The assignment was to write about books and authors that have inspired and that continue to influence me. It was published on a now-defunct writers’ website.

“We read to know we’re not alone.”
…William Nicholson, Shadowlands

My introduction to literature came not through the classics or my education. It came through tales of travel and adventure. It happened like this…

I WALKED INTO a bookshop that day in a time now distant. I’ve forgotten how many decades ago it was. Doing that was something I often did.

In writing that, something comes to mind. It is about my late-friend, Carolyn Nuttall. She lived in Brisbane, Highgate Hill, not far from where I went to high school. She was author of a couple non-fiction books. But what I want to say is how I would bump into her in bookshops. That happened not in Adelaide and, if I remember correctly, in Melbourne. That is why I associate Carolyn with bookshops. But, my story wanders, so let’s step back a few decades before that.

I don’t know… there was something about bookshops. I would wander the aisles, thumbing through the odd book, sometimes even buying one. My preference was for non-fiction but here I was in the fiction section.

Perhaps it was the title that caught my eye. I picked up the book and start to flick through, reading the odd paragraph here and there. I not sure what it is about but whatever it is, it caught my imagination. I walk out with a copy of The Dharma Bums in the back pocket of my jeans.

Kerouac’s semi-autobiographical novel follows his alter ego, a 1950s drifter seeking Buddhist enlightenment. It contrasts the bohemian city life of jazz clubs, poetry readings and wine with the solitary asceticism of hiking and climbing mountains in the Sierra Nevada.

This was the book that first awakened me to the reality that there were other, freer ways to live. That came as something of a revelation to my young self.

Finishing the book in quick time, I go back to the bookshop to see what else this Jack Kerouac character had written. I walked out with a copy of On the Road. No way could I have guessed how influential this book would be.

I start to rea. The going is difficult at first. His long, long sentences that disregard punctuation are a bit of a struggle, however they bring an immediacy to his text as if I too am travelling along the road that is the chief metaphor in his book. Later, I learn this is called ‘spontaneous prose’. It set a reading pace that generates a sense of movement and the way thoughts flow through the mind. A sort-of stream of consciousness downpour of words on to the page as if Kerouac is writing down his flow of thoughts and they come and go.

Discovery Kerouac comes at the right time in life for me. I was young and ready for change. I think I had been unknowingly seeking it, change. It was a restlessness I was feeling that I couldn’t put into words. No idea where it came from. No idea where it would take me. It was directionless, a semi-conscious notion in my head.

The book opened my eyes. There were other possibilities than stepping into a comfortable niche in the social mainstream, than stepping into the shoes of conventional life that the previous generation had prepared for us. Now I saw that there were paths to other, more intriguing places. But how would I find them? Sure, I did find some by experimentation, some deliberately. But what bugged me was the question of whether they were the right paths. Were there others I should be exploring?

On the Road appealed because the lives of the characters that Kerouac described had some rough and tenuous resemblance to those of the people I associated with. It was more their attitudes, perhaps. The mentality of the characters is where I found the similarities, their spontaneous attitude to life.

In looking back and suggesting that I was unknowingly looking for change in life, for redirection onto a different path, I wonder how much one of the people I was working with influenced me. On the outside Jack Hawkins was an ordinary looking man in middle age. On the inside he was exceptional. He had equanimity and insight and that is what impressed me. Jack introduced me to Buddhism. It had some appeal and perhaps it could direct me along one of those unkown paths to somewhere. I didn’t know. I developed only a superficial contact with Buddhism at the time. Perhaps it prepared me mentally for the surge in interest in Eastern philosophies that would come with the 1970s, not that I became caught up in any. Perhaps it unknowingly fed my later visits to the Sydney Zendo.

On the Road is usually regarded as Kerouac’s most influential work in that it inspired footloose young people to stick out their thumb and make their own transcontinental journey across the USA. Did it have that effect here in Australia? I’ve found nothing written about it. My guess is that it did. I was aware that there was a tribe of people who were traversing the country by hitching. That was a common way to get around then. But were they doing that just to get from place to place or was it some kind of lifestyle?

My discovery of Kerouac, and others’ discovery of his writing, coincided with the emergence of an American folk singer who, accompanying his rough voice on acoustic guitar, sang his stories of life to a youthful coterie all too ready to listen. His songs formed a melodic accompiament to the words of Kerouac and, somehow, caught the restless vibe of the time. Bob Dylan and Jack Kerouac were a natural combination that propelled me towards whatever it was I was seeking, if that was anything at all.

The road was metaphor, an asphalt passage threading the country. More than a mere physical route it was a conduit propelling his characters into motion to take them to friends and strangers and distant places. The road was the medium through which they sought identity, freedom and meaning.

Meaning? Seeking meaning in life? Maybe the road would take them to that, maybe not. Kerouac wrote in 1950s America and that was a very straight-laced time. Uptight, some might say. But there were rumblings though you would have to look hard to discern them. Something was brewing under the smooth surface of society but it would be more than a decade before it burst forth in a disruptive cascade that rose and fell into a new normal.

Deviation in those times was looked down upon. But there were cultural deviants out there, people in search of something more fulfilling in life. Was Kerouacs’ On the Road a fictional narrative that could take them there? An allegory whose characters were symbolic figures brought together to spin the ideas the author wanted to convey? Maybe, like me, they had no idea of what it might be.

Freedom, a sense of freedom… I think that slippery concept was what impelled people into the kind of lives Kerouac wrote about. Some talked about Kerouac’s influence pushing them into the freewheeling lifestyle they sought on the road. For others it lay a quiet motivator just below everyday consciousness. Whatever motivated it, the sense of freedom remained largely conceptual, uninvestigated, poorly defined.

Kerouac’s was a tale of adventure in life as well as movement by road across the USA. Inspring our youthful consciousness was the knowledge that Kerouac had made the journeys he wrote of, his stories were at least partly fact masquerading as fiction. Some of us didn’t know that at the time. When we found out the revelation was even more inspiring.

Like The Dhamma Bums before it, On the Road spoke to me. It wasn’t that I wanted to get out on the Pacific Highway and thumb my way north to distant and unknown destinations, although I admit to feeling the pull of Far-North Queensland with its distant, shabby towns clinging to the tropical coast. It was more knowing that I could do that if I wanted to. That knowledge, just like hitching a succession of rides north, brought a sense of freedom. Options in life count for much.

On the Road spoke to so many others over the decades. It forecast how the footloose and the seekers of the 1970s counterculture would quit the city and head north or in any direction to where others of their kind gathered. I think it still whispers its seductive message to those with ears to hear and the eyes to read it.

Desolation Angels, the story of his time as a fire lookout atop Desolation Peak in the North Cascade Range in the US northwest followed in my binge reading of Kerouac. That was a story of the mountains and what happened in the minds of those who spent their summers isolated in their lookout towers. The work carried its own appeal even to someone like me, way across the ocean on the other side of the world. Lonesome Traveller followed. Solitary wandering physical and mental as a path to self-discovery and spiritual truth.

Big Sur is one of my favourite Kerouac books. I found a tone of sadness on reading the account of his six or so weeks living in a coastal shack on the California coast in 1960, his stays there broken by trips back to San Francisco.

The book is a reflective story of coming to terms with his popularity as a writer. He talks of being tired of being pursued by followers and the media, and reflects on the contrast between the popular perception of him as a wandering writer and what he feels he has become:

“Because after all the poor kid actually believes that there’s something noble and idealistic and kind about all this beat stuff, and I’m supposed to be the King of the Beatniks according to the newspapers, so but at the same time I’m sick and tired of all the endless enthusiasms of new young kids trying to know me and pour out all their lives into me so that I’ll jump up and down and say yes yes that’s right, which I can’t do anymore…”.

Big Sur is marked by ennui, a listlessness and sense of dissatisfaction and existential crisis. Despite this, I found it a profoundly immersive book. Written in 1961 after he returned from his little shack in Bixby Canyon, the outpouring marked a stark turn from the exuberant freedom of On the Road. It was a turn toward disillusionment and spiritual crisis.

All of these were influential but none as influential as On the Road and The Dharma Bums. Kerouac’s writing gave me the taste for tales of travel and far places. Soon after, I found William Least-Heat Moon’s Blue Highways and John Steinbeck’s Travels With Charlie. Both relate road trips the authors made across the American landscape, revealing how we experience travel in our own ways. We notice different things. We like and dislike particular places, encounter different people and have different experiences of a landscape.

I wondered why I had come across no similar books of cross-country travel in Australia.

Second journey

MY SEARCH was for books by Hemingway. I had only recently discovered him. The sweep of the landscape and the people he wrote about captured my imagination. It was also how he wrote in short, declarative sentences, plain language and a journalistic detachment that avoided ornate adjectives. His writing featured the stark simplicity of economical prose and his stories unfolded through sensory facts and sequential action. This was very different writing than Kerouac.

There was something grand about Hemingway’s writing. It was the scale, the scale of places and the people within them. There was an openness, a freshness in his words.

You know that fiction, prose rather, is possibly the roughest trade of all in writing. You do not have the reference, the old important reference. You have the sheet of blank paper, the pencil, and the obligation to invent truer than things can be true. You have to take what is not palpable and make it completely palpable and also have it seem normal and so that it can become a part of experience of the person who reads it.
… Ernest Hemingway

The Snows of Kilimanjaro, a collection about the author’s travels in Africa, was the volume I walked out of the shop with. I had not long before finished reading his tale of the Spanish Civil War, For Whom the Bell Tolls. I enjoyed the book, its characters, the trajectory of the story and its sense of loss.

Later, I discovered his first novel. It was written while living as an expatriate in Paris and draws directly on his life there as a foreign correspondent and expatriate writer. The city was something of a writer’s encalve and became the literary capital of Europe in the 1920s. His 1926 debut, The Sun Also Rises, tracks American and British expats from Paris to Pamplona’s bullfights, capturing the ‘lost generation’ in its postwar disillusionment. It’s a search for meaning amid fading values, with authenticity found in nature and stoic endurance.

Work in journalism saw me writing in the classic inverted pyramid news writing style. Writing feature articles enforced stylistic compliance with the magazine’s house style. But reading changes us. Even now I find myself adopting a style reminiscent of Hemingway.

Hemingway was a larger-than-life figure whose approach to life I found inspiring. His is the second journey I want to structure this story around, for that is how I see my discovery of literature, as four journeys with many side trips.

Third journey

MY THIRD JOURNEY into literature starts with another accidental discovery in a bookshop.

It was a some years after Kerouac opened my eyes to other possibilities in life and some time after I started reading Hemingway. The author, Peter Matthiessen, was unknown to me, not that I knew of many authors at all. It was the title that caught my attention: The Snow Leopard. The book relates a journey by foot into remote regions of the Himalayas. It also relates a parallel journey made in the author’s mind.

Matthiessen accompanied a friend who wanted to study the bharal, the Himalayan blue sheep. But for Matthiessen the journey was one of Buddhist insight, and to clarify personal events back home in the US.

The pages flow with the detail of their journey, the places, the people, the mountains. It was a step-by-step reading experience that inspired me. I suspect it had that impact not only because it was an adventure in a place far, far from home. This was the Himalayas before the backpackers, before the tourists and tour groups, before the tourism industry packaged and changed the places people came to see in the way a parasite destroys the host organism. It was a time of authentic travel, of discomfort, of making your own way instead of having someone plan an itinerary of places they think you should see.

I suppose I could relate to the book because at that time I was interested in Buddhism. Maybe, though I don’t know if it was so, I was looking for my own insights.

Peter Matthiessen’s The Snow Leopard transported me out of the city and into places strange and distant. I still feel the cold wind and see those high, jagged mountains in my mind when I glimpse the ragged copy of his book on my shelf.

Fourth journey

ANOTHER BOOK. Another place. This time it was not the high mountains of the Himalaya but the coast and ridges of the remote Pacific islands. The Marquesas. The Marquesas of the late 1930s. The Marquesas before they were discovered by footloose westerners. The time before tourism. The time when tradition still ruled lifestyles. It is here my fourth journey into literature starts in the pages of someone else’s journey.

Was it again a title that attracted my attention? Fatu Hiva is so uncommon a title that it is sure to attract the perceptive eye scanning the bookshop shelves. I read Thor Heyerdahl’s Kon Tiki years before, so I guess the mental stage was set for Fatu Hiva. You know how it is… you read one book by an author and want to read more of their work, and on it goes.

Fatu Hiva is the tale of Thor and wife Liv’s time on one of the Marquesas. The book combines archaeology and adventure. Archaeology, in finding in the forest the stone structures and carvings of an earlier people. Adventure of the physical, geographic kind in their crossing and recrossing of the island’s central mountain ridge and in their escape.

The book is non-fiction but, like fiction, it contains tension that ends in resolution. The tension comes when relations with a few of the villagers turn sour. Seeking escape, the couple climb through the forest and cross the island’s central mountain ridge. Descending to an isolated beach they build a shack by the sea. There they live off the land and the sea, and there comes a man hostile to their presence.

Their tropical idyll broken, they recross the island to live in a cave on the coast until they take passage on a trading vessel.

Fatu Hiva is a story of archaeology, of geography, of living off the land and sea, of human relationships and escape. Thor and Liv’s time in the Marquesas was in the 1930s, however the subplot of how human relations force change is the story of any time.

My journey

Hemingway, Kerouac, Matthiessen and Heyerdahl. Why did I find these four writers inspirational? I think the reasons are both societal and personal.

Societal, because at the time I discovered Kerouac and Methiessen, in Australian society as elsewhere in the Western world a subtle and ambiguous mood of readiness for change was forming in those of my generation. It was an unconscious perception that we stood on its brink. It seemed, to many younger people anyway, that the staid society of previous times was due for overhaul and renewal.

Personal, because it was a time when I was open to influence and ready for my own change in life although that was more a subconscious knowing than anything conscious. It was a feeling rather than an urge. The idea of movement by foot across unknown landscapes, of encountering people different to those of the society in which I was immersed, was appealing.

Looking back, I suspect that the travels of thousands of young westerners across Asia to India, Nepal and on to Australia, or back the other way, had something to do with this. Travelling the so-called Hippie Trail was the grand adventure of the time. It also marked the end of the time of open borders, Europe to Asia. They closed with the civil war and consequent Russian occupation of Afghanistan in 1979. They have never reopened.

How was it that these writers made their journeys? What force propelled them on into uncertainty and life lived in the moment? Could I have ever emulated their journeys? I didn’t think so. Those books spoke of other people, other places, other ways of living. They also spoke of other times, times for the most part long gone.

That matters. Opportunities like that open for only a short time and then they close. The time window that enabled the existence of the expat writer and artist community on the Greek island of Hydra opened in the 1950s with increased travel by educated Westerners and Hydra’s distance from mainstream norms. It is the story of expatriate singer/songwriter Leonard Cohen, Australian author and journalist Charmian Clift and writer husband George Johnston. It is also the story of Marianne Ihlen, the Norwegian partner of writer Axel Jensen who became Cohen’s lover.

They all became significant literary and musical figures in later years, but there at the start they were part of an emerging bohemian ethos that encouraged long stays and unconventional relationships. The island’s low cost of living and basic conditions allowed struggling writers and artists to live for years in a then-remote location, supported by their peer group and immersed a cultural moment that valued dropping out of conventional society.

That type of lifestyle was made possible through the 1950s and 1960s thanks to a specific set of economic, cultural, and political circumstances of the time. It started to dissolved some time between around 1964 and the early 1970s as founding members Charmian Clift and George Johnson, who had lived there for nine years, left. The island’s fame grew, attracting a less-desirable crowd of celebrities and hippies.

The books

Those writers. Their influence, I think, was more subtle than visceral, more to do with ways of thinking about the world and about other ways of being. That’s it, isn’t it? That’s what those books opened up an awareness of. They represented possibility and the option of seizing it. That is the power of literature. And in realising it you know that a book has been successful.

Those books about footloose living I found early on have influenced my reading preferences. Although those preferences broadened over time to include genres like science fiction, that earlier reading still points me to books of the type. Books like Jeff McElroy’s Californios and Richard Taylor’s House Inside the Waves, collections of short stories of more-recent years around life on the coast and surfing.

Their value lies not in acheiving some grand ambition, for the characters had none. Are their short sories all fiction? Or are some fictional overlays to factual stories, the names and locations changed, the timeline compacted but the events real? Whatever, the stories are those of ordinary people and ordinary things in life on the coast within the broad ambit of a coastal subculture. And in that they are indicators to the way life is lived there.

Why the coast? Because that is where I live. I have only to look up from where I write to see the turquoise waters of the bay set against the grey-green hills of the distant land. I have come to this place after living on other coasts. The urban coast of Coogee where the controlled environment of the city runs up against the uncontrolled chaos of the sea; the inspiring coast of Byron Bay where the sweep of the yellow sand beach leads the eye to the distant spire of Mt Warning on the far horizon, while close at hand the surging energy of the Pacific cascades in white water on the sand of Main Beach. Books about coasts hold as much appeal as those about the mountains.

