Walking in the wild

tales from the Overland Track | honouring our feet | adventure inspiration

Family portrait at Pelion Plains, Overland Track Tasmania

The clouds lift and a great expanse of blue opens above.

Imagine this, after three days of walking in cold soaking rain.

The sun is so bright I hide under my wide brimmed bushwalking hat. A sweet warmth rises from the ground, it reminds me of my childhood, of making brown, sludgy mud-cakes.

My seven-year-old son, Sidney, is singing a nonsense song as he walks. His red 24 litre backpack is clipped neatly around his waist. His navy and orange sports shoes squeak on the wooden duckboards¹. A compass sways gently across his stomach, it hangs from his neck on a bright blue string.

We try to catch the words and join in the chant — macaroni, a bunny, and Justin Bieber? But it doesn’t matter, out here in the wild everything sounds strange and mysterious — trees whimper in the wind, boulders swallow the thump of feet, and shrimp drum underwater in mountain tarns.

We hear the call of a froglet by the track and stop to look into the clear cool water. My six-year-old son, Arthur, puts his hands in and lifts out a tiny pulsing amphibian. We stare at it in wonder. Our nine-year-old daughter, Lottie, crouches down to scoop water in a red plastic cup, lifts it to her lips to drink. My husband cuts off hunks of salami with his pocket knife and feeds them into our hands as we pass him.

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At the end of January our family² went bushwalking. We filled our packs with food for six days, tents, cooking and sleeping equipment, and warm clothes.³ And with nine members of our extended family and one friend we set off along the Overland Track, an iconic 65 kilometre walk through the heart of the wulinantikala Cradle Mountain — leeawulenna Lake St Clair Wilderness World Heritage Area.

It was an incredible adventure. We walked in stinging rain and burning sun; climbed alpine mountains; traversed windswept plateaus, the older cousins holding the hands of the younger; and swam beneath glittering waterfalls. We slept in our clothes, wore the same soggy socks and boots for days, sucked strips of dried meat like lolly pops, shared pots of rehydrated meals and yarns in the evening, and read stories of wulinantikala \ leeawulenna Country in hut books and the bark peeling from snowgums.

Walking in wild weather on the Cradle Mountain plateau

We were a family gone wild, like a mob of kangaroos escaped from a nature sanctuary.

Bouncy feet.

Wide eyes.

Hungry ears.

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At the end of the walk, while waiting for a ferry across leeawulenn Lake St Clair, the deepest lake in Australia, I read a quote on the Narcissus Hut wall by naturalist John Muir — In every walk with nature one receives far more than he seeks and I wondered then about what we had received.

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Less than 12 hours after returning home, the house covered in drying bushwalking equipment, I flew to the bustling metropolis of Sydney for a writing course with the talented and generous author

Bri Lee

. That evening I stood at the window of my hotel, palms pressed flat to the thick glass, fifteen stories up.

I looked out at the city — tall grey buildings with hundreds of glowing windows, a swarm of ‘party people’ on the footpath, a flashing neon sign beckoning, open late. It was a city much brighter than the universe pressing down from above — a vast vibrating slab of humanity.

And I thought about that day on the Overland Track when we stood on top of Mount Ossa, the highest mountain in Tasmania. The sky a deep bowl of blue, a few swirling clouds on the horizon, half the Island visible, only one human mark in the distance — a thin brown incision, a forestry road.

And I knew then which place had captured my heart.

If you walked through a wild place would it change you?

Yellow Alpine Groundsel, Mount Ossa, Overland Track, photo by A Bown

Back at home, late in the evening, I began writing about our Overland Track adventure — little stories, postcards from the wild. I can’t wait to share them with you. I’ve included three here for you.

Jelly snakes

I stop to take a photo. But it’s difficult to capture the magic of this place — where things grow in a tangle of complexity that is too hard for us to fathom, trees stand as old as a time we cannot know, and the only evidence of the human hand is under our feet.

Walking here feels like glitter running through my veins, like lemonade popping in my stomach, like jelly snakes slithering on my tongue. If only the jelly snakes would slide all the way down to Arthur’s weary legs.

Mum, the lolly energy isn’t getting through, he told me despairingly one afternoon, his body curled over a boulder at the side of the track. I think of a story to honey his ears. To lull him along kilometre by kilometre. I tell him about the tooth fairy.

Undulating

The word undulating is used frequently in our Overland Track guidebook. It means the land is shaped like a gentle wave — mostly flat walking, with a little up and down at times. Our children do not like undulating. It is frustrating to walk back down what you have just walked up. Why didn’t they just build a tunnel, Sidney asked his father when he was fed up. We are almost there, he reassured him as we dropped into another patch of forest, the campsite still just around the corner.

