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. The first story was published in 2012. Now the blog 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.

Redbank Gorge - Tjoritja National Park, NT

A few months ago we paddled into a mountain - one of our shortest and most accessible adventures yet. But also, one of our most extraordinary. 

Pawenyapeena (Spring); Lake Belton, Tasmania

And winter only just turned over on that man-made bureaucracy known as a calendar as we set off walking for two nights and three days of sanity saving spring sunshine - finally, a three day forecast of no rain; clear skies. It is spring; technically, and, I’ll come back to that later.

The aim of this trip is to introduce two new awildland team members to the world of wild places. Blue and Yella are secondhand packrafts purchased months earlier. They have been waiting patiently in the garage as winter cold fronts have swept, one after the other, over the Tasmanian mountains. They’ve heard rumours of snow camping and frozen boots. They’ve seen the awildland team returning wet to the bones. They’ve glimpsed photos of white-capped mountains and ice-covered tarns. Now it’s spring. This is to be their maiden voyage. We choose something simple for this first adventure, and, it turns out something totally sublime. 

Rumble in the Jagungal - Mt Jagungal, Kosciuszko National Park, NSW

“A lot happened today” is the opening, understated sentence in my journal on Day 3 of an eight day walk in the Jagungal Wilderness of Kosciuszko National Park. 

“Up at 5:30am,” it continues. “The sky east was clear, the sky west dark with clouds. The frontal edge of the approaching storm is drawn in a straight line directly above us. Re-checked the weather and not much change but, hints that the bad weather should be gone by the afternoon.”

So, of course who wouldn’t set off walking into that uncertain sky. We started walking that day at 7:30am, leaving the safety and shelter of O'Keefe's Hut with plans to stick to our Plan A, which was to climb the epic 2,061m high Mt Jagungal and spend a night on its impressive summit; despite the menacing pall, despite the storm warning and with us using the untracked, steep, thick-scrubbed direct approach from the weather station on Grey Mare Fire Trail.

Standing Guard - The Sentinel Range, Tasmania

The Tyndalls: Paradise in the sky

I drag my boots through my over pants, zip them down to my ankles then reach for my gaiters. These I strap on over the top. I zip up my raincoat, despite the sky being blue and clear. This full armour feels stiff and ungainly as I shoulder my overnight pack and follow Caz into a tight scrub of tea-tree and banksia. Last night it rained. This is why we wear everything. The trees are heavy with moisture. It is like pushing through the wet swirling brushes of a wild car wash. I wish I had added gloves to my bare hands. At this early hour, on the shady side of the mountain range that lies ahead, the trunks of the small trees are covered in frost. I grab and wrestle the stubborn branches and my fingers grow increasingly numb. There is a path, but it is narrow, rough, muddy, slippery, strewn with puddles and hemmed in by this encroaching, tough, west-coast Tasmanian scrub. They are admirably persistent trees in Tasmania. About 2-3m high, thin trunked and flexible. They hold their ground with determination; and a knowledge of their right to be exactly where they are.

Fortunately, it is a short half hour of this kind of tense conversation and we emerge onto open, mountainside heath marked by clumps of buttongrass waving their bobble-headed flowers stalks in celebration. Above us now we can see our destination - the spectacular and geologically bizarre Tyndall Range. Many locals argue that this mountain, and its labyrinth of lakes and cliffs, is the state’s finest alpine region, with relatively easy access and few crowds. 

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.