The literature of place, people and movement over land and sea. This is where my early reading has led. Let me list some of the other books that have been influential on me:

• Woman in the Wilderness, Miriam Lancewood’s autobiographical tale of her and her partner’s lives, living wild in the mountains of New Zealand
• Watch Me Disappear, Janelle Brown’s intriguing novel of a suburban mother who disappears in the mountains and her husband’s search for her
• Nick Rosen’s explorations in off-grid living in the UK and US
• On Trails by Robert Moor, a story of the tracks, trails and routes that take us across the landscape
• Ducka Bush’s Fire, about her peripatetic life in the US northwest
• Michael Veitch’s The Forgotten Islands about his travels around Tasmania’s Bass Strait islands
• Clair Dunn’s My Year Without Matches, about her year living alone in a humpy in the Australian bush
• The Voyage of the Cormorant by Christian Beech, about his journey in an open boat along the southwestern US coast and into Mexico
• 180° South by Yvon Chouinard, he and his companions retracing of an climbing expedition they made in their youth
• Finding Everett Ruess by David Roberts, the history of the unsuccessful searches for Everett Ruess who disappeared in the desert of southwestern USA
• books by John Krakaeur including In the Wild, the story of wanderer, Chris McCandless whose travels came to an end with his death by misadventure in Alaska
• Dispatches, journalist Michael Herr’s book about his experiences reporting the war in Vietnam
• Homesick-why I live in a shed by Catrina Davies, the story of her search for home on the UK coast
• The Brexit Brigands, Adrian Chisholm’s fictional account of Spain’s political collapse that forces a group of British expats into clanestine survival as refugees in the forests and mountains
• Tim Mathis’ Dirtbags Guide to Life as well as Kevin Mohler’s How to be a Dirtbag, both about living rough and cheap
• Australian author, Kylie Tennant’s The Man on the Headland about a man living alone at Diamond Head on NSW’s mid-north coast and life around the town of Laurieton in the mid-twentieth Century
• Outbreak in the Woods, Ryan Michael Beck’s tale of following the long distance Appalachian Trail as the pandemic breaks out
• From Snow to Ash, Anthony Sharwood’s walk from Walhalla, Victoria, along the long distance and rough Australian Alps Walking Trail all the way to NSW’s Snowy Mountains, just as the devastating bushfires of 2020 were getting underway.

Books about places and the people who venture into them. The first that I read was John McPhee’s Coming Into the Country, a story of his travels and sojourn in Alaska. That was back in the seventies. Just recently I’ve discovered but have yet to read another geography-based book, this one by speculative fiction writer, Kim Stanley Robinson. This is not one of his science fiction novels but the story of his relationship with a landscape, that of the Sierra Nevada mountains of California where over the decades he has spent much time trekking. Entitled The High Sierra, Robinson’s book takes you into the ‘range of light’ and into what he calls the psychogeography of his long relationship with it. The book’s subtitle aptly sums up the relationship: ‘A love story’.

I think that the value of a book of an article about adventure and travel is its ability to transport you to a place or a time. When I open one of those early titles I mention an odd but pleasurable feeling comes over me. It is like I am being shifted not only to the places and events in the book but being shifted back to those past times when I first read the book.

So, this is where that early falling into the literature or place, journey and adventure has led me. It is how innocently picking an interesting-looking book from a bookshop shelf led to discoveries in literature and to a few adventures of my own.

I don’t know where I go from here. Different literary genres pull me in different directions. I suppose I will be happy following any one of them.

• From snow to ash: a journey on foot to an impending crisis
• Kerouac on the coast: Big Sur
• Grand adventures on wild rivers
• Life on the road: freedom, mobile dystopia and resilience
• Evasion escape, survival in the mountains as Spain disintegrates
• Life on Hydra: a fictional reflection
• Along the AT in a time of pandemic
• Homesick: a woman’s search for livelihood and a home
• In Tasmania
• Michael Herr, Tim Page: a note of thanks
• Tasmanian musicians’ pay tribute to Leonard Cohen & Joni Mitchell
• Finding Everett Ruess
• The flight that vanished
• The widening gyre
• A crisis. A vulnerability. A society reconfigures

Falling into literature: how accidental discoveries shaped my reading was originally published in PacificEdge on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The claim that change is getting faster is cliche. It is also true. Change has been building up speed since the mid-1950s in what has become known as the Great Acceleration, the speeding up in social change, technology, science, economics, transportation, aerospace and so much more. In that time Australia has been reinvented in a number of forms. And, now, we stand with our feet on the ground of a society being reconfigured by three major changes that will significantly affect our future… and our present.

Australia is changing.

But its political and economic institutions are not changing fast enough.

For much of the country, the old Australia, the ideas and notions that popular culture sees as Australian characteristics, still exists in the way we talk about politics, work, immigration and national identity. But the country itself is becoming something different.

What it is becoming is not yet clear. The changes have been going on below the surface of society, below the popular imagination, below the attention of social commentators and the media for the most part.

We cannot yet see the margins or clearly discern where this change is taking us. That is still foggy, vague, but the changes are already established. Now, a new book gives us a glimpse into how they are forming a different future.

That is the argument at the centre of George Megalogenis’ new book, Three Shocks: Who We Are Becoming in the 21st Century (Penguin, August 2026).

Megalogenis is an Australian journalist, political commentator and author. He has spent more than three decades in the media, including as economics correspondent and senior feature writer at The Australian and as a member of the Canberra Press Gallery. His later work has included books, essays and documentary projects. The Australian Moment won both the Walkley Award and the Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Non-fiction.

His work is driven by data. For Three Shocks, Megalogenis draws on long-term political and economic analysis, demographic and electoral data, historical research, interviews with political figures and other original research.

He identifies three major changes reshaping Australia. He argues that they are not properly reflected in the media, in national politics or in the wider national conversation.

They are more than demographic statistics or economic trends. They have already changed who Australians are, how they work, where they come from, what they expect from society and how they see Australia’s place in the world. That is so, even if our institutions and many of our citizens cannot see that yet. Together they paint a vivid picture of an emerging Australia.

To understand what is changing, it helps to remember what came before.

What was Australia?

Australia was a relatively homogeneous society for much of the twentieth century, certainly up until the 1970s. It was permeated by a sense of certainty and a belief that technological progress would create a better world.

Most Australians were of European heritage, particularly Anglo-Celtic. There was a broad set of shared assumptions about politics, gender, class and progress.

The political system and the culture were strongly influenced by the dominance of the predominately male, industrial working class. Trade unions, manufacturing, mining, construction and other blue-collar industries provided much of the social foundation of the labor movement. The Australian Labor Party was its political representative. The conservative Liberal–National Coalition drew much of its support from business, farmers, professionals, small business and the suburban middle class.

Our voting and education patterns, culture, opportunities and social outlook were defined along class lines.

Our geopolitical outlook was formed by the experience of the Second World War. Britain, and later the United States, provided strategic protection. Pictured an a European people living on a geographically isolated continent, there was a powerful fear of Asia that dragged us into the war in Vietnam.

That Australia disappeared.

The White Australia policy ended. Successive waves of immigration brought people first from Britain and Europe and later from further afield.

Free tertiary education, introduced by the Whitlam Labor government, helped drive the expansion of higher education and opened new opportunities. Changing expectations opened for the generation born after the Second World War. The stay-at-home housewife, in reality a household managerial role embedded in the culture by the need for childcare and long-ago-formed gender roles, started to totter before it finally fell.

Women entered professional occupations in increasing numbers. Manufacturing declined. The service economy expanded. The social landscape changed with it.

From a predominantly rural economy in the 20th century, we transitioned to manufacturing and then to the digital economy and global participation in the final decades. This evolution brought new opportunities while closing some of the past’s, especially its livelihoods.

Those who lived through the technological and workforce transformation of the 1970s can recall the sense of rapid change and the new opportunities it brought. The Whitlam Labor government’s free tertiary education brought social class migration. Many of the younger demographic moved from working to middle class with its higher incomes. Labor’s free tertiary education was the right policy at the right time as the economy began its technoliogical transformation.

That the nation was changing was not fully visible as it started. Profound demographic change seldom is. It creeps up and one day someone, like George Megalogenis, looks at the data to find that change has already happened and is continuing. Some might mourn the nation as it was and want to return to it, but that is nostalgia, and nostalgia is not a strategy for moving forward. While we can learn from the past, there is no going back.

This trend over the latter decades of the 20th century accounts for the shift of economic and political power from the country to the cities. While the old Australian beliefs and attitudes still exists in some rural areas, the centres of economic and political power now reside in the cities, Sydney and Melbourne especially.

Australia is now more culturally diverse, more highly educated, more urban and more professional. The old political categories do not fit as neatly as they once did. Perhaps that is why politics often seems strangely disconnected from the country it is supposed to represent.

What are they saying?

How are politicians, the media and the other institutions of power responding?

The answer: unevenly, confused, often backward-looking.

Political parties still carry much of the history of the old Australia in their policies. Yet they compete for votes in the new one. They might allude to an imaginary past, a factual past sometimes, but they cannot resurrect and deliver it. Reality does not work like that.

Labor can no longer simply be the party of the industrial working class. That class declined in number, political and cultural power as technology entered the workplace and the economy changed. New skills were demanded. Many of them paid more than the old industrial skills. Labor now has to appeal to professionals, women, migrants, regional workers and people experiencing economic insecurity.

My guess, and it is only a guess based on having lived through this change, is that the process began to accelerate in the 1970s as Australian business and industry started to computerise.

The Coalition has a different problem.

Some of its traditional support came from educated middle-class and professional Australians. Parts of that constituency became socially progressive and increasingly uncomfortable with aspects of conservative politics. A portion of it drifted rightwards as the Coalition fractured in recent years.

Something has shifted. The rise of the independent candidates, particularly in the more-affluent metropolitan electorates, is one sign of it.

The old Labor–Coalition class divide is no longer enough to explain the political map.

The media has changed too.

The old mass-media assumed a relatively unified national audience. Newspapers, television and radio dominated the political conversation. People were consumers of news and information.

Then came digital media. People became both consumers and producers of information. The old mass-media audience fragmented. It struggled to find a place in the shifting spaces of the new media, to find a format by which to deliver news and information and still make money. They moved to a subscription model, the paywall, hoping to retain readers and viewers on the basis of their former dominance.

But people now inhabit different information worlds. Political organisations can speak directly to particular demographics and cultural groups. Social media rewards emotion, conflict and outrage. It is an agroentertainment industry.

Popular myth says that diversity brings strength. A society that stands on multile social and economic pillars is stronger than one that stands on a single socio-cutural pillar. But does this still hold when social media exterts such influence?

There is a danger in diversity. The penetration of social media and the disinformation cyberwarfare that accompanies it fractures society into bubbles of belief and attitude. When they rub up against each other there is friction. Friction creates clash. The more diverse the society becomes the more fragmented it may become, whether that is along lines of affluence, ideology, ethnicity, religion, culture, attitudes to science and other points of friction.

Politicians respond to whatever issue is producing the loudest noise rather than developing a coherent picture of the country that is emerging. We all lose when they do that. It is just one reason behind the collapse of trust in politicians and their parties.

The recent argument over immigration is an example. Immigration has become intensely contested, and not only in Australia. People fear cultural swamping, that too many immigrants will swamp the dominant culture, that demographics based on cultural or religious identity will gain too much say and alienate others. Governments are trying to respond at the same time to population pressures, housing concerns, labour-market needs and growing political pressure for lower migration.

These pressures do not necessarily point in the same direction. That is the problem. The solution rests in working out how we have a national conversation on immigration that is based on clear thinking, reason and social and economic data.

What does all of this mean?

There are three changes now flooding the basement of Australian society and bubbling to the surface. Megalogenis identifies these in his book.

First, Australia has become a migrant society.

For the first time since Federation, most Australians are migrants or the children of immigrants. This is a profound break with the old Australia that was created with European settlement.

Second, the workforce is changing.

Professional women have become the largest segment of the workforce, outnumbering the blue-collar male worker who once occupied such an important place in Australia’s economic and political life. While the socio-economic transformation that started in the 1970s or threabouts began the change, the rise to dominance by professionally-trained women take it in a new direction.

Third, Australia’s place in the world has changed.

We can no longer assume that our traditional allies and trading partners will always be reliable. For Europe and Canada, this has become all-too-clear. Now, that realisation is being felt in Australia.

Australia is economically tied to Asia while remaining strategically dependent on the United States and its Western alliances.

These three changes are now interacting with the Australia we inherited. That are where the real disruption lies.

Australia as a cultural mashup

Cultural and religious tribalism offers no answer.…if every group retreats into its own community and puts its own tribe first, the result is not a cohesive multicultural society. It is a collection of separate societies living beside one another.

How do we create a shared Australian identity without demanding cultural uniformity?

Most Australians are immigrants or the children of immigrants. Irrespective of our attitude to multiculturalism and immigration, cultural diversity is now the mainstream. No political party is going to be able to change that.

Some see immigration and multiculturalism fracturing Australia’s once homogenious society. They point to how ethnic groups occupy particular parts of our cities as cultural enclaves. How they clash over events in the places they came from. How they attempt to influence political decisions to primarily benefit themselves.

What is multiculturalism’s record? The consensus seems to be that it has brought opportunity. Skills. Cultural knowledge. Entrepreneurship. Relationships with the wider world. It has also brought challenges for those nostalgic for the Australia that was. Is this nostalgia a phenomenon only of the older generation? Or does it appeal to younger generations too?

It raises a difficult question: How do we create a shared Australian identity without demanding cultural uniformity?

Assimilation has an obvious appeal. It seems to offer unity. Everyone becomes part of the same cultural mainstream. But that idea belongs, perhaps, to the Australia that existed before.

Cultural and religious tribalism offers no better answer. Some cultures have strong internal bonds. But if every group retreats into its own community and puts its own tribe first, the result is not a cohesive multicultural society. It is a collection of separate societies living beside one another. And, at times, they will clash as they vie for social and political influence.

People should be free to speak, work, associate, worship and organise their lives as they choose, as long as they don’t coercively harm others…

Australia’s identity is not a mosaic of separate cultures but a coalescence that blends in everyday life. The challenge is not managing difference but conceptualising national belonging in ways that don’t erase or marginalise diversity. Can cultural groups retain their identity a part of a multicultural society while assimilating around the values of the host society?

The argument is that identity politics based on culture or religion weakens democratic process. Democratic systems become less stable when citizens choose an identity based on ethnicity, religion, or other shared values instead of a common national identity. The identity politics and declining social trust that comes when Australians see themselves primarily as members of separate ethnic or cultural groups raises concerns about weakening civic unity by prioritising identity differences over the shared national values of a social democracy. It questions whether different value systems can coexist within a single political framework.

Identity based on specific ethnic or religious affiliation is easier for individuals to relate to. A broad sense of national belonging based on an Australian identity differs from ethnic nationalism in that it doesn’t depend on ancestry or cultural homogeneity. Instead, it relies on liberal-democratic principles like individual freedom, gender equality and secularism. It is defined by political participation, shared institutions, political values, legal equality, individual rights and a commitment to democratic principles. It is based on the tradition of individual freedom. People should be free to speak, work, associate, worship and organise their lives as they choose, as long as they don’t coercively harm others.

There may be another way.

Instead of demanding that people become culturally identical, could we create places and institutions where different Australians actually meet and cooperate?

Neighbourhoods. Sporting clubs. Community centres. Libraries. Gardens. Voluntary organisations. Local associations. They provide something that politics and social media cannot easily provide: people encountering one another as neighbours, colleagues and fellow citizens rather than as members of opposing groups.

Belonging is felt in councils, schools, neighbourhoods. Not in abstract nationalist slogans.

The rise of professional women

The second transformation is about economic and social power. When the dominant workforce changes, the distribution of social influence changes with it.

Professional women now occupy a large part of Australia’s economic, educational, administrative and professional life. That changes workplaces. It changes women’s place in society, continuing a process that started back in the late-1960s. It changes households. It changes organisational leadership. It changes politics.

It also helps explain why some traditional political and social assumptions no longer work. They are artefacts of a past time although they still exists as a long tail in the minds and attitudes of many.

The political question is no longer simply what the working man wants. That question belonged to another Australia. The question now is what kind of society a highly educated, diverse and increasingly professional population wants to live in. A society in which professional women now outnumber male blue-collar workers.

The priorities change: childcare; housing; education; work-life balance; health; environment; community safety; quality of life. These changes are most visible in capital and regional cities. People come to cities because they offer opportunities in education, employment, cultural and economic life. They offer the connection often lacking in rural regions. It is no accident that Sydney and Melbourne have become the country’s centres of economic and political power.

Those things are brought by the changes in workplace structure, and the social changes it carries in its wake, are less visible in rural Australia. Why? Because rural Australia is not at the heart of political and economic power.

Changes social, economic, cultural and in the makeup of the workforce have momentum. They have force, energy and direction. They will not be deflected even were a political party to try to reassert the values of the old Australia. Social change and workplace structure are more powerful than political party policy.

The question is whether the institutions built around the old workforce understand how much the modern workforce has changed.

Australia in an uncertain world

The third transformation takes us beyond the nation. It is geopolitical and geostrategic.

Australia once enjoyed an unusually comfortable strategic position. We had powerful allies, dependable trading relationships and a relatively stable international order.

That order is fraying. Rapidly. The rise of Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump, North Korea’s Kim Jong-Un and Benjamin Netanyahu has contributed to a world that looks less predictable than it once did.

China remains enormously important to Australia’s economy at the same time we manoeuvre with China for influence in the Southwest Pacific.

The United States remains central to our defence strategy. Our alliance with the US, basing American military assets here so that Australia becomes a strategic forward resupply base in a conflict, threatens to drag us into a war with China if it comes to that between the world’s two superpowers.

We sit between the two global powers with a different foot in each camp.

Now we are looking more intently at Southeast Asia and the Southwest Pacific. In a time of big power competition in the region they are becoming increasingly important strategically. Australia’s recent security agreements with Southwest Pacific island states are part of that shift of focus.

At the same time as climate change, energy and fertiliser supply chain disruption, technological competition, artificial intelligence and geopolitical conflict are creating new uncertainties, Russia is increasing its grey-zone warfare in Western Europe. Aircraft and drone incursions into NATO member states, destruction of undersea communications and energy cables, attempted assassination of industry leaders and others in Europe, cyberwarfare and sabotage in Germany, Poland and the Baltic states are driving military preparedness at the same time that Trump’s America is threatening to reduce its support for NATO. Could it be that Europe and the coalition of Middle Eastern states centred on Iran, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia become major mid-range regional powers?

War has returned to Eastern Europe and the Middle East. Global fuel and fertiliser supply chains have fractured. Fuel prices rise and fall in accordance with the intensity of conflict in the Gulf of Hormuz and the Bab el‑Mandeb straits, the Middle East’s two critical maritime chokepoints. The aberrant behaviour of the Donald Trump has introduced another level of uncertainty: the war in Iran, invasion threats to Canada and Greenland, chaotic tariffs, internal political conflict and a stepping back from defence guarantees that the United States itself created.

