks, probable violent weather changes including whiteouts or snow while tackling steep ascents and descents with unreliable water sources and other 'significant challenges' such as the trail being easy to lose.

Guide books are, of course, by their very meaning, supposed to be accurate guides to a walk. But the tatty track notes I have borrowed for this 3-day walk are more than 20 years old so I would excuse them some discrepancies, particularly with the ever-changing nature of a wild landscape. The fact they turn out so eerily accurate, in directions and in the adjectives used, is worth mentioning.

The wild and crazy west - bushwalking on the Bibbubulum Track from Bow Bridge to Denmark

The forest smells of sun-warmed rain. The trees by the track drip with water. It wets my boots and I feel damp leaves against my bare arms.  The path winds between twisted, low gum trees. But, this kind of track walking makes me look inwards more than outwards. A dozen ideas, conversations, random stories and thoughts jostle loudly in my head. 

It feels both cleansing and annoying to let the internal noise run its wild path as we leave the road behind us and begin climbing towards Nut Lookout. The white sand track becomes mesmerising. I watch my feet and am still only half aware of my surroundings so that Caz has to stop me and bring me to the moment. Look at the view, he says. It ranges across verdant farm paddocks to the coast that stretches eastwards. I search, uselessly, for the exact route of the Bibbubulum Track, and where it will takes us over the next 7 days as we wend our way from our starting point (Conspicuous Beach) all the way to the town of Denmark, about 82km east. 

There are track notes for this walk in plenty of obvious places - the reliable and endlessly admirable authors John and Monica Chapman cover this section in their Bushwalking in Australia book. And you can get detailed notes through the Bibbubulum Track website as well as a plethora of other information online and in print.

What you will get here, at awildland, is a combination of the noise in my head and Caz's beautiful images. You'll get the cleansing process that comes with long walks.

Across Oz - cycle touring Australia, Coast to Coast

Most nights we just pushed our bikes off the road, into the scrub and pitched the tent. At one point we couldn't wash our cycling shorts for 10 days. Across the Nullarbor, we cycled Australia's longest section of  road without a bend - 146.6km over two days. Our legs got sunburnt, our stamina was tested, and the wind was a constant battle. This, is the story of one of our most challenging and memorable adventures yet.

The plan was to ride our bicycles coast to coast, more than 4,200 km across Australia from City Beach in Perth to Nobby’s Beach in Newcastle. There was to be no fundraising for charity, no-one sponsored us, we didn’t raise awareness for a particular cause, or visit public schools along the way. It was to be our first major adventure holiday together as a couple. Pure, selfish adventure.

A taste of the Munda Biddi Trail - Western Australia

Do meat pies and cycle touring go together like ducks and water? Is there a symbiotic relationship between bakers and bike riders; a long, evolutionary unfolding of shared necessity? 

Lunch time, at Pemberton in the south-west of Western Australia. Before we set of for a taste of the Munda Biddi Trail, we are tasting the local pies at Crossings Bakery. They're not bad. Certainly they are full of the sort of fat-fueled energy we'll need for the journey ahead. The Munda Biddi Trail (MBT) is a 1,000 km off-road cycling route stretching from Mundaring (near Perth) to Albany on the south coast. Listed as one of National Geographic's top 10 cycle rides in the world, it is a combination of single-track, forest roads, old rail trails and small sections of bitumen.  

Done by twelve - cycle touring in the Kimberley

Have you heard the one about the meat inspector and the non-breeding golden-headed cisticola. Sounds catchy but there is no punchline. They are just two snippets from an entertaining journey - cycle touring for four days in the Kimberley region of Western Australia.