Here, on the Overland Track, nothing stays the same for long. Everything is already becoming, flowing into something else.

It only takes half an hour for a hot spot on your foot to turn into a blister, a grey cloud to drop water from the sky, an exhausted child to fall face first into the mud.

Golden hour at Pelion Plains

Everyone at the hut rushes outside to the heli-pad. It is the place with the best view of the sunset. A gentle breeze pushes the clouds aside and Mount Oakleigh’s long dolerite spires appear. We watch the mountain change clothes, from pink to orange to purple. The evening light catches our cheeks — that warm glow that makes everything look beautiful. Cameras out. We pose for a family photo. It’s the first time on the trip I notice that we are missing our youngest child. And I think of something she said when we watched the sunset on Maria Island a month ago. Look Mum, the sky is going to sleep.

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A beautiful poem about feet and friendship —

About Standing (in Kinship)
By Kimberley Blaseser

We all have the same little bones in our foot
Twenty-six with funny names like navicular.
Together they build something strong —
Our foot arch a pyramid holding us up.
The bones don’t get casts when they break.
We tape them — one phalange to its neighbour for support.
(Other things like sorrow work that way, too —
find healing in the leaning, the closeness.)
Our feet have one quarter of all the bones in our body.
Maybe we should give more honour to feet
and to all those tiny but blessed cogs in the world —
communities, the forgotten architecture of friendship.

A few wild and wonderful things

Cloudy Bay

Last weekend the kids and I went camping with friends on Bruny Island in southern Tasmania. The Cloudy Bay campground is magical — a tall eucalyptus forest greeting a sandy surf beach, with a lazy lagoon just around a headland, smooth steel boulders lining the shore.

We wore wetsuits all day and swam, surfed, paddled and fished. In the afternoon, we ferried the children on a SUP⁴ across the rushing rapids of the lagoon mouth to a smooth cream beach. They pretended they were shipwrecked and made a hide out in the rushes, collected a bucket full of solider crabs just in case. The dads swam across but were dragged by the current and had to walk up the beach. The mums crossed further up and landed in exactly the right spot. And no one caught a fish.

In the evening, the children asleep, I lay in my sleeping bag and the crash of waves on the beach filled my ears, like an ocean nocturne.

My husband had work commitments but managed to join us for a few hours. Our friends stepped in to help, carrying my children when they were tired or hurt, supervising water activities, jump-starting our van when the battery went flat, ordering me fish and chips for dinner on the way down.

We were like a remote village — tents on sandy black dirt, fire smoke lifting through the canopy, smiles on sea-salty faces — raising children together. On our last day silver clouds rolled into the Bay.

Writing Update

No one notices how I rise in the dark, boil the kettle, pour a cup of tea, and run my fingers over the letters on my computer keyboard.

I’m writing nearly everyday, thanks

Summer Brennan

for your encouragment and support.

How do you start the day?

I loved joining author

Bri Lee

and 15 other delightfully wordy people for her February writing workshops. I came home with new friends, a furious energy for reading, and tips and tricks in my pocket. Bri’s debut novel The Work will be published in April and I am excited to be seeing her in conversation at the Hobart Town Hall on April 30th. Tickets are here if you’d like to come along.

Adventure inspiration

My dear friend Vonna shared a blog, Noodles for Breakfast, with me a few years ago. It was the story of a young New Zealand family-of-five who walked the length of Aotearoa New Zealand on Te Araroa Trail. It's roughly 3000kms, and it took them 6 months. I have always been inspired by their courage and sense of adventure. And I would like to share their story with you here.

Now we are home I am thinking about our next family adventure. I wonder where we will go, what we will do?

And you?

What wild adventure awaits?

As you read this letter our family will be driving to Burnie on the north west coast of Tasmania. Tomorrow, my husband and I have an adventure date. We are running the final 27 kilometre leg of the Gone Nuts race together. The course description says it’s an undulating course with some short steep sections. Our wonderful friends S and J are looking after our four kids.

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Wishing you time this month to walk in the wild and read in a sunbeam.

With love and kindness,

Kate xx

1. Duck boards are planks of wood placed on the ground as part of a walking track. They are used to prevent further damage to the ground from walkers, most commonly in muddy sections.

2. Lottie 9, Sidney 7, and Arthur, 6, my husband and I. Our three-year-old had a special holiday with Grandma, as she was not quite old enough for the trip and Anders and I not quite strong enough to carry her.

3. Our five packs weighed in at 65.5 kilograms!

4. A SUP is a ‘stand up paddle board’. The board floats on top of the water, you can sit or stand on the board, and manovure it through the water using a long paddle.