The consequences include Canada and European countries now starting to reposition themselves politically and strategically as middle powers. A sign of this growing relationship came in September 2026 when European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen publicly invited Canada to become the EU’s first ‘associate member’. Now, the question of whether Australia too could become an EU associate member is entering the public discourse. Sydney Morning Herald journalist, Peter Hartcher, recently discussed this possibility.

I was at a seminar at the Lowy Institute with security and geopolitical experts during the first Trump presidency. They proposed and alliance of middle-range powers. Now, I watch as that appears to be unfolding.

The consequences of the political chaos in the US are larger than any one president. They may well persist under a different regime.

Meanwhile, Australia remains allied to the United States. The government watches how things unfold with the US and the rest of the world. Yet, Australians are beginning to confront a question that would once have seemed redundant: What happens if the world we depended upon is no longer there?

This is our geopolitical wake-up call. The global realignment. The world of only a few years ago is unwinding. What happens on the other side of the world can show up in any Australian town. At the petrol pump. In the price of food. Perhaps one day, on the supermarket shelf. The conversation therefore turns towards strategic capability and self-reliance while maintaining relationships with neighbouring countries.

This is not simply a foreign-policy problem. It is a question of national resilience. The resilience of our energy supply; of our food supply; of technology, communications, manufacturing and critical minerals. The question is how much of these things Australia needs to be able to provide for itself and whom we share them with.

What can we do?

…seeing the scapegoating of particular demographics for what it is: the social fracturing that weakens the nation

One implication of Megalogenis’ argument is that adaptation cannot be left entirely to governments. The transformation of Australia can happen from the bottom up as well as the top down.

As individuals, whatever our views on immigration and multiculturalism, we still have to work out how to live together as citizens of a diverse society in an increasingly uncertain world.

That means resisting simple political stereotypes and slogans. It means seeing the scapegoating of particular demographics for what it is: the social fracturing that weakens the nation. It means shunning politicians who depend upon this divisive tactic. It means checking information before sharing it rather than feeding the outrage economy of social media… all that achieves is supporting those distributing disinformation, greater profits for the big tech corporations and the polarisation of society. It means looking outside our immediate social and political circles and joining local organisations rather than simply consuming their services.

And it means learning how to disagree without turning disagreement into hostility.

These are small things. They are important things. Maybe the shift we need is from being spectators of politics to being participants in society.

Organisations face a similar challenge. Many were created for a population that no longer exists. They need to ask who they were designed to serve and whether those people still resemble the population of today.

They need to make room for women as leaders as well as participants and to connect generations; to collaborate rather than operate in isolated silos.

The strongest organisations may be those that act as nodes in a network… connecting people, groups, skills, information and resources. That may be less like a hierarchy and more like a living system.

The larger lesson

Megalogenis’ three shocks are best understood as a change in Australia’s social operating system.

The changes cannot simply be reversed. We cannot go back to the Australia of the 1950s. Nor should we. Retro is for entertainment. It is not a strategy for the present tmes.

We have moved from a relatively homogeneous society to one where people from different parts of the world, from different cultures, interact.

We have moved from the economic and cultural dominance of an industrial male workforce to a professional, service-based economy with women at its centre.

And we have moved from a relatively secure Western world into a more unstable and interconnected Asia-Pacific world.

Neither government nor political parties can manufacture social cohesion on its own. So perhaps the task is to turn diversity into cooperation, to redesign work around the workforce that now exists, to stop treating childcare, flexible work and care responsibilities as private problems.

Megalogenis’s changes distantly echo Alvin Toffler’s 1970 book, Future Shock. I read the book at the time and thought he had it right. Yet that was only the start of the accelerating pace of rapid technological change, economic and social shifts that would build and build. Toffler thought those underway at the time would overwhelm our ability to adapt by overloading our social decision-making capacity and submerging our familiar beliefs, values and institutions. The changes Toffler identified were apparent and became more so in the decades that followed his book. They are different to the changes Megalogenis writes about. Those have been subtle, building at a slower pace, unnoticed, unseen other than by the few who study such shifts. But they are equally transformative. Still, they are of the same order of impact.

Nostalgia for an imaginary golden age, the mythical ‘old Australia’, is a reaction to these changes. Politicians create fantasy images of that time and feed them to an electorate lost and confused by the present. But imagined good times cannot compete with troubled present times. Reality always comes out on top.

Out of those past times, can we extract the fluff of imagination from the substance of the values we had as a culture… the fair go, the mutual respect, the civility and the rest… and reinvigorate them for contemporary times?

And then there is resilience

If Australia can no longer take global stability for granted, resilience cannot remain an abstract national-security slogan.

Every community should know what it would do during a prolonged power or fuel outage, a cyberattack that disrupts essential services, a supply chain disruption, an extreme weather event or a sudden shortage of essential goods.

Local councils and voluntary organisations could identify backup arrangements for food, water, communications, energy and medical supplies as part of local emergency and resilience plans. They could tap into emergency volunteer networks, neighbourhood communication systems, repair workshops, community centres. Emergency response must go beyond state emergency services, police and medical assistance to a whole-of-community response in which small, local organisations and groups are activated to develop local solutions. A true civil defence structure like this would make resilience practical and hands-on rather than rhetorical and passively reliant on established institutions.

When the next crisis comes, the question will be simple: do we wait for distant institutions and already overstretched governments to respond? Or do local networks already know what to do?

There is another possibility associated with this. How about we make democratic participation more local and more accountable?

One idea: governments or local organisations could hold regular citizens’ assemblies or local deliberative forums on housing, climate adaptation, immigration, transport, food and regional resilience. People would receive clear and comprehensive information and hear from affected groups. Recommendations would be published. Elected representatives would be obliged to respond publicly.

This would give citizens direct experience of listening, negotiating disagreement and sharing responsibility. Those are precisely the habits that fragmented social media and algorithmic outrage weaken.

For individuals, the response can be simpler still.

Check important information before sharing it. Who produced it? And why? What is their record in publishing such information? Call out disinformation and those creating and spreading it, for disinformation is a clear and significant danger to social cohesion and our community and national wellbeing.

Additionally, learn one practical skill that could be useful during a disruption: first aid; water purification, food production; repair; cooking; alternative communications systems like mesh networks.

These actions are modest yet they go some way to addressing the three shocks directly: they turn migration into cooperation; workforce change into broader participation; strategic uncertainty into local preparedness.

What comes next?

The migrant society, the professional female workforce and the uncertain global and Asia-Pacific environment are not temporary disturbances. They are the conditions in which Australians will live, in which we are living. Many do not know that, including politicians and the media. These changes are the reality we live with whatever our personal attitude is to them. As the saying goes, reality is what is left when assumption, belief and attitude collapse.

The questions this raises will not be decided only in parliament. They will be decided in workplaces and neighbourhoods. In community organisations. On the streets. In schools. In sporting clubs. In the ordinary conversations between Australians.

That may be the larger significance of Megalogenis’ argument, his three big changes. It is not simply about what has happened to Australia. It is this: how does a changing society build the relationships and institutions it needs to live with change?

The danger is that our political institutions continue to operate according to assumptions formed during another era. The evidence is that other than in the minds of still-too-many, in our media and in our slugish institutions, that era has ended.

Perhaps the future will depend less on our ability to agree with one another than on our ability to work with one another when we do not.

The question is no longer how we preserve the Australia we had. It is how we build an Australia capable of becoming what it is already becoming.

• When the community food movement meets the regulators
• Security leaders respond to the climate threat to our food system
• Prelude to collapse: Australia’s oil fuels vulnerability
• From utopia to dystopia
• The flight that vanished
• The widening gyre
• How a rural town became epicentre of an illicit industry
• A crisis. A vulnerability. A society reconfigures

Three shocks changing Australia was originally published in PacificEdge on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Some of the people we encounter in life come and then go. Others come and stay. Some come, stay awhile, go and reappear many years later. That is what happens in this story. True? Fiction? A little of both? Revealing that would spoil the mystery.

ALISON was a regular at Pierre’s Cafe. She had come here since moving to this Tasmanian city some years ago. The staff knew her, knew she would ask for her cuppuccino extra hot, knew she would sometimes accompany that with a croissant sliced in half, lightly toasted and spread with blackberry jam. They knew, too, that when it was free she would sit at the corner table and spend more than an hour there on those days she pulled the iPad from her shoulder bag and started typing on it.

The young waitress had worked at Pierre’s for the past three years. Yet in all that time she couldn’t work out whether Alison was one of those self-sufficient types happy in their own company or a lonely sad-sack bereft of friends and partner, her only solace the iPad and whatever it is she types into it. She thought the latter at first, judging Alison by her plain, unstylish clothes and her sometimes neglected hair that saw a hairdresser maybe only once a year. Less frequently, sometimes.

The waitress says hello when Alison walks in that morning. Settled at her corner table, she notes. The coffee machine hisses as she steams the milk, silently noting that Alison has skipped the croissant today. Placing the steaming cup on the table she returns to the coffee machine and starts wiping it with a cloth when she notices Alison holding the cup close to her lips and looking intently towards the door, not taking a sip.

”It couldn’t be!”, Alison silently says to herself. She watches. All she can see is a figure at the cafe door, a figure cast into partial silhouette by the bright daylight outside. But that silhouette, it’s one she would know anywhere. Or so she thinks. Maybe it’s just some look-alike. Memory might be a bit shonky after all these years. The cup remains poised by her lips as if it, too, is undergoing a moment of disbelief.

“It couldn’t be”, Alison repeats silently as the figure walks in.

“But it is!”.

It is. It’s Rusty. Unmistakably Rusty. Sure, he looks a little older, his hair a little thinner but it is the same build, slim and upright. She sees he wears the same style of clothing as back when she last saw him in… in… now, where was it? Sydney? Yes, Sydney. Coogee Beach. Ten years ago give or take the odd six months, wouldn’t it have been?

Rusty casts his eyes around the cafe in search of a seat. They settle on a figure at the corner table, a figure looking at him. He looks at the figure. Why is there something familiar about it? Then it dawns.

The next half hour consists of a give-and-take conversation of the catching-up type, one of those conversations that fill out the biographies of friends who have spent long years apart.

“So”, Rusty says. “You’re still the radical though in a different way now?”.

“Once a radical is not always a radical”, Alison responds. “But, yes, in my writing I do espouse something of a radical perspective. But it’s deeper… not hidden, just submerged in the implications of the text”.

“Sounds complicated. Working on anything at the moment?”. Waiting for Alison’s reply, Rusty raises the cup to take a sip of the hot, energising liquid.

“Wellll…”, responds Alison in a drawn out manner that suggests to Rusty that she is about to say something tricky. “A publisher, a fiction publisher in Melbourne asked me to send a manuscript I completed about three years ago. I’m just going over it again.”

“And?”, Rusty replies, prompting her to continue.

“Wellll… It’s about the past, the past of maybe 40 years ago, a past time about the Sydney scene of which I, and you, were a part. Sort of like historical fiction but grounded in real people and real events”.

Rusty’s stunned expression discloses his uncertainty. Just what is she going to divulge? Should I be worried?

No. Nothing personal. Nothing intimate. No need to worry. Alison assures Rusty as she takes a swig of her coffee, her eyes locked to his as if she is enjoying his discomfort.

“It’s based around a real mystery. Names have been changed. Characters amalgamated. Timelines altered. It’s fictionalised, though were anyone in the know to read between the lines they might find something familiar there. Something, like themselves.

“It’s a mystery. It’s a mystery you know about. It’s about the disappearance of Amber Jenkins”.

“Uhhh…”, responds Rusty. He looks up in surprise at the mention of the name. “Amber?”.

“Yes, Amber”, Alison answers. “Amber who walked into our lives and moved into the sharehouse. Amber, who then disappeared”.

Rusty had formed a close but not intimate friendship with Amber while living at the sharehouse. They spent hours in the kitchen discussing politics, life and the people they knew. They went out together. French’s Tavern on Oxford Street for the jug band. That other place… what was it called?… for that country rock band. And those Sunday mornings when for coffee and cake they walked up to the cafe just off the intersection where William Street collides with Darlinghurst Road in a confusion of cars.

Then came the disappearance.

It happened quickly.

Amber’s workmates raised the alarm. One of them came to the sharehouse, curious about why she hadn’t turned up these past few days. Was she sick? Then her father turned up one evening. Amber was to have had lunch with him the previous day. She didn’t turn up. She hadn’t called. Have you seen her?

Curious, Alison went to Amber’s room. She knocked. No answer. She tried the knob. It turned. She went in, turned on the light and there it was on the bed. The note. The note apologising for her hasty departure. Personal issues, it said. Nothing more.

Rusty searched for her after she went missing. He checked with friends and acquaintances around town. From one of them he picked up the idea that she had headed north. To Byron Bay, maybe.

Byron Bay was an annual destination for Rusty. Come his annual holidays he would strap his longboard to the roofrack of his VW Beetle and head north. He was going there for a short break soon. Maybe I can track down Amber while I’m there, he thought. If she really is there.

Byron in those years was a melange of traditional coastal town and Australian family holiday destination roughly blended with the surfing subculture that had moved in shortly after surfing started to become popular. The local legend was that surfers cruising the coast looking for good breaks had discovered Byron. They liked it swells and warm sea. They stayed. And from that humble beginning a local industry of surfboard shapers and instructors had grown.

A splash of coastal hippie was the colourful cream on top of this social mashup. The town was an eclectic place in which everyone accepted the others’ differences and got on well, more or less. It was also a place now familiar to Rusty after he discovered it a few years back on one of his solo road trips. He liked it and played with the idea of moving there to live. The idea came and went until, one day, it became reality although for only a short time.

In town again, Rusty thinks as he pitches his tent among the trees in the caravan park on the southern edge of town. His plan is to stay here for five days, maybe, then head up to Brisbane via Nimbin, Murwilliumbah and the Gold Coast. Sure, he could simply head north along the Pacific Highway and be there in a few hours, but Rusty was not one for long, boring highways. Backroads held greater allure and opportunity.

Surfing conditions are poor on visiting Wattegos and The Pass. Mornings are okay but conditions deteriorate through the day. Afternoons usually bring an onshore breeze that totally wrecks things. Afternoons, then, are the time for his desultory search for Amber. There is little chance of finding her, he knows. All he has is the vague recollection of someone who thought she might perhaps have come here to Byron… maybe.

Rusty looks in cafes when he walks past, just in case she is there. He remembers that she was something of a habitué of such places when she lived in the sharehouse. He walks along the beaches, wondering if she will be there sunning herself. Thinking that Amber would go to the local bars to check out the music, his search takes him to the two hotels when bands are playing. Nothing.

He carries a photo but realises she might look different now. The few people he gets talking to and shows it to in the pubs, they look like regulars, are reluctant to offer any information at all, figuring him to be some kind of snoop or a jilted lover out for revenge.

Three days. Much walking. Much looking. Still no Amber.

Rusty sits on the grass across the road from the Top Pub one afternoon, where it tilts down to the beach. PLONK! The sound makes him look up to see that a guy has dropped his mal on the ground close by. He’s in his thirties, Rusty guesstimates. The guy nods a greeting. He is joined by three others fresh from the surf.

Boards grottied by layers of wax, Rusty notes, a few dings, plain looking, nothing flashy here. And the logos, these are made by the shaper over in the industrial estate. These guys are locals.

They sit there looking at the choppy swells coming in. They’ve quit for the day thanks to the onshore breeze that turned the small but consistent swells to mush. Their occasional comment to Rusty becomes a conversation about the local surfing scene and the difficulty in finding lasting employment in town.

Had he been out today, one of them asks? No, replies Rusty. I’ve been looking for a friend from the city. She disappeared. Her friends and family are concerned for her safety. This is her, Rusty says, retrieving Amber’s photo from his pack.

Nope. Never seen her was the response from the four.

Rusty is just about to get up and go when a friend of the surfers wanders over. A woman probably in her thirties, sun wrinkles already starting at the corners of her eyes. Suntanned. Sun-bleached hair. Fit-looking. Rusty noticed her relaxed ease of movement. Pure North Coast surfer girl, he thinks. A female stereotype of the lifestyle.

They talk about their morning’s session and how for the past week or so the swells have been mediocre. Then one of the guys tells her Rusty is looking for someone. Show Penny the photo, he says.

Another never-seen-her-around-response coming up, thinks Rusty. He hands the photo to the woman. She looks at it for a few seconds.

“No, don’t know her.” she says, handing the photo back.

Rusty is about to take the photo when she suddenly grabs it back. “Wait… “. She looks at the image more intently now. She gazes at it in silence.

“Yeah,” comes the response. “She hung round the surfing scene here for a few months, lived in a farmhouse near Myocum with a few others. Couple of blow-ins, guy with a new Hot Tuna mini-mal, a woman with curly black hair who spoke with some kind of accent. European. A hippy-looking guy who looked like he had drifted down from Nimbin.

“There was a Kombi at the farmhouse that belonged to one of them. Saw that when a few of us went to a party there. Dented front, looked like somebody run it into a post. Somebody said later that the cops raided the place. A drugs bust. I think they moved away after that. They haven’t been around for some time.

“I didn’t get to know them well. Didn’t really like them. Probably my envy at that guy’s shiny new board. Wondered how he afforded it because he didn’t seem to have a job to go to… that was something I picked up in the conversation. Obviously had a few notes to spare. I’d see him hanging out over at Wattegoes or here at Main Beach.

“That hippy-looking guy, he was a strange sort of person. Came across as devious, untrustworthy. Sort of distant and wary. Closed off. He wasn’t a surfer, only the one with the Hot Tuna was.”

A clue, and a good one. Rusty goes from an expectation of finding nothing to a hope that Amber is still in the district.

A few more days in town produce nothing. Where to now? I’ve pretty much exhausted the possibilities around Byron. Might head up to Nimbin, he decides.

Nimbin. The once down-at-heel decaying dairy town reborn as hippie nirvana at the Aquarius Arts Festival of 1973. Over the years since the locals have maintained the arty shopfronts that were painted just after the festival. Walk down the street and notice how the locals look like they are still in that time.

Rusty pitches his tent by his car in the camping area. He knows he must be careful flashing around the photo of Amber. Locals would be very cautious of strangers doing that in this town. They are likely to assume he’s hunting down a runaway or that he’s an undercover cop looking to bust someone. Nimbin, after all, is the epicentre of the campaign to legalise weed as well as a major growing area for the herb. The free-living hippie culture of the place is underlaid by a good dose of paranoia.

Rusty visits a friend from his old Sydney days. She lives on the edge of town, not far along the road from the recording studio down by the creek. They occasionally meet up in Sydney when she reluctantly visits town to spend a little time with her parents, but they are not close friends.

No, Mel doesn’t recognise Amber from the photo. Not surprising, she tells Rusty. Wayward kids drift into town all the time. As to his description of the people Amber was with down on the coast, they sound just like anyone else in town. She will ask around, anyway.

A couple nights later they meet for dinner at the only pub in town. The food is okay if not great and is improved by the fruity red they wash it down with.

“You’re looking for someone called Peter”, Mel tells Rusty. “A friend I met up with yesterday, when I told her about your search for someone called Amber, she said she knew her, or she used to. She lived further down the same street as her, with three others. She remembered the Kombi with the dent, too. But… they’ve gone, all except the Peter guy. He’s still in the house but told my friend he is off north in a couple days.”

The value of local networks, Rusty thinks to himself. The chance of contact at last.

It is the next morning. Rusty rises just as the sun is coming up. Shower time. The shower block is surprisingly clean. That is unexpected. His impression of Nimbin is of a town of arty people overlaying a population of dope heads with all the grime you would expect. Maybe he is wrong about that. The place is not exactly on the tourist route and any campground that can keep its shower block clean speaks well of the place.

What to do about breakfast? He wanders into town and finds an early-opener cafe. Orders cappuccino, extra hot, because if you don’t order that way you end up with a cup of lukwarm brew. He realises he is not in the big city anymore when the waitress questions whether he really does want toast spread with peanut butter and honey.

Time to plan the day. Time to act on his friend’s sleuthing. He plans to head north today but first there is this Peter guy.

Breakfast done, Rusty walks over to the house and knocks loudly on the door. A disheveled-looking character cautiously opens it a little way, just far enough to see Rusty standing there. Rusty remembers what Penny said back on the beach. Yes, he is devious looking. Long scraggly hair that could do with a wash. Worn-looking jeans. Loose Tshirt. Shoeless. Shifty.

Rusty explains his reason for standing here this morning. Yes, he is Peter. And, yes, he knows Amber. And, no, you’ve missed her. Where has she gone? No idea, he responds. She just packed her one and only bag and disappeared.

Figuring that local possibilities are now exhausted, Rusty decides to continue on to Brisbane. He drives slowly, VW beetles not being known for great speed.

Through the Nimbin Valley until he takes the turn at a sign that says Uki, the small town, village be would a more-accurate description, below the spire of Mt Warning. Passing through Murwillumbah takes little time, but following the highway through the linear sprawl of the Gold Coast is stop and start.

Rusty spends a few days with friends in Brisbane before the time comes for the return drive to Sydney. That won’t be done in the two days that people usually take. The necessity to check out the surf at Crescent Head, Port Macquarie and Hawkes Nest consumes the last week of his time off.

Back in Sydney he tells the people in the sharehouse how his search went from low expectations to the elation of hope and on to disappointment.

Life returns to its workaday normal. Memory of Amber fades into the past.

A couple years go by before the sharehouse breaks up. People go their own way in life. Sally takes off to Far North Queensland for reasons that no one can fathom. Paul moves up the road to The Cross and disappears into the melange of people who inhabit that enclave. Bev marries a guy who was a regular visitor to the sharehouse and settles into a comfortable, middle class North Shore life. People disappear into the world to be neither seen nor heard of again.

Rusty moves into another sharehouse. This one is an old Victorian era terrace in Surry Hills. It will be home for the next year.

And Alison? After the sharehouse she moves in with Frank. Later, Rusty would hear how they lived in inner urban Stanmore, worked jobs and started the lifetime sentence, as she put it, of paying off their duplex.

It didn’t last.

More years pass. One Friday afternoon Rusty is in the city to collect a new lens from Fletchers Photographics. That done, he decides to wander down to Circular Quay to get the bus back to Coogee.

Walking along George Street he feels the urge for caffeine and remembers the hole in the wall in a narrow and dingy lane that connects George and Pitt streets and that is always in shadow. It’s a canyon, really, a narrow defile between high-rise office buildings. Sunless. Dingy. Grimy in the way that even clean places appear to be in the city. This is not one of his regular coffee stops.

He walks in, orders a croissant and cappuccino and sits at the corner table.

Cafes and coffee are the opportunity to mentally zone out or to mull things over. He pulls out the instruction sheet that came with his new lens. No. Nothing new there but he will try it out down by the beach tomorrow in preparation for photographing an event this coming Saturday. An environmental fair an organisation has asked him to cover so they have a photographic record of it. It’s a voluntary assignment even though for the past nine months he has been working as a journalist and photographer for a business publication. His mind drifts through this stream of thought and then settles into that aware blankness he calls zoning out.

Zoning out is what Rusty is doing when he inattentively looks over to the other side of the cafe. His eyes continue to sweep across the room. Then they stop. He looks back at the man sitting by himself. He’s done this before, seeing someone he thinks is familiar but who, on looking carefully, turns out to be a stranger. But this man…

He’s dressed in a dark suit. His beard is trimmed so that it frames his jaw and makes a continuity with his neatly-cut hair. A dark red tie drapes over a light blue shirt. Clearly a worker here in the financial district. But, still, he’s somehow familiar. He watches him, then… Peter?

Peter, yes it is Peter and he’s as startled as Rusty whom he obviously can’t place when he walks over. Then Rusty reminds him… Nimbin, Amber?

The past floods back, an unwelcome past of troubled memories surge into the present here in the cafe in the dingy lane. Rusty asks him if he can sit and after a lot of prodding by Rusty, the story hesitatingly unfolds.

“Yes, I’m a changed man as you can see”, he says. “I have a job, a good job, not the job I had back then. That was a… let’s just say that was a different sort of job and leave it at that. I work down the road in an office.”

Peter hesitates as if he is thinking something over. He looks at Rusty.

“Okay, I suppose I can tell the story now that so much time has passed… there’s little likelihood of retribution.”

They order fresh coffees as the talk gets around to the past.

“Yes, I did go north with Amber. Before Nimbin, where you found me, we moved in with friends in Myocum, to an old farmhouse. I was a dealer in Sydney and I kept dealing when we were on the North Coast.

“In Sydney I ripped off a supplier. He got his stuff from people in Melbourne. Organised crime, I guess you would call them.

“I ripped them off for $10,000 or so. We figured it was time to quit Sydney for the North Coast because they set a couple toughs after us. They followed us there after talking to someone I knew in Sydney and somehow they learned that we were living at Myocum. They paid us a visit. Pay it back or else was the message. We hurriedly left and headed to Nimbin to lay low. Sure, I figured they would look for us there but I hoped we would disappear among the crowd of look-alikes.

“We didn’t. They spotted one of my friends at the beach at Byron one day. They recognised him because he had been with me when I picked up some stuff in Sydney. He was a surfer and had just bought a new surfboard. They confronted him, making the usual threats that thugs make, but he convinced them that he and the rest of us had parted company weeks before. He told them he had been staying in Nimbin but that the rest of us weren’t living there now. He came back to the Nimbin house, told me about the encounter, bagged his belongings and took off for the Gold Coast that same day. I’ve never seen him since.

“Then, just a couple days later, Amber was in town and what does she see coming along the footpath? The two thugs.

“That afternoon, I came back to find Amber’s stuff still there but no Amber. Feeling concerned with the toughs about, I walked downtown to look for her. She was nowhere to be found. Nobody I spoke to had seen her.

“I suppose she was spooked by seeing the hoods in town, but at the time I thought they had got her and would use her as a hostage to get the money. You came around that morning asking about her. I thought you might have been one of them. I panicked. Next morning I got the bus into Lismore and took the train south. And here I am.

“Coming back to Sydney I thought it time for total change. If the hoods were still looking for me I would hide in plain sight. I avoided past friends and past haunts, got my hair cut, bought some city clothes, cleaned up my appearance and found a job.

“And that’s my life over the years since. After spending years looking over my shoulder for a bunch of Melbourne toughs intent on recovering money now many years overdue, I realise they have gone on to bigger and better things or, more likely, to incarceration.”

“So,” Alison asks, “…they carried out their threat to harm Amber? She disappeared?”.

“Not quite,” Rusty replies.

“I’d moved to Tasmania not all that many years after that encounter with Peter and was working in the adventure equipment business. I spent a lot of time hiking in the mountains.

“On one trip we were overnighting in Windy Ridge hut. It’s a couple day’s walk in from the Lake St Clair trailhead. We arrived there late afternoon via the rough side trail from Pine Valley after coming down from The Labyrinth. We thought we would have the hut to ourselves that night, when in walks another party. Room for a few more, one of them asks?

“They tossed their packs onto the sleeping platform, laid out their sleeping bags and started to cook their food. I was looking through the hut’s log book and hadn’t taken much notice of the newcomers. Then, one of them laughed. I looked up and looked back at the log book. Then this really weird feeling comes over me. I stop and look back at them. There’s the guy who laughed facing in my direction and there’s this woman with her back towards me. She turns. We look at each other and experience that feeling of dawning familiarity, like deja vu… you know… only it collapses into reality rather than remaining a vague sensation. I sit there staring in disbelief… at Amber. We talk into the night and she tells the story of back then.

“After seeing the Melbourne hoods in Nimbin, Amber thought that getting out of town was one of the best ideas she had ever had. Rushing home, she took a couple changes of clothes and a few other things, put them into her shoulder bag and caught the late afternoon bus to Lismore. The rest of her stuff she left behind. She wanted to travel light. She wanted to travel fast and far, as those fleeing from a couple dangerous toughs would do. From there she took the early evening coach to Brisbane and, just as Peter would soon do, started a new life.”

Rusty finishes his tale. It comes as the resolution of a past mystery for Alison. She realises she now has more material for her book. A completely new ending.

“Wow”, she says as she leans back, lifts her cup and takes a sip of her now-lukewarm coffee. “This is completion… you know how people talk about completion tying off something unknown? As resolution? An ending? Closure? That’s how I feel now. I’ve based my novel on the mystery of Amber’s disappearance as an unsolved case. I suppose I could keep it as that, it’s fiction after all, but it’s fiction based on fact… you know how writers of fiction take a true story and embellish a mysterious story around it. Yes, I could leave the book as it is. But, no. It is based on actuality and actuality has just been changed for me. I feel that maybe a rewrite of the ending is in order.”

“So you would rewrite it according to what I’ve told you?”, Rusty asks.

“I don’t know… going to have to think about it.”

She leans forward again as if she has thought of something. “The big mystery now is what happened to Amber after you ran into her in that mountain hut. It would be good to know, to write that up as a resolution to my story.”

Alison moves closer and rests her elbows on the table and her chin in her hands. “So, anyway, why are you here in Pierre’s restaurant?”.

“Well, like you, I live in Tasmania. Down south. I’m up here for a trade show. My partner took a few days off so we could go bushwalking around Cradle Mountain. She’s meeting me in Launceston. Here, in Pierre’s restaurant, in a few minutes.”

“I might get to meet her, your partner?”. Alison drains the last of her lukewarm coffee from the cup. “Maybe we can meet up again when you’re next in town and have dinner somewhere. Always good to catch up with old friends and make new ones.”

Rusty looks at Alison.

“Maybe it won’t be like making new friends”, he says.

Alison gazes at him, a puzzled expression on her face.

“Do I know her? How could that be?”.

“Do you know her? Probably”, Rusty replies.

“Well, who is she? What’s her name?”

“Her name”, Rusty responds, “is Amber. Amber Jenkins.”

• Four friends
• Missing on the headland
• A crisis. A vulnerability. A society reconfigures
• The pack
• A good year
• A letter from Virginia
• The declutterer
• A place in the world
• Sunset in the last days of managed retreat
• A quiet conversation

Alternative history…

• Franstralie: a nation that could have been
• The legacy

What became of Amber? was originally published in PacificEdge on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

A farewell… a radio check… then, nothing. The mysterious disappearance of Brenda Hean and Max Price.

IT IS September 8. A Friday. 10.16 in the morning. We are at Cambridge Airport.

Two people climb into the tandem cockpits and secure their harnesses. The pilot starts the engine. There is a puff of smoke and the two-bladed propeller starts to spin. They sit for a few seconds while the engine warms up, then taxi out onto the airstrip.

The pilot opens the throttle. The old biplane gathers speed along the strip. The tail rises, bringing the Tiger Moth onto its main wheels. A few seconds later the wheels leave the ground and the aircraft eases into the air.

A group of friends have gathered to say farewell to what they anticipate will be an audacious mission. They watch as the aircraft turns to the north. As it gains altitude, pilot Max Price makes radio contact with the control tower. It is the last contact anyone has with the pilot and his passenger, Brenda Hean.

Among those watching the departure is Brenda Hean’s 14-year-old niece.

This is the story of a woman, a pilot, a lake, the flight in an old aircraft, environmental politics and a disappearance. It is the report of a mystery that has never been solved.

Brenda Hean: musician, bushwalker, environmental activist

In 1972 Brenda Hean is a pianist, church organist, piano teacher and a member of Hobart’s arts community. Brenda is also an active bushwalker and member of the Hobart Walking Club, the state’s oldest bushwalking club founded in 1929. Like other enthusiastic bushwalkers, Brenda is attracted to Tasmania’s rugged and isolated southwest wilderness.

Lake Pedder is the gem in that wilderness. It can be reached only on foot or by light aircraft landing on its wide sandy beach. Known for that pink quartzite beach, its remote mountain setting and astounding wilderness beauty, Brenda joins the campaign against the hydro-electric scheme that threatens to flood it.

After the Lake Pedder Pilgrimage in March 1971, the Hobart Walking Club helps to establish the Lake Pedder Action Committee. Brenda becomes one of the campaign’s more committed figures. She later stands as a United Tasmania Group (UTG) candidate in the 1972 state election. Formed from the Lake Pedder campaign, the UTG is the world’s first Green political party.

Despite evident opposition, the Tasmanian government plans to go ahead with the hydro-electric project. Brenda decides that the campaign needs to be taken directly to federal politicians where they work. Canberra, that is.

Her plan? Fly to Canberra with Max Price, write ‘Save Lake Pedder’ in the sky above Parliament House and lobby for federal intervention.

And that is why that group of friends and fellow campaigners stands on the tarmac at Cambridge Airport that morning in September 1972 and watches the aircraft set course northwards.

The aircraft

Max Price was an experienced pilot. He held a commercial licence and had approximately 1968 hours of flying experience, including 962 hours on the Tiger Moth type. His aircraft, registration VH-AQL, had been fitted with an auxiliary fuel tank and a smoke-generating system for the planned sky-writing. The aircraft’s certificate of airworthiness was valid.

The Tiger Moth was designed in Britain in the early 1930s by the de Havilland’s company as a simple, open-cockpit biplane built to teach pilots the fundamentals of flying. The open cockpit exposed a pilot to the wind, cold and noise of flight (Max’s Tiger Moth had been fitted with a closed cockpit). It had a fixed undercarriage and an adequately powered, four cylinder, air-cooled Gipsy Major engine. There was no sophisticated navigation system.

The aircraft has history in Tasmania. In August 1940 the Royal Australian Air Force established No. 7 Elementary Flying Training School at what is now Launceston Airport. The base was part of the Empire Air Training Scheme. Young men selected for pilot training learned the basics of flying in de Havilland Tiger Moths there before being sent on to more advanced training elsewhere. The flying school operated about 60 Tiger Moths and trained around 1800 pilots before training was suspended in late-1944.

Like Max Price’s aircraft, many Tiger Moths survived after their role as World War Two trainers because they were simple to maintain and, later, because a generation of enthusiasts recognised their historical value.

A departure, a sighting, a disappearance

Cambridge Airport is located on the shore of Pitt Water, a large water body connected to Frederick Henry Bay by a narrow passage. Close to Hobart’s main airport, Cambridge is approximately thirty kilometres from Hobart.

Max starts the climb out from Cambridge and sets the Tiger Moth on a northward course to follow Tasmania’s East Coast. This will be no nonstop flight from Hobart to Canberra. The flight plan records a stop at Yarram, Victoria, contact with Flinders Flight Services Unit and a stop at Flinders Island in the middle of Bass Strait before continuing on towards the mainland.

A witness at Eddystone Point sees the aircraft pass at a little over 600m altitude and flying normally.

The Tiger Moth heads on towards Bass Strait.

And then it disappears.

2pm. Flinders Flight Services reports no radio contact.

A search begins. All searchers have is a last confirmed position, a broad area of open water and no direct evidence of how the flight ended.

Aircraft and ships cover the region. Hundreds of flying hours are logged.

The search continues at full intensity and is followed by continued searching at a reduced pace. The final investigation classifies VH-AQL as lost. No physical evidence has been located. No physical evidence has ever been located.

It is a flight into tragedy. A flight into a mystery that remains unresolved to this day. A flight surrounded by rumour and troubling details.

Warning signs

“Mrs Hean, how would you like to go for a swim?”.

A cryptic message that is threatening in its implication. Brenda Hean’s niece, Celia Watchorn, later recalled the call Brenda receives. The wording appeared to evoke the Lake Pedder campaign, however that remains conjecture, a linking of the dots that might lead in the wrong direction. Or, it might not.

Unsolved incidents build speculation. Speculation builds rumour. A threatening call. The reported break-in of the hangar where the Tiger Moth was housed. The rumour that the aircraft’s fuel supply might have been tampered with and possibly contaminated. A story about an emergency beacon removed from the aircraft and found behind fuel drums in the hangar.

They form a troubling sequence. Joining them along the timeline points in one direction. But they remain allegations and recollections, not a demonstrated chain of events.

Then comes stories about Max Price’s business relationships. He was involved in business disputes. Perhaps they contributed to the disappearance. It is more speculation, the linking of possibly unrelated facts.

But the rumour persists. Max reportedly believed someone had previously interfered with the aircraft after an engine failure near Maria Island. The suggestion is that any sabotage might have been connected to him rather than to Brenda Hean’s environmental campaign. We simple do not know. The reports establish something troubling: someone may have gained access to the aircraft before the flight, and concerns about interference existed before VH-AQL disappeared.

A connection to Brenda Hean’s activism or to Max Price’s business disputes? Or to neither? None of it proves sabotage. But together they keep the disappearance unresolved for more than half a century.

It is years later when a new account adds to the mystery. People involved in the original search tell filmmaker Scott Millwood that they had seen possible wreckage in Banks Strait and reported the sighting by radio. According to their recollections, the search aircraft was recalled and a police vessel arrived too late to find anything. That, too, remains unresolved.

Accident? Or something else?

The most straightforward explanation is an accident.

VH-AQL was a small, ageing aircraft flying over Bass Strait, an often rough, 250km wide body of water that separates Tasmanian from mainland Australia. Other aircraft have disappeared here. If Max and Brenda crashed into the sea the wreckage could have scattered, sunk or drifted beyond the search area. The absence of debris does not rule out that possibility.

The disappearance prompted questions about the original investigation. Later, the matter was raised in the Australian Senate but the official record remained unchanged: VH-AQL disappeared somewhere north of Eddystone Point. Neither the aircraft nor its occupants was found.

That is where the investigation sits as the years pass. Then, in 2003, Scott Millwood receives documents concerning the case. His research becomes the 2008 documentary Whatever Happened to Brenda Hean? It is accompanied by a book. ABC News reported a $100,000 reward offered for new leads. Nothing comes of it.

Police records raised questions about the reported hangar break-in and the original investigation. Claims of political pressure were also examined, but historian Jillian Koshin was reported by ABC News as finding no evidence establishing political involvement in the disappearance itself.

Here is how the The Tasmanian Aviation History Society record of September 2020 reports the disappearance:

…following the aircraft’s disappearance, theories grew wild. Reports indicate that Price suspected an attempt was made on his life the week before the fatal flight, when the Tiger Moth suffered an engine failure en-route to Maria Island due, to his belief, that water had been put in the aircraft’s engine oil. At the time, Price was in conflict with a business partner, and allegations of embezzlement were brewing.

His passenger, Brenda Hean, was campaigning against the plans to flood Lake Pedder, at the time a very sensitive and emotive topic, which would drown it’s 3km long alpine beach.

It was further reported that both Price and Hean had received death threats prior to the flight’s departure and the aircraft’s hangar was broken into the night before the flight. The plane’s emergency beacon was later found hidden behind some fuel drums.

Despite some evidence pointing to potential sabotage of the aircraft, a police investigation went nowhere, and authorities rejected calls for a public inquiry.

In the forty-eight years since the disappearance of the aircraft, conspiracy theories continue to surround this intriguing story. But with no bodies or wreckage found, no coronial inquest was ever held although the police have never declared the case closed.

What can be said with confidence

The facts are limited but clear.

Brenda Hean was a 62-year-old environmental campaigner planning to take the Lake Pedder fight to Canberra.

Max Price was an experienced Tiger Moth pilot.

They departed Cambridge Aerodrome at 10:16 am on 8 September 1972. The aircraft was seen near Eddystone Point flying at around 600m.

It did not reach Flinders Island.

No wreckage has ever been found.

Beyond that point, the evidence becomes confusing and uncertain.

The flight to Canberra failed to reach its destination. The fate of Brenda Hean, Max Price and VH-AQL remains unknown.

The aircraft may have crashed into Bass Strait. It may have suffered a mechanical or fuel-related failure. It may have been deliberately interfered with. The reported warning and hangar break-in may be connected. Or they may be unrelated events entirely.

Lake Pedder was eventually flooded, but it left a heritage. The campaign to protect it shaped Australia’s environmental movement into a political force.

In Hobart

I arrived in Hobart the year after the disappearance where I joined the Hobart Walking club, the same bushwalking club Brenda Hean had been a member of.

I had not heard of the disappearance but I soon leaned of it from club members. Curious, I thought, that they talked of it in hushed tones. It was almost as if they didn’t want to talk about it. Perhaps that was because it was too close and involved someone they knew. Was that why?

The disappearance and club members’response has stayed with me over the decades, hidden in the back of my mind somewhere only to occasionally emerge but not receive any answer.

And, I wonder. Is there someone out there who knows something?

• How a rural town became epicentre of an illicit industry
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• Gardening in a time of crisis
• The French in Tasmania’s maritime history
• A lake, a peak… how a video raises deeper questions
• How photography saved the wilderness
• Search and rescue: the dilemma of Tasmania's wild places
• The pack
• Hidden paths: the lost settlement at Crater Cove
• Agitprop reborn

The flight that vanished was originally published in PacificEdge on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Journalism. It takes you into unexpected places. You meet people. Some are a bit sketchy. Some are downright unpleasant. Others are a privilege to meet. I didn’t know which this would be as I walked down that long driveway…

FINDING the lane leading to her home wasn’t hard. Parking on the steep hill, I walk past old apple and pear trees the remnant of the orchard that occupied this steep land before it was subdivided. Those are probably heritage variety fruit trees, I realise.

A small vegetable garden. A fenced yard with a shed for the chooks I can see scratching in the soil. A loquat tree overhangs part of the chook run. How those birds must get fat on the seasonal fruitfall.

The hot summer is drawing to an end, what they call hot in these parts anyway, that day I come to interview Kate. As I approach I can see there is nothing showy about her modest house on the hill above the city.

A voice calls from the dimness of the house. “You can leave your shoes at the door if you like.”

Shoes or no shoes? That’s the uncertainty when you go to interview someone at their home. Some people insist on their removal. Most don’t care.

I walk in. Kate comes over and shakes my hand in greeting. I thank her for making time to talk.

“No difficulty finding the place?”, she asks.

“No, and thanks for emailing directions.”

“Let me finish what I’m doing and then we can talk. Have a seat”. She points to a couple chairs and a settee grouped around a low table.

I once read a book on visual anthropology. It was about how anthropologists photograph the interior of people’s homes and read meaning about how they live and what values and priorities they hold, all based on their furnishings and belongings.

I thought it a good idea so I adopted it. Not photographing peoples’ homes, I mean, just observing them. Furnishings might speak of wealth or its lack, though not always. Photos, ornaments, books on shelves, even the colour of the walls say something about someone’s character and interests as well as about their past.

It is the small personal things that speak of their lives. The pictures on the wall. Not art works I mean… family photos and pictures of places they have visited. You have to be careful with photos of people. I don’t ask about them at all. You don’t want to appear nosy or intrusive. Photos of people are very much personal things that carry memories, and perhaps they would rather not share them.

Asking about photos of places can be an ice-breaker when you come to someone’s home to interview them. Photos, ornaments and the like can disclose much about peoples’ interests, about their background, and that in turn can stimulate them to bring up some revealing anecdote to use in your story. Doing this is useful in writing personality profiles. And that is my reason for being here today.

I look around while Kate is busy in the kitchen. I notice things. Posters and nicknacks that I later learn she brought back from China when she returned from working there. Twenty five years ago, that was. When I mention this later Kate shows me the big bed she shipped back, a heavy, dark timber construction with a red, patterned canopy above. Where she sees something luxurious I see something on which dust would accumulate and necessitate regular cleaning. I guess we have different priorities.

The two posters that decorate one wall are reproductions from the Mao Zedong years of the Cultural Revolution. One shows a healthy looking peasant girl against the red background and yellow stars of the Chinese flag. I comment how the use of bright primary colours in the posters, red and yellow, was designed to create a positive, uplifting feel as was the image of the young girl illustrated from below in hero pose. I add that the reality at that time was famine and starvation, hoping my comment won’t offend any political sensibilities Kate might have.

“You’re probably right”, says Kate. “I got the posters when I worked in China”, she explains, adding that they don’t signal political allegiance. She just likes the graphics, she says.

In contrast to her kitchen the sitting area adjoining it is more or less tidy. The settee has that worn but not threadbare look of furniture well-used. A cluttered cabinet stores brick-a-brak. Glass doors give onto the covered courtyard with the long table I passed as I entered. Beyond that, the small orchard of old fruit trees.

A cat enters as I look. We exchange glances as it continues on its way to a bowl of food. It is old. Lethargic. Its fur has a rough-looking texture like it has not been brushed for some time. It gives the animal a ratty-looking appearance.

“That’s Andy,” Kate tells me. “He comes and goes. Comes home to eat. Had him for years. He’s a bit of a fixture here.”

Kate apologises for her messy kitchen. “I get things done through chaos”, she explains, saying that a hidden order known only to her lies behind what others mistake for messiness.

I realise she is being facetious.

Kate turns down the stove where she is preparing food for a client of her one-woman catering business and comes over to sit on a lounge chair, setting cups and a plunger of freshly-brewed coffee on the table. Its aroma floods my senses and I realise I haven’t had my customary morning coffee yet.

After a few pleasantries I ask if she minds my recording our interview, explaining that it helps get the story right and provides quotes. I place my recorder on the low table. Kate speaks with a softness unfamiliar to those who know her as a performance poet.

I want to get around to that, her role in the peformance poetry scene, but first I want some background to why she came here. That will give my story a sense of continuity leading to her life now. I ask Kate about how her life leading to her moving here unfolded.

“I got together with my partner… we ceased being partners decades ago… when I was living in a sharehouse in the inner-city. He knew some of those living there and would come around from time to time. I was with someone then but he took up with another woman in the sharehouse and they left.

“It was like my partner and I just drifted together. That’s got something to do with the times, I think. They were easy-going. People would drift into and out of relationships. Nonchalant, sort -of.

“Thinking back, I don’t recall all that many lasting through the years… lasting like that they are still together. There’s only one that comes to mind and that was a woman who left for the tropical far-north with the person she met. They built a small shack in the bush and lived in it for years before moving down to the coast where her partner found an administratve job in a sugar mill. They’re still up there though no longer where they originally were. They eventually moved down to Brisbane. She’s settled and seems happy. I guess I envy her stability in some ways. It was not my path, though.

“We… my new partner and I… left the sharehouse. We took out a mortgage soon after we got together. Bought a duplex in another inner-urban part of the city. He had the impression that we were a life-match. I didn’t know about that. I didn’t think about it. I put it down to his coming from a stable home and me coming from one far less stable. My parents divorced. I was more a creature of the moment when we got together. Think I might still be.

“It lasted years. We had a couple children. Our breakup eventually happened because we took different tracks in life and were growing apart. I guess I was becoming despondent. Life had taken on a kind-of regularity that seemed to stretch into a distant future, and this made me feel uneasy and… how do I describe it… sort-of empty inside. But it wasn’t like I had any other plans in life. As I hinted at before, I kind-of drifted in life. How does the saying go? For a ship without a rudder any port is the right port?This wasn’t something I suddenly realised. It was a notion that started slowly and built on itself.

“So I saw no reason to continue and after a while he seemed to accept that. The offer of a job teaching English in China came at the right time.

“We still had the duplex in Sydney’s Inner West. I was away in China for around three years. My partner, or should I say ex-partner, was still living there when I came back. So on my return I rented a small place in Annandale and found a job cooking in a French provincial restaurant in Balmain. It was a good job. Good pay. The chef was easy to get along with.”

Kate hesitates and glances away. People sometimes do this when they realise they might be disclosing too much personal information. Should they go on or change track?

She continues.

“A few years would pass before I realised I was getting tired of life in the city. I had to get out. But it was not just that which convinced me to move down here to this small regional city. It was more a deeper malaise, an emptiness in life, a directionlessness…”. She hesitates as if searching for the right word. “I hadn’t experienced anything like it since taking the China job.”

“ My relationship with my now-ex-partner was amicable. So some time after I came back from China we agreed to sell the house. He at first resisted the idea but came around to it. I didn’t know what he would do, where he would go after that. Turned out that he quit the big city for a rural town. And so we went on our separate ways in life.

“It’s strange, isn’t it, how after living with someone for years you break up and lose contact with them. Your life has a rhythm, a day-to-day pattern. They are there as a part of that, an everyday presence in your life. And then they aren’t. This is something I’ve noticed with friends too. Like me, they have spent years with a partner. Then they start to grow apart. They don’t notice it at first. Then one day it dawns on them. And then they say goodbye and head off somewhere as if they are walking down to the road to the bus stop.

“Anyway, I moved down here after selling the house”.

Why here? I didn’t have to ask because Kate continued her story.

“A longtime friend lives here… has for many years”, Kate continues.

Kate explains how in her younger years they lived in that same sharehouse in a distinctly downmarket part of Sydney. Then her friend and her partner “… moved to this place. After a few years the relationship crashed, as happens with relationships.” Her friend did well as a lawyer.

Breakups are frequently wrapped in emotional turmoil, yet the way Kate describes her’s comes across as rational rather than emotional, although there was emotion at the time. I realise that here is a woman with the maturity and grasp of reality to go through an emotional reaction and emerge in some clear place that gives her perspective.

Later, her ex-partner drifted down here. They maintained a friendship for some time.

“He bought a house with the proceeds of the sale of our Sydney home, as did I. He had a blues program at the local community radio station. He gave that up and became more and more withdrawn from the people he knew. I thought he was having some kind of mental problem, an existential crisis, perhaps. But over the diminishing number of times I saw him I realised it was none of those things. It was just like he was withdrawing from life or something. He never told me why. He just sort-of faded away. I haven’t seen him for years now.”

For profile stories like I plan to write, letting people ramble on can reveal interesting incidents and thoughts. Especially when they reminisce about something like Kate was doing. That can reveal history and can link with others who come up in the conversation. Links can sometimes put facts into context. You have to nudge gently to get to it.

Tone matters too. That was something I learned back when I did my journalism degree. Tone can hint at personal relationships, whether they are good or tense. Tone and language reveal what an interviewee thinks of someone. Not all, of course. Some people are good a keeping feelings hidden below an even tone.

The other point about letting someone ramble on is that you can start to place their life along a timeline. You might do this when you review the recording if the interview is more than a question and answer session, like this one with Kate, because people jump around the timeline and risk confusing you.

That happened to a colleague. He was interviewing a woman for a personality story. She jumped from incident to incident, person to person, confusing the timeline he was trying to establish. She started with one lover. Then in the middle of talking about him she jumped to the one who came after. Then back to the first. Then back to the one who came after. My colleague was getting confused but he thought he had it right. So he published the story. He got the timeline, the sequence of events and people wrong. One of the lovers read it as being betrayed.

There is a gap in our conversation. A noise outside makes her look away. I sip my coffee and look at Kate. What? In her early fifties? Must be. She doesn’t have that sweet feminine look that some males find so appealing. She is attractive in the way that strong women are. Angular facial features. A few wrinkles. Her hair falls in curly strands to her shoulders, an intermediate colour between brown and black. Green eyes. Her build is more solid than slim, though not what you would call overweight. But it is more than physical appearance, more to do with the sense of acceptance and confidence she emanates that is reassuring.

There’s nothing pretentious about her. She dresses plainly. Well, at least here at home. I imagine she dresses up a bit to do her performance poetry appearances.

I note this because I will use it in my story. Describing how someone looks helps paint a mental picture of them for readers. But I am here to talk about how Kate became a performance poet. I nudge the conversation in that direction.

That, she said, came out of her sense of directionlessness.

“I was ready to do something different”, she explains. “It’s not like a job or anything like that. Much of what I do performing and organising events is unpaid. It’s my small catering business that keeps me going financially.”

A little cognitive dissonance creeps in as we speak about her performance work. My stereotype image of stand-up performers is of extroverted people who make outrageous and sometimes provocative statements to either shock or amuse their audience. With Kate, the extraversion is there yet it doesn’t dominate her personality. It’s more like an overlay sitting atop a quieter, more-introspective personality. That’s a contradiction, I think. I don’t say so.

Is it all show? Is the public Kate a performance? I don’t know how to ask.

Two common-law marriages, three children now grown up. A couple short-lived relationships, like that with the journalist in Sydney, and some personal challenges fed what I discover to be her philosophical attitude to life. When faced with emotional challenges she has the capacity to step back and see the big picture. “That leads to acceptance”, she tells me, “I let go and move on”. I quickly realise that Kate is what you might call an independent woman.

Would she ever settle down into another stable, long-term relationship?

“I can’t see that happening” she replies. “I think that’s a possibility now gone. With my catering business and the performance poetry, my life is kind-of full. I’m also something of a social person. Because I like cooking I often put on dinner parties for friends. I’m not ready to put any of that aside to devote lots of time to another person.”

I think Kate is set in her ways although not hard-set. I realise it’s more that her life has a pattern though it is one she is prepared to break occasionally.

She is far from lonely. With plenty of friends and occasional visits from her children, plus the demands of her work paid and unpaid, there are plenty of people who come and go in Kate’s life.

I ask her about this. What sort of relationships are they? Shallow? Deep?

“Both,” she replies. Out of all the people I know, there are perhaps four I would describe as confidants. Others will do things for you but they are not close enough to talk about really personal stuff with.”

Later, speaking with people who know her, I learn that she is regarded with respect and affection. And, yes, they really like her dinner parties from which they leave satiated with food and a little-too-much wine.

Draining the last of the coffee, I put the cup on the table. Kate sits opposite, her legs crossed in a relaxed pose, cup in hand.

“What about your early years? Is there anything that stands out?”.

“Did I mention my early childhood was spent in Malaysia? My father was in the Air Force. He was based at Butterworth, where the air base was. We came back to Australia and some years later my parents divorced. Mine wasn’t all that happy a childhood.

“What stands out, you ask? Nothing big and dramatic, more little dramas interspersed among good times. I grew up in the late-1960s and the 1970s and had that lack of direction we all had back then. No idea about my future or a career or anything like that. I’ve never had a career, or maybe I’ve had a succession of careers like teaching English in China, cooking in the French restaurant, my current catering business and my role in the performance poetry scene.

“Not many people know, but I was a radical in those days. I was once arrested for kicking a government bus at a demonstration against the war in Vietnam.

“We were leftists, and that gave me the critical outlook on life I still have. It taught me to question, to reflect on things to find what lies below them. That’s something I’ve noticed in people who have been leftists. They look for what lies under the events. They look for buried trends and currents, for the deeper, longer-term layers.

“Maybe it, the defiance of authority I mean, subconsciously fed into my becoming a performance poet.”

We talk about that for a while. Kate explains how her having done a fiction writing masters at the University of Tasmania fed into the writing of her performance poetry pieces. She will pick a theme and write around that and then perform it with a flourish of drama. Timing, eye contact with the audience, tone, volume… they are all important in creating drama and keeping the audience intrigued.

She tells me about the performance poetry scene, the people involved, the occasional challenging person, how winners are chosen. It is a new world for me.

The theme of my story is less the peformance poetry scene and more her life journey that led to it. So what about significant people in her life other than the fathers of her children?

“It’s curious how first one and later another of the kid’s fathers drifted down here. There was the one whom I had those first two children with who I mentioned before, the one who withdrew from contact. The other one moved to a town not too distant from where we are. He met a women. They set up house together. They parted. And so it goes, I suppose.

“I have a sister living on the mainland but we haven’t talked for years. I don’t want to go into the reasons other than to say that it was her doing. Last I heard she was living in this country town in inland Queensland somewhere. Doing what, I have no idea. I do think of her sometimes, mainly when friends ask if I have heard from her. I don’t expect to see her again.

“Other significant people? My brother lives in an isolated house off the East Tamar Highway and spends his time restoring old Kombis and VW beetles. And there’s Charlene, my friend from my radical days who became a lawyer. We travel together like when we went to the US for a Bob Dylan concert.”

She finishes speaking but I don’t interject. Silence invites the urge to fill it and, sometimes, people will make some kind of revelation. When personal life is the topic of discussion that silence can be someone mulling over whether to reveal something deeper and more personal. You need to give them time.

“You asked about the past. Well, there was this young man… back when I was young too, years and years, decades ago now. I lived with him for a year or so until he took up with a woman in our sharehouse. So we went our different ways. That young man I was with moved down here with the woman from the sharehouse and they remained partners for the good part of a decade before splitting up. He returned to the mainland. His partner stayed here. She’s that lawyer I mentioned. She’s perhaps my closest friend.

“That young man… we occasionally meet-up when we’re in each others’ city, but those are fleeting visits. I’ve known him longer than anyone else, so he’s special. I would like to think that he feels that way about me, although we never talk about it.

“No, we would never be a couple again. He’s in a long term relationship. But if he wasn’t, well, maybe I would have to contradict what I just said. It would never be a relationship like it was back in the day. But I know it will never happen. It’s one of those wistful thoughts that you have in the quiet moments at the end of the day, thoughts about what could be but never will be.

I thought this would be a quick interview for a short backgrounder piece. An hour and a half and two coffees and more nibbles later, I am still here. Packed into her brain, Kate has a catalog of stories to tell. I’m an avid listener.

Sitting through the interview I realise Kate exhibits the characteristics of the stoic personality type. She has the courage to forge her own path in life, like taking off to work in China and starting her small catering business. Her happiness is not dependent on others. She has a self-confidence that rests on her life experience. She helps others in need and her sense of justice… that might come from her background as a leftist years ago… makes her scathing of powerful people yet compassionate with friends and family. She also exhibits all of the contradictions most of us have.

Most important, though, Kate comes across as satified with her life. Like her younger self, her present self has no great ambitions and she seems happy to accept what life offers.

When I ask her what’s next she looks away as if gathering her thoughts, then lifts her cup of now-lukewarm coffee and turns back to me.

“I don’t know. I’m settled in this house. I have friends, I have a role, maybe a couple roles, I have a little veggie garden that a visitor made for me and some chooks that lay eggs. I travel a bit. I don’t think I’m going anywhere anytime soon.

“Most of all I have my memories and although some of them are painful, those are counterbalanced by the good.

“I guess you might say I’m content.”

• Four friends
• A place in the world
• Sunset in the last days of managed retreat
• On the coast, a parting
• A letter from Virginia
• A good year
• A quiet conversation
• The legacy
• Franstralie: a nation that could have been
• Missing on the headland
• The pack

The interview was originally published in PacificEdge on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Cooking in the mountains: the evolution of our cook kit

IN THE 1970s we had lightweight bushwalking gear. Now it is heavy. In the 2000s we had a new generation of lightweight equipment. It is still regarded as lightweight. But now, we have ultralight.

The availability of today’s new, lightweight equipment is the result of new, strong materials such as silicon nylon and titanium coming into adventure equipment design. New design concepts, too. Reducing the weight of our three heaviest and bulkiest pieces of bushwalking equipment — pack, sleeping bag and tent — is the key to a lightweight bushwalking kit.

We can go lightweight with other equipment too, such as our cooking kit. To appreciate today’s lightweight kit, however, let’s make a brief excursion into the past.

How it was

A fine day has moved into a fine late afternoon as we set up camp somewhere near Mt Pelion in the Reserve, as the Cradle Mountain-Lake St Clair National Park was then known. We scout around for firewood. Someone lights a fire, sets up a frame to hang billies from. We cook in tin plated or aluminium billies. Tin is cheaper, but they eventually rust. A small fire is all we make, as we go along with the bushwalkers’ saying: ‘The bigger the fire the bigger the fool’.

Then, fires were permitted in national parks. They are now banned for the most part. That is because of the peaty soils. Even after a campfire or cooking fire appears to be extinguished it can stll slowly burn in the soil and then, when conditions are right, burst out into flame: bushfire.

Firewood could be in short supply in the mountains. Sometimes it looked like dead wood but it was alive. Bushwalking was becoming popular. More people needed more firewood. In time, popular campsites became denuded of dead wood. People damaged living vegetation in their search for something to burn. That was another reason that open fires were eventually banned in many of Tasmania’s national parks.

We gathered firewood sparingly. More often that not, though, we cooked over the little stoves we carried in our packs … single‑burner contraptions that choofed away on shellite, or kerosene for those few using the Swedish Optimus… wasn’t it? We thought of them as lightweight back then, purpose‑built for bushwalking. The old Optimus in its steel clamshell case would certainly not be regarded as lightweight today. It was a weighty beast, but it burned hot. When you primed it and heard that rising roar, you felt like you were part of a long tradition of mountain travellers. Which you were.

The Svea 123, though… that was the jewel of its era. A brass, pressurised Swedish marvel that slipped neatly inside a small billy. It was the pinnacle of liquid‑fuel stoves. You primed it, lit it and away it went with that familiar roar that was so reassuring on cold nights when the rain beat heavily on the hut’s galvanised iron roof. It was my choice.

Then came the new century, and with it, Jetboil. Bushwalkers suddenly found themselves cooking with a system rather than a stove: burner, pot, windshield, all clipped together in one tidy unit. It was a far cry from the Gaz Bluet with a billy perched precariously atop a butane cartridge — the setup we’d carried in the seventies. Jetboil rethought bush cooking. Their stove kits made it faster, safer, more efficient. Others followed.

Lightweight convenience made Jetboil a favourite. But the quest for shaving grams never really ends.

Saving weight with Toaks

I have used a few different stoves in the bush. The Gaz Bluet was my first, an early butane canister device. The shellite-burning Svea 123. Trangia 27, a complete cookset that runs on methylated spirits. Jetboil Minimo, a complete stove/billy/windshield device. Now it is the Soto Windmaster, an isobutane stove that is remarkable efficient.

But there is another way. It is lighter weight. It is simple. It is minimal. The Toaks alcohol stove feels like a natural continuation of that long lineage of bushwalking burners. It is evolution by subtraction rather than addition. It is profoundly simple in its effectiveness.

Imagine a tiny cup‑shaped thing made of titanium that is so light you don’t notice it in your pack. No pumping. No pressurised tank threatening to flare if you mishandle it. No isobutane cartridge. Just a simple container filled with methylated spirits that quietly burns with a soft blue flame. The Toaks alcohol stove feels like a logical step forward in the long evolution of bushwalking cookers.

Maybe some will miss the aggressive roar of a pressure stove or the instant gratification of isobutane. Instead, the flame gathers itself before it begins the slow, steady work of heating your food. There’s a kind of enforced calm in its pace, a reminder that boiling water for a bush coffee doesn’t need to be hurried. You are in the mountains. You can slow down. You have time.

Titanium is feather‑light, stubbornly durable and non-reactive. The stove sitting under it has nothing to clog, nothing to break, nothing to fiddle with when your fingers are cold. In an age of increasingly technical bushwalking equipment the Toaks stove feels like a return to basic principles: fire, pot, patience.

And then you hear it. The billy lid rattles. You lift it and see bubbles, boiling water.

Irrespective of what you cook on, and whether you feel it or not, preparing that evening meal makes you part of a long tradition of mountain walkers.

Testing

I never set out to acquire one of these cookers that day I walked into a Melbourne outdoor shop that specialises in lightweight equipment. But I also walked out with a titanium windshield/pot support that folds flat and clips together. Bought it all on a whim.

I thought I should test the device to see how it performs.

Weight? The stove weighs a mere 20 grams and measures 5.3 x 4cm. The windshield/pot stand’s four, clip-together panels weigh 34 grams total, and each panel measures 7.6cm x 7.6cm.

We need to carry spare fuel. 350ml, 600ml and 1000ml aluminium bottles made by Optimus, MSR or Trangia and designed to carry liquid fuels and are available in outdoor stores. If your bushwalk is of shorter duration, a 250ml-350ml Nalgene bottle would do. Whatever you carry fuel in, make sure it seals firmly to prevent leakage.

To test the kit I boiled a billy of water at home to estimate how much fuel it consumes. Then, I worked out how many boilings I would make in the bush to calculate how much fuel I needed carry. I allowed a little extra, just in case.

For my test of the Toaks stove and pot stand/windshield I used an 850ml (measured to the top of the pot, meaning the pot holds less, around 750ml) aluminium pot salvaged from my old Mini Trangia kit. Here’s the results:

• conditions — inside; very light air movement coming through the window; mild air temperature
• fuel capacity of Toaks stove — 50ml
• time to boil 500ml water — 6.4 minutes
• volume of fuel used to boil 500ml water — 25ml.

The stove cooled rapidly after the burn ended.

I wanted to test the stove in calm inside conditions to obtain some kind of baseline from which to judge its peformance in the field. I expect longer boil times in the field because breeze and air movement reduces efficiency.

Expect to pay more for titanium equipment. Titanium might be lightweight but it is not cheap.

Improving the kit

I have a Jetboil MiniMo set that performs well, however the Toaks will do for walks when light weight and compactness is needed. On day walks, too, when I want to brew a coffee or heat instant soup for lunch.

I supplement the Toaks stove and windshield with kit salvaged from elsewhere. My kit consists of:

• Toaks alcohol-fuelled stove
• Toaks four-piece pot stand/windshield
• 850ml aluminium pot salvaged from a Mini Trangia cookset, or 750ml Toaks titanium pot
• small pot grippers salvaged from the Mini Trangia cookset
• brass lid/flame adjuster salvaged from a Mini Trangia cookset; this allows the flame intensity of the Toaks stove to be adjusted
• titanium spork
• lighter; you can light the methylated spirits using a ferro rod
• nylon carry bag
• spare fuel in a small Nalgane bottle for overnights or an Optimus aluminium fuel bottle for longer walks.

This is a compact, lightweight cookset for one person. Add a larger pot for two people.

A Soto Windmaster isobutane cartridge stove with the 750ml titanium pot is what comes along on most trips now. It is easier to use than the alcohol stove and has a hotter flame, shortening cooking time. If cooking for two, an 1100ml pot would is more than adequate, depending on what you cook. Even with the larger pot you still have a compact, lightweight kitchen in your pack.

Evolution

From tin or aluminium to titanium, from shellite to spirits to isobutane, cooking in the mountains has followed an evolution from heavier to lighter, slower to faster.

It is the same path followed by the rest of our bushwalking equpment.

More information from Toaks importer, Backpackinglight in Melbourne: https://www.backpackinglight.com.au/brands/toaks-titanium/

• Misadventure in the mountains
• How photography saved the wilderness
• A lake, a peak… how a video raises deeper questions
• The hut
• Late summer: a walk on the coast
• By track to the bay
• Along the Pipeline
• Missing on the headland
• A bush shack a part of our history
• The forgotten islands, a Tasmanian journey

The bush kitchen goes lightweight was originally published in PacificEdge on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Nestled in the folds of the Northern NSW coastal hinterland and dominated by the imposing bluff of Nimbin Rocks, a farming community was transformed into something very different.

IMAGINE this. A place with a humid subtropical climate, high rainfall, fertile volcanic soils and rugged hinterland terrain. It has hidden valleys and forest margins where old farmland meets the bush. Its warm, sunny environment, reliable rainfall and workable soils creates a long growing season.

Difficult access and sparse populations make surveillance harder and create natural concealment. Cultivation gravitated toward remote country like this. Here, crops disappear into dense bushland and are concealed below the steep ridges.

The social culture matters too. Some regions develop reputations for independence, experimentation and distrust of authority. In 1973, the Aquarius Festival set the scene for the subsequent transformation of Nimbin from a dairy farming backwater into a symbol of alternative living, environmentalism and cannabis culture. Over time, this created networks of knowledge, tolerance and identity that reinforced the region’s association with cannabis. As one commentator on Reddit wrote, at the Aquarius Festival:

a lot of that stuff was smoked and the hippies started co-ops to buy up the cheapish land in the area and the festival rolled on.

The scene was set. The future unrolled.

Some places become cannabis-growing regions because local culture, landscape, climate and economics align in powerful ways. In a region where work is scarce, cannabis cultivation and trafficking offer an income that conventional working life cannot match.

Once established, the illegal industry in these regions gains momentum. Seeds, growing techniques, sellers and buyers, stories and myths circulate. A local economy and folklore emerge around the crop. Legend and mythology start to form.

Prohibition shapes this social geography. When cultivation is illegal growers seek secrecy. They seek a physical and social terrain that hides. Remote landscapes become economically valuable for the grower security they offer because they are difficult to police.

In this way, cannabis-growing regions emerge where ecology, isolation, economic pressure, rural skills and countercultural identity meet to create environments that are as much social worlds as illicit agricultural zones.

The crime link: like looking for a fruit bat in the blackness of a moonless nigh

Reports of scale and crime associated with the growing and distribution of cannabis are hard to separate from myth and rumour. Anecdote suggests an overlap between cannabis markets and harder drugs such as heroin and methamphetamine. That heroin has been, perhaps still is, a presence in Nimbin is attested to by comments from locals made in confidence.

Stories of violent crimes, including homicides, have been associated with the cannabis trade. How much is due to criminal activity linked to organised drug markets extending beyond the region, and how much is attributable to the myths and exaggerations that surround Nimbin’s countercultural reputation is anybody’s guess.

It is no secret that organised cannabis cultivation and trafficking are common in a town that supports a Hemp Embassy. So many visitors report being offered weed as they walk along Cullen Street, the main street through town. There have been reports of minibuses taking backpackers from Byron Bay to Nimbin not just to experience the counterculture vibe of the place but to buy the weed that is a part of that vibe. And what about the stories of criminal groups operating in the Northern Rivers region?

Over the years, police have responded with raids. The telltale sound of a helicopter flying around is clear indication that a raid is underway. There are reports of commercial-scale cultivation, the seizure of weapons and cash.

Not long ago, police seized cannabis worth an estimated $750,000, hydroponic growing equipment, two compound bows and ammunition during the raid at Barkers Vale, near Nimbin. Police also conduct roadside drug testing. Some say this is excessive and a waste of public resources, particularly during events like MardiGrass that celebrates the local culture.

There are stories of murders and suspicious deaths in the wider Northern Rivers region that journalists, police, locals and researchers have at times linked to drug trafficking networks, including the cannabis business. Many such links remain alleged. There is truth. There is speculation. There are stories not readily shared with outsiders. Discerning one from the other is like trying to spot a fruit bat in the blackness of a moonless night.

Criminologists and journalists note that during cannabis prohibition eras, illegal markets foster violence because disputes cannot be resolved legally. This is one argument often made by cannabis law reform advocates in Nimbin.

Easy availability

Nimbin has a complex drug scene that extends beyond cannabis. While often romanticised in past years as a hippie haven, the area faces significant challenges with harder drugs. It is common knowledge that weed is prevalent, however Redditors say that the drug problem in Nimbin is goes well beyond that:

Not just weed. Lots of ice. Over the years weed has been replaced with meth and it is no longer the chilled out place it once was, like much of the northern Rivers.

Many visitors report being openly offered drugs in town. According to one Redditor:

I drove through there with my partner and we got offered weed multiple times on the street. Super interesting how the cops just seem to let it be legal there.

Another writes this:

I was there for 3 days back in 2019 and got offered weed multiple times every hour. One afternoon me and buddies were having an afternoon coffee at a cafe when, at 4:20pm the cafe staff closed the doors and invited us to roll and smoke inside the cafe. Was a pleasant experience.

As others have stated, meth seems to be quite a problem there as well. Had some friends drive through one night, stopped somewhere in town, looked outside and there was, in their words, ‘a man that looked like a zombie with scars and scabs all over, scratching at his arms and face’.

Despite drug laws, enforcement in Nimbin appears to be limited, with observations like:

Something may be illegal but not enforced, that’s pretty much the experience I had.

It’s a lot worse these days. Used to be a fun little place through the early 2000’s and I’m sure much more fun before that.”

Many residents argue that Nimbin’s image as a drug town is overstated, that much violence in the region relates more to methamphetamine, alcohol, domestic violence, poverty and mental health issues than to cannabis itself. They say cannabis culture has usually been comparatively nonviolent relative to other illicit drug markets. They also point to the creative energy of the town, the local music and arts scene, the long-running renewable energy technology business, Rainbow Power Company, the community self-help projects.

The hippie culture once extended to Byron Bay, a good hour’s drive away, down on the coast. In the 1970s and 1980s, Byron was the epicenter of an emerging surfing culture. While surfers are not averse to a little weed, it was their culture that prevailed to ultimately dominate the town.

The extent to which the hippie scene of the 1970s and beyond influenced the New Age culture that emerged in the 1990s, and that became a presence in Byron Bay, remains uncertain. The New Age culture was a derivative mishmash of Eastern spiritual beliefs; the appropriated cultural products of the East such as yoga; mysticism; wishful thinking; pop psychology; wellness practices genuine and fake; and profit-seeking by entrepreneurs capitalising on the subculture.

But, there is no credible, published evidence to suggest that the New Age movement has been a driver or partner of Australia’s illicit cannabis industry, including in the Byron Bay/Nimbin salient.

Hippie feeds the industry

Hippie was a largely non-violent subculture. Cannabis always was a part of it, right from the time of Nimbin’s Aquarius Festival. So it comes as no surprise that hippie fed into the region’s illicit cannabis industry that started to develop. Marijuana beame a generational symbol, the palmate, serrated leaf appearing on Tshirts, in publications and in other subcultural products of the times. Its use soon spread from the hippie scene into the wider society.

Hippie played a major role by increasing demand, normalising use and creating social networks through which cannabis spread. However hippie did not create create the black market industry all by itself. Prohibition and law enforcement also played a part. The role of prohibition has surely to be counted as a factor in pushing a countercultural practice into a profitable illicit industry.

When police raids started after 1976 and a moral panic around the ‘drug problem’ was beat up in the tabloid press and among the public, small-scale growing was disrupted. Unable to meet damand, organised crime moved in, driving up prices to $450 an ounce by 1988, according to University of Queensland researcher, John Jiggens.

Writing in his thesis, Marijuana Australiana: cannabis use, popular culture and the Americanisation of drugs policy in Australia, 1938–1988, Jiggens writes of how in 1964, “a massive infestation of wild cannabis was found growing along the stretch of the Hunter River between Singleton and Maitland in New South Wales.” This signifies how the use of marijuana preceded the hippie era. He goes on to report how the attempted repression of marijuana use through “…police crackdowns, numerous murders, and a marijuana drought,” was “…followed quickly by a herion plague.”

It was a misuse of drugs policy which greatly worsened the drugs problem, bringing with it American-style organised crime.

Marijuana use and the police and government crackdown in Australia paralleled that in the USA. There, Nixon declared a war on drugs to exterminate use of the illicit weed. That opened the path to cannabis distribution through clandestine networks, much as it would do here.

The organised crime link extends well beyond Nimbin and the region. That became apparent in the uncovering of large-scale growers in the Griffith/Riverina region during the 1970s. It was revealed that they were linked to organised crime and police corruption, and led to the largest cannabis seizure in Australian history. One plantation spread over 13 ha and was estimated to be capable of producing 60 tonnes of cannabis.

The counterculture normalised marijuana use. Hippie catalysed it. Prohibition industrialised it.

We need to make a distinction here. It was not always about organised crime. People in towns and on the intentional communities that increasingly appeared after the Aquarius festival grew the herb for personal use and for sharing among friends. The practice continues.

It would be inaccurate to portray cannabis alone as the sole or primary cause of violence in the region. Yes, there have been violent crimes and some homicides allegedly connected to illicit drug activity in the Northern NSW/Nimbin region. And, yes, cannabis cultivation and trafficking form part of the town’s culture. But the daily life of those who call the town home goes on around this. Like people elsewhere have adapted to social change and to their region’s geography and the economic opportunities, legal and illicit that arise out of it, so have they to Nimbin’s.

• Security leaders respond to the climate threat to our food system
• The widening gyre
• A crisis. A vulnerability. A society reconfigures
• A Solomons adventure: not quite a working holiday
• Echoes of yesterday
• Two dogs… a saga of the Rainbow tribe
• Hidden paths: the lost settlement at Crater Cove
• Putting down roots
• Indigenous welcoming ceremonies: fake or authentic?
• The French in Tasmania’s maritime history

How a rural town became epicentre of an illicit industry was originally published in PacificEdge on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The project grew out of the hospital’s primary health care unit.

It started with a food garden for patients in the hospital and ended with a book documenting the traditional knowledge of the island’s forest food resource.

Read the story here:

Preserving the traditional forest foods knowledge

• When the community food movement meets the regulators
• Home-grown food security in a time of crisis
• The widening gyre
• A crisis. A vulnerability. A society reconfigures
• A morning with Ernesto Sirolli
• Misadventure in the mountains

Preserving traditional knowledge in the Solomon Islands was originally published in PacificEdge on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

From time to time was are called upon to defend what we hold of value. This is how Tasmania’s home and community gardens, food swaps, food charities, and community pantries spontaneously rose to oppose state government regulations that could have shut them down. It leaves us with a lesson in the effectiveness of cooperation and community resilience in food advocacy.

It starts slowly, builds momentum, and ends with a crash.

We start to hear about it in the weeks before it becomes a political issue. Those who follow such things realise what the proposed regulations mean. They put the word out through social media channels. Mainstream media picks up the story. The resistance begins.

And that’s when the cracks start to appear.

Threat generates action

A storm is brewing among home gardeners who share some of their production with community pantries and food swaps. It brews, too, among Tasmania’s community gardeners. Some community gardens grow food in common, the gardeners taking a share. How would the regulations affect them?

As they delve into the draft Primary Produce Safety (Horticulture Produce) Regulations, gardeners discover that leafy greens, berries and melons are to be classified as high-risk horticulture. Biosecurity Tasmania proclaims that anyone daring to cultivate these crops and share some of what they grow, even your everyday backyard grower, must be documented on a public register. That immediately raises privacy concerns. A daunting thirty-page food safety management plan looms ahead. It demands water testing, input verification and audits.

The spectre of accreditation haunts those who wish to donate, swap or sell their produce. It is a measure cloaked in the guise of ensuring fresh produce safety. Yet, to the home and community gardeners and food charities, this is no safety net. It is a net of control. The regulations will severely impact the food donations that Tasmania Neighbourhood Houses social programs and food charities depend on. They provide essential support to those struggling to feed their families.

The implications are stark. The red tape and the costs designed to regulate the community food sector as if it was commercial farming are insurmountable.

The proposed regulations come across as a blatant case of government micromanagement and bureaucratic overreach that threatens to stifle the Tasmanian tradition of home gardening, community food exchange and the generous sharing of surplus through food donations. Have the anonymous architects of these regulations ensconced in their offices ever paused to consider the collateral damage they would inflict? Do they even care?

Terms used in the draft regulations are ambiguous and undefined. Questions hang in the air. If these regulations are unleashed, would they be enforceable? And how would Biosecurity Tasmania wield the power to enforce them?

The drama builds to leave the future of community food systems hanging in the balance. Soon, the whispers of dissent appearing in online and mainstream media start to converge into a stream of resistance that gathers strength as the days go by.

Stepping into the background

Let’s step out into the bigger picture for a moment.

Tasmania’s food culture is different. Backyard growing is common and is regarded as normal for both city and rural people. Community food exchange is a part of life, whether that is between neighbours passing their excess over the back fence or donating it to a community food pantry. When enough people do this frequently enough, the practice becomes a part of Tasmania’s broader culture.

Food‑relief organisations rely on donated home‑grown produce to provide free food to families find it difficult to feed themselves due to cost of living and other factors. Community gardens are a feature of some Neighbourhood Houses and are found elsewhere. They yield food and the social connection that counters social alienation.

The draft regulations don’t distinguish between industrial supply chains and community food webs. The presumably unintended impacts would erode a cultural practices central to Tasmanian identity.

That proves the trigger point for the community-based resistance that goes on the offensive to defend a productive tradition. As news of the proposed regulation spreads over the weeks, Tasmania’s community food sector realises that the stakes are no longer bureaucratic. They are cultural, social and economic.

It is time for action.

Mobilisation

The Southern Beaches Food Resilience initiative is a new formation attached to our local Neighbourhood House. The House already supports a free weekly dinner, a community refrigerator pantry, a community garden, food co-op and bicycle repair shed. All but the last two would be badly impacted by the regulation.

The group is involved in grassroots activity to build local food security. It is supportive of home food production, food swaps, garden visits and workshops. We are at a meeting when we realise the very existence of our initiative is put at risk by the proposed regulation.

What can we do? We can do what other food organisations are doing. Make a submission opposing the regulation during the public comment period on Biosecurity Tasmania’s website.

We start writing. So does the Neighbourhood House, Permaculture Tasmania, Sustain: the Australian Food Network, the Agroecology and Food Soversignty Alliance (media statement here) and numerous Tasmanian community groups and organisations engaged in the informal community food sector.

• backyard growers submit objections
• food‑relief organisations warn of catastrophic impacts on donations
• local councils make submissions
• community food networks organise petitions and speak to the media
• the Tasmanian Greens and the Jacqui Lambie Network, a political party, add their political heft
• mainstream and social media turn the issue into a statewide conversation about fairness and common sense.

The Southern Beaches Food Resilience initiative submits its comments the day before the public consultation closes.

I submit my own. In it I say:

A viable, active and informal community-based food system is vital to the welfare of Tasmanians experiencing difficulty in obtaining an ongoing supply of fresh, nutritious food.

The proposed regulation would:

• inhibit community response in distributing home grown and community garden grown fresh foods to those who need them during times of crisis when food and fuel supply chains are disrupted (ref: current fuel crisis; Covid pandemic)

• block community self-help initiatives such as community gardening, food swaps, donation of fresh food to food relief programs

• disempower citizens and deprive them of their agency to participate in self-help initiatives, it would discourage further participation in community activities and break down their sense of community

• contradict the Tasmanian government’s Food Resilience Strategy 2025–2031 that recognises the validity and contribution of communities in addressing food security through sustainable community-led solutions.

Proposal

Biosecurity Tasmania:

• negotiate with the community food sector to develop a means of ensuring food safety without restrictive regulation

• encourage the formation of a community food advisory group to advice Biosecurity Tasmania on food safety in the sector and to work collaboratively on solutions

• in cooperation with the sector/advisory body, develop a guide to educate the sector on food safety.

The narrative shifts from food safety compliance to defending Tasmania’s food culture.

Resolution

On 29 July 2026, Premier Jeremy Rockliff and Primary Industries Minister Gavin Pearce announce full exemption from the regulations for backyard growers, community food groups and small‑scale informal producers.

They publicly announce that the regulations will apply only to large commercial operations.

Gavin Pearce issues a media release:

As the second round of consultation on the draft Primary Produce Safety (Horticulture Produce) Regulations comes to an end, the Tasmanian Government has announced there will be no impact to backyard producers.

Premier Jeremy Rockliff said the Government has listened and heard the community’s feedback loud and clear.

“I want to be clear: we are not going to make it harder for people to grow, share, donate or sell small amounts of fresh local produce in their communities,” the Premier said.

“As all good consultation does, the draft proposal has prompted legitimate concerns from backyard growers, community food groups, market gardeners and regional communities.

“I am directing that any final regulations must protect community food growing, food relief activities, local markets and small-scale producers from unnecessary fees, excessive paperwork and disproportionate compliance requirements.

“Food safety remains important, but common sense must prevail.”

Gavin Pearce, said backyard growing is a way of life in our rural and regional communities:

No Tasmanian should need to fill out pages of paperwork, pay fees or navigate a complex regulatory process simply because they are sharing surplus produce, supporting a community food initiative or selling small quantities of fresh food locally,” Minister Pearce said.

Our Government will not proceed with any model that undermines community food security, discourages local food production or creates barriers for ordinary Tasmanians participating in local food networks.

The final Regulations will clearly distinguish between large commercial operations and community-scale activity.

The objective is simple: protect food safety while protecting Tasmania’s local food culture.

Backyard growers, community food groups and small local producers should not be caught up in red tape designed for large commercial operations.

If there is one clear takeaway from this, it’s that nobody will be regulated out of growing, sharing or selling local food in their community.

Following the government’s backdown, Greens Primary Industry spokesperson Tabatha Badger warned that “The Greens remain ready to speak up and push back on these regulations should they return in a similar heavy-handed fashion that negatively impact Tasmania’s non-commercial, community gardens, home growers, crop swappers and small roadside vendors.”

The dramatic tension broke. The community won. The spontaneous campaign for the freedom to grow, exchange and donate fresh food humbled the Biosecurity Tasmania bureaucrats.

Lessons for community advocacy

The case offers powerful insights into how communities can influence policy.

The narrative matters

For food advocates, the story we tell and the way we tell it influences how people understand the issues. Biosecurity Tasmania framed their regulations as a necessary part of a safe food supply. The community reframed it as an attack on the community food sector. It worked.

The media picked it up. Yahoo News reported that “Will Perry, independent candidate for the Kingborough Council, said the government had planned to impose a $700 fee on growers.

“In a Facebook post this week titled “$700 for a handful of spinach”, he said the government’s plan would ‘genuinely kill any farmers’ market proposal at the community hub moving forward’”.

Reframing is important

Done skilfully, reframing redirects and gives an alternative meaning to an adversary’s argument. It deflects and builds momentum.

The community food sector’s reframing of Biosecurity Tasmania’s regulations as an attack on the community food sector told a different story that resonated with growers in Tasmania.

The ‘$700 for a handful of spinach’ distilled government complexity into a relatable injustice. It was a catchy phrase. It was unexpected. It was a sound advocacy tactic.

Scale-up

It is hard to do it alone. You need friends. You need supporters. The campaign against the Biosecurity Tasmania regulation was more self-organising than coordinated. It arose spontaneously in response to a common threat. It self-scaled.

The lesson we can draw for community food advocates from the experience? Seek common ground and recruit home garden growers, charities, councils and allies in academia, community organisations and other and advocacy organisations.

Local culture is political capital

Defending Tasmania’s food traditions resonated deeply. Recognising the threat the regulations would face community growers and food charities with and defining them in terms of established tradition recruited supporters and multiplied the resistance.

Visibility forces action

Limiting a campaign to a single organisation or practice signals isolation. It makes it appear as if support is weak. It presages failure.

Mainstream media coverage transformed a technical regulation into a public issue. So did the use of social media. Combined, they built presence, strength and momentum.

Persistence works

Escalating pressure and unified messaging led to success.

Be there for the long run.

What now?

Food safety breaches involving leafy greens in Australia are predominantly the products of commercial farming and processing distributed through centralised industrial supply chains and sold through supermarkets.

Food Standards Australia New Zealand is the national organisation responsible for food safety. In 2025, the agency coordinated 92 food recalls, the majority due to labelling errors, mould and microbial contamination such as Listeria and Salmonella in processed foods. Pre-packaged salad products were recalled by Coles, Woolworths, Aldi and IGA after E. coli was detected in spinach and mixed-leaf products.

There is no record of systemic contamination arising from community food systems, crop swaps or informal donations.

This implies Biosecurity Tasmania’s targeting of the informal fresh food sector lacked evidence of unsafe practice. It comes across as a fabricated narrative. We can be excused if we view it less as misinformation from Biosecurity Tasmania and more as disinformation.

From such incidents, we draw lessons. One person suggested it was “back to the drawing board” for Biosecurity Tasmania . “It is not over yet”, I responded. “We await the renewed draft regulations. We must ensure they genuinely exclude the community food sector.

“We must remain vigilant,” I concluded.

We all want a safe food supply. Let’s ensure the focus is on the where the evidence shows food safety to be most at risk.

More reading…

• Gardening in a time of crisis
• Searching for resilience
• Preserving the traditional forest foods knowledge
• Permaculture in a time of crisis, war and displacement
• Is permaculture appropriated and rehashed indigenous knowledge?
• Watch out: black swans ahead
• Community gardens: a placemaker’s approach to design
• A crisis. A vulnerability. A society reconfigures
• Security leaders respond to the climate threat to our food system

When the community food movement meets the regulators was originally published in PacificEdge on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

What follows is a collections of tales about misadventure in the mountains. They come from personal experience. The stories are atypical. Most who venture into the mountains don’t encounter misadventure. Yvon Chouinard… climber, mountaineer, surfer, bushwalker and founder of the Patagonia adventure equpment business said that the adventure doesn’t start until something goes wrong. And, sometimes, it does.

The Stoic idea of ‘premeditatio malorum’ is about getting our bodies and minds ready for tough times before they happen. The idea is that if we imagine a hardship beforehand, we’re better equipped to handle it when it comes up.

We can get ready both mentally and physically by facing hardships in safe, familiar places, like where we live. For example, if it’s raining and cold dress warmly, wear your waterproofs, pack your day pack and take a walk. If it’s hot, take a water bottle, dress for the weather, put your pack on and go for a walk while avoiding dehydration. Pack more weight than you would normally carry in the bush and walk further and faster than usual in a place you can easily get out of. Step out of your comfort zone.

The Stoics were not saying we should give into despair by rehearsing bad things. It was about preparing for misadventure or hardship by putting ourselves in stressful situations. They were encouraging us to build resilience. It reminds me of the old scout’s motto: be prepared.

Being prepared is my intention in looking at these incidents. Here’s something to remember: the adaptable survive.

Misadventure on kunanyi

March 2026
Kunanyi-Mt Wellington, Tasmania

It happens suddenly. We have just stated descending Hunters Track and are about fifty, maybe a little more, metres down the steep and rocky slope.

Our intention that morning was to follow the steadly ascending Panorama Track from The Springs, then instead of taking the Zig Zag Track to the summit plateau we would follow the Organ Pipes Track below 120m high vertical dolerite cliffs to The Chalet , a grandiose name for a three-sided stone shelter. From there, we would descend the steep and rocky Hunters Track to Junction Cabin, then turn south to follow the Leah Valley Track back to The Springs.

There were others on the track, some with no packs, no equipment, lightly dressed for a day in town despite the signs at the start of the track warning about the possibility of cold and wet weather and the basic equipment that should be carried on the mountain. That includes warm as well as waterproof clothing even in summer, food and water, a charged phone, a map. Check the forecast before setting foot on the track. kunanyi-Mt Wellington might be close to Hobart but it is not a city park. Alpine conditions prevail on the open summit.

The warnings are not alarmist. Over the past five years there have been a number of rescues on the mountain, usually for small groups or of individual walkers who were caught out by the sudden onset of cold, wet and windy weather. Some tripped or slipped. Some became disoriented in fog or were caught out by the weather. Hypothermia, the loss of core body warmth, tripping and falls and disorientation due to poor visibility and losing the track are the most common mountain emergencies in Tasmania.

The most recent serious incident on the mountain was in 2024 when 18 walkers including three children were rescued in cold, snowy blizzard conditions near the summit. They were exhausted. Temperatures plunged below zero, with a feel-like temperature of -21°C reported at the summit because of the wind chill. Blizzard conditions and rapidly deteriorating visibility made the mountain impassable. Rescuers said the people were ill-prepared for the conditions. Someone commented that they were tourists, not bushwalkers. People, especially interstate tourists, underestimate the mountain because it is close to the city. I see them setting out poorly equipped, time and again.

A familiar walk

It’s a popular walk, the circuit we are doing. Ten kilometres of ascent, descent and more or less level walking along the final stretch. We have done it before. Quite a few times.

The Hunters Track starts steeply before the grade lessens further down. We start descending the steep and rocky part not far below where it leaves the summit road. There are high step-downs from rocks to a track covered in loose rocks and fine gravel.

She is descending carefully, stepping down from rock to rock, using her walking poles to brace herself.

Then it happens.

It is sudden.

She steps down and slides on the rocks and loose gravel, losing her footing. I can see that her left leg is caught up behind her, her right leg out in front.

She sits there for a minute. I wonder if she will just get up and continue walking. I have my doubts. The fall looked serious to me. I ask her if her leg is hurting. She says it is. A sprain, she speculates. But it could be a fracture. She heard a snapping sound when she went down.

What to do? I suggest splinting the ankle with a stick and the tape in my first aid kit. She says no. Her boot, she wears low boots that are more like trail runners, will help stabilise her foot if there is a fracture, she says. I’m uncertain. I know splinting is the proper treatment to immobilise her sprain or, perhaps, her fracture. How do I extract her from this steep part of the track? Continuing down Hunters Track, then the walk out from Junction Cabin to The Springs is out of the question given the pain she is in. Should I call for a rescue team to get her out? No, she tells me. I can do it, she says. I have doubts about that but I know she is a quietly tough, clear-thinking and capable woman. So, it looks like we will self-rescue.

Back the way we had come seems the best strategy. We set off, slowly and carefully. I support her up the steeper sections and the high step-ups. It takes quite a bit of effort to ascend the steep and rocky track. Her walking poles help a lot, both supporting and stabilising her. Their utility in circumstances like this is obvious.

The top of the track. Her ankle is painful but there are no other signs of injury. I leave her sitting here, cross back to The Chalet and set off along the Organ Pipes Track, the way we had come, to get the van and drive up the mountain and pick her up.

I walk fast. Fifty minutes back to The Springs. Average 4.8kph, I later calculate. I’m being careful. I don’t want to become a casualty too. Finally, The Springs. Into the van and up the mountain, and soon we are heading to an urgent care centre. She comes out of the centre with a pair of crutches and left lower leg embraced by a splint. Diagnosis: a spain.

Saturday morning. 7:30. I’m in town. I’ve just taken her to the emergency department at the hospital, as instructed by the doctor at urgent care centre. They x-ray her ankle. It is not a sprain. It is as she speculated when she fell: a fracture. That accounts for the snapping sound.

Looking back on the incident three things come to mind. First, I admire her courage and persistence in insisting on self-rescue. Second, the number of times you have walked a route and your bushwalking experience — and she did have that — does not diminish the possibility of mishap. Third, the old boy scouts motto is less cliche and more actuality: be prepared. I now carry one of those small, lightweight Sam Splints in my pack and hope to never use it.

A van, a pack, a mountain mystery

June 2025
Cradle Mountain, Tasmania

Late in the afternoon of June 9 Christopher Inwood, a 52-year-old Victorian man, drives his white HiAce van to the car park at the Lake Dove ranger station. He leaves it there. It is the first month of the southern winter. The weather at Cradle Mountain is cold.

Rangers discover his Toyota van, unlocked, keys inside, around 07:30 on Tuesday, June 10. That same morning, around 500m along the road towards Lake Dove, they discover a pack. It has been abandoned. It is Christopher’s. The find suggests he carried it only briefly from the ranger station car park before abandoning it on the edge of the road. Why? No one knows.

Police pinpoint Christopher’s last confirmed sighting prior to his coming to Cradle Mountain in Kelso, north of Launceston. That was the previous Sunday, June 9. But now? There is no sign of him. Just his van and his pack a half-kilometre down the road towards Dove Lake.

The unlocked van, the pack. It is strange. It is mysterious. It is the sort of incident that triggers speculation, assumption and rumour. These are noted and usually dismissed as they lack direct evidence.

The search commences. It involves police, State Emergency Service personnel, drones, helicopters and rangers. It continues for several days. Searches usually start with a reconnaissance search of tracks, huts and campsites. If clues are found an intensive search of the immediate area is started, perhaps a line search to fully comb an area. Chances are the missing will be found during the reconnaissance search phase, sheltering in a hut of at a campsite, delayed by weather, disorientation or injury. But, not this time.

Christopher went missing on June 9 or 10. It is now June 12. Three days missing in bad weather in the mountains. Three days with cold nights. Hypothermia weather. The survival window is closing. Nothing has been found. It is time to wind down the search.

Police and rangers believe Christopher left his van at the ranger station intending to head into the mountain country over toward Dove Lake or the start of the Overland Track. He did not register a walk intention in the logbook. So where is he?

There are a number of tracks Christopher could have followed. The most popular is the sometimes steep and rugged ascending track to Marion’s Lookout that gives access to Cradle Plateau. From here, the usual route is across the plateau to the Kitchen Hut emergency shelter. From there, the steep scramble to ascend Cradle Mountain is accessible.

There are alternatives. From a little south of Kitchen Hut the rough Face Track crosses the flank of Cradle Muntain to join the track to Hansons Peak. Rangers Hut, another emergency shelter, is just off-ttrack near the intersection. Another route from Kitchen Hut follows the Overland Track around the mountain to Scott Kilvert Hut where walkers overnight. The track continues to the Face Track junction near Rangers Hut. Alternatively, the track from Dove Lake to Hansons Peak, above Twisted Tarn, takes walkers to Scott Kilvert Hut or the Face Track.

It is the frequent hostile weather that accounts for the presence of the emergency huts. Even in summer the temperature can fall suddenly. Winds, strong and cold from the west, sweep across this open alpine country above the treeline to bring cold rain, sleet and sometimes snow. Becoming disorientated in fog is a risk. There have been many search and rescue operations here. There have been fatalities caused by hypothermia.

It is mid-June 2025. No trace of Christopher has been found. Police scale back the search. They say that because of the sub-freezing conditions Christopher’s survival chances are extremely low.

Winter passes. Spring comes to the mountain. Snow melts. Days grow longer. The earth and the rocks of this bare bone landscape warm. As much as they ever warm, anyway. December comes. There are reports of a wallet being found. They stem from unverified posts in a bushwalking forums. There is no official police or media corroboration.

It is getting on for a year since Christopher disappeared in the rugged Cradle Country. Will his story become one of those tales whispered on long dark nights as bushwalkers huddle inside the huts to escape the wind and rain? For now, the mountain keeps him. Christopher walked in. The wilderness closed around him.

The case remains an active missing persons investigation. An abandoned van. An abandoned pack. Something is not right. There are no answers.

An abandoned pack hides a tale of escape

The case of missing walker Christopher Inwood in June 2026 was not the first find of an abandoned pack in the Tasmanian mountains.

December 2, 2020.
Walls of Jerusalem National Park, Tasmania.

Discovery

Bushwalkers found it. They alerted the national park rangers. But coming across fully loaded packs in the mountains is not all that unusual. Usually, it they belong to bushwalkers taking a side trip to climb a nearby peak without the weight of a pack on their back. They leave them by a track to retrieve on their way back.

But this was different. The pack appeared to have been abandoned. There was no sign of its owner. The pack was left where it was in case its owner returned. They did not. The police later removed it.

The Walls

For decades, the Walls of Jerusalem has attracted mountain walkers. Located on the edge of Tasmania’s Central Plateau, they come for its peaks, lakes and its indigenous Tasmanian King Billy pines. Walkers usually spend at least two days walking in and camping. Many stay longer.

The Walls is an alpine environment. Snow covers the ground in winter. There is only one hut there, Dixon’s Kingdom, a remnant of the days when cattle were grazed here in the high country.

The search

Tasmania’s history of bushwalking incidents led the authorities to treat the find seriously. On December 2, police put out a public call: Does anyone recognise this pack? Does anyone know who left it by a track in the Walls of Jerusalem National Park?

Nobody knew anything, other than the person who had abandoned the pack.

It took weeks for the story to come out.

The resolution

She was alerted to the situation by bushwalkers. Realising her predicament, she was forced into a decision many travellers faced that year: leave immediately or risk being stranded indefinitely. But… here she was a good day’s walk into the mountains. What to do?

Lockdowns loomed in Victoria, her home state. Borders were tightening. Flights were uncertain. The pandemic situation was escalating.

She made her move. She would have to travel light to make it out of the mountains to try to catch a flight home. Taking only her essentials, she abandoned her pack with the intention of returning to retrieve it later. Speed, not belongings, was her priority.

But there was to be no quick return. Months passed. Borders stayed closed. And in all of that time until rangers removed it her pack sat there in the weather beside a track in the mountains, inspected only by curious wildlife.

This is not a survival story. Not the tale of a lost bushwalker. Nor a rescue. It is the tale of a curious incident amid a global crisis.

The high country: a near miss

Some time in the late 1990s.
Kosciuszko National Park, Snowy Mountains, NSW

We are… what is it? Let’s see. Three days? Maybe. Whatever, we are days into what was probably a seven day trek through the high country of the Snowy Mountains, Kosciuszko National Park. We are headed out to Mt Jujungal.

The mountain is this big chunk of old, dense basalt that rises boldly above its surroundings. At 2061m it is the highest point in the Jagungal Wilderness Area, a vast, remote, and largely treeless expanse located in the northern section of Kosciuszko National Park.

The multi-day walk to reach the mountain is suited to experienced and self-sufficient bushwalkers. There are a number of huts in the region: Derschkos Hut, O’Keefe’s Hut, Round Mountain Hut. Bushwalkers and ski tourers use them as camp sites.

Spring to autumn are the months for bushwalking the high alpine country, but even then cold, windy weather and heavy rain comes in. Winter brings snow. That… cold, wet weather and those high country huts, lead us into this story of a misadventure that could have ended differently than it did.

I’m unsure where we came from that day. It was years ago. Memory can be a bit hazy after all that time. I know we had already been out for days.

Most of the group I am with are experienced walkers of the high country. Gary, a quietly spoken man probably somewhere in his mid-fifties, had organised this trek. Tall, slim, his dark hair swept back, his face craggy through years of exposure to sun and wind, and muscled in that understated way you find among bushwalkers who undertake ambitious treks in the mountains, his appearance speaks of his years of high country bushwalking.

In contrast is Fiona, a woman in her early thirties who has made a few high country bushwalks with the group but is still learning through experience. By this time she has acquired a pack that is comfortable to carry when loaded, a Lowe Alpine Systems model, and a waterproof parka suited to mountain conditions. Those are an improvement on the old military pack and red plastic raincoat she had on previous bushwalks. With her blondie hair and light and positive attitude, she is good company.

So here we are, another day out in the high country in the fine, sunny weather of late summer or, perhaps, early autumn. It wouldn’t last.

We are following a track heading towards Jujungal by the time the change of weather sweeps in. We are getting tired. But it isn’t far until we reach the hut where we plan to overnight. Maybe it is the thought of a hot brew and dinner and a warm night in our sleeping bags that keeps us going those last few kilometres. It is getting cold.

There it is ahead. I don’t recall which hut it was. Perhaps it was one of those build by the cattlemen when this was wild grazing country. They are long gone, replaced by bushwalkers who wander the high undulating country just as the cattle had once wandered.

We open the door. Nobody here. Good. Looks like we will have the hut to ourselves. It is a simple structure as mountain huts are, a living and cooking space with a table and some seats and at the rear a number of bunks in two tiers. We stow packs on bunks, unpack sleeping bags. It is time to eat. No matter what the food is, it always tastes good after a day on the track when the weather turns rainy and cold.

Maybe it is an hour after we arrive that the door opens. In comes a group of scouts. Teenagers. They too are relieved to get out of the rain and cold. They organise themselves and start to make something to eat.

How long is it? I didn’t check. But the group has been here for what must have been something like ten minutes or more. That’s a guess. What happens? It is this. The door opens again. A scout enters, one of the party that is settling into the hut. He is alone. Odd, I think. How come he is by himself? Then I notice something. He appears vague. Disoriented. Lackadaisical. Cold. Tired. Then it clicks as my earlier experience with a search and rescue unit in Tasmania makes the connection. This young guy is hypothermic.

Hypothermia is an extremely dangerous condition. It occurs in cold wet windy weather when the body’s core temperature goes into decline. If the victim is not warmed quickly, well, then it can be too late.

I mention my suspicion to Gary and Fiona. The scout is showing the classic signs. I go over to the troup’s leader and firmly suggest it is time to get the scout into dry clothes and into his sleeping bag. The leader hesitates as he takes in the situation. Then he concurs. It is none too soon.

I monitor him before we climb into our bunks. He appears to be stabilising.

Morning. The weather has improved as has the young scout. It look like he can continue his walk.

We close the door, swing packs on back and set off. I mention to Lynn that a party never leaves someone behind, that a reliable person is appointed to bring up the rear of the group. If the party is split, a reliable person takes on the leader role for each group, and that includes pathfinding. Another stays at the tail. A location to stop, rest and reconnect is agreed.

It was an excellent few days in the high country. We returned to the city and didn’t speak much about the young scout after that. But even now, many years after we encountered that group that cold, wet and windy evening, images of the incident still come to mind as if to remind me that the high country offers beauty and challenge and, sometimes, just more than a little danger.

On the cliffs

Some time in the late 1970s
kunanyi-Mt Wellington, Tasmania

It is around 2am. Strange, the taxi driver thinks. A strange time to drive someone to the summit of Mt Wellington. Concerned, he contacts the police.

I hear of it not long after daybreak. Someone has gone missing on the mountain. As a member of the bushwalking club’s search and rescue unit I drive up to the search base at The Springs. There I find the police search and rescue crew and a few people returning from a reconnaissance search.

A reconnaissance search is what you do first. The idea is to follow the commonly used tracks and check out campsites. That is where someone who is injured will most likely be found. The search teams this morning has done that. Nothing has been found. There is no sign of the missing man.

Mid-morning. Still no sign of the mystery taxi passenger. I join a small team setting out to follow the top of the precipice known as the Organ Pipes, a vertical wall of columnar, dark brown dolerite that reaches 120 metres and that is clearly visible from the city below. We are close to the summit of the mountain.

The mountain

At 1271 metres above sea level, kunanyi-Mt Wellington dominates the city of Hobart and shelters it from the worst of the wet and cold weather that blows in from the west. As well as the tourists who drive the 22km up the road from the city to the summit, kunanyi is also a mountain that is popular with bushwalkers. Popular trails traverse the eucalypt forests as well as the terrain above the treeline. The open and exposed-to-the-weather alpine summit plateau is popular with more-adventurous bushwalkers. The Organ Pipes brings out the climbers.

The missing man was neither bushwalker nor climber. Neither venture out on the mountain at two in the morning.

Discovery

The news comes over the radio net. There he is, 30 or more metres on a ledge down the sheer face of the Organ Pipes. Two rescue paramedics prepare to descend. Ropes and a rescue winch are set up at the top of the cliff. Down they go.

He is alive. Some broken bones, abrasions, mild hypothermia. But, alive. The paramedics patch him up to make the ascent. Slowly the rigid plastic stretcher is winched up the vertical precipice, a paramedic at either end. At the top, a team of four carries the stretcher to the waiting ambulance. It is now late morning. The search has ended in success.

Questions

I am assigned to talk to the media where they stand close to the precipice from where they can observe and photograph the rescue. None ask why the man was up here in the first place. And that is the question this day.

Why did he come here? And why at two in the morning? Clearly, he wasn’t here for a night bushwalk along the top of a high, sheer precipice. He must have had other reasons. Suicide? That is the speculation. But if it is the reason, he failed. The precipice is a vertical wall for the most part, but he went over just where a ledge projects from the cliff. And that is where he landed 30 or so metres down.

I never did find out whether his fall was a suicide attempt or misadventure. The latter seems very improbable. There have been other rescues on the mountain. There will be more in the years to come.

Illness in the winter mountains

Some time in the mid-1970s.
Walls of Jerusalem National Park, Tasmania

The Walls of Jerusalem in winter. What better time and place could there be for a bushwalk?

Across the fast-flowing river on the log bridge and then up and up through the forest. Finally, Trappers Hut. A welcome break. We down packs, extract snacks. We are warm from our ascent of the track but we soon start to cool. Fingers become cold and stiff. We put on our gloves.

Trappers Hut is just what its name suggests. Once, when furs were an industry, trappers came here to catch and skin the mountain possums when their winter fur was thick. From there it found its way onto the clothing of the fashionable.

The hut is a rough shack built of the native Tasmanian pine of the mountains. To call it basic would be no lie. But on a cold winter’s day no one is going to complain. It offers a welcome respite. The cool encourages us to get moving again. There is a way to go to our campsite.

The track undulates across more or less open alpine country. We slog through the snow past copses of native pine and past small tarns whose surfaces are frozen. The snow is thick out of the shelter of the forest. Fortunatley, we had the foresight to wear snow gaiters. Areas of deeper snow make the going difficult. We sink up to our knees in places. In conditions like this we take turns breaking trail. Although the track is hidden below the snow we know that this is the route because we have been here before. It was better weather then. It is going to be a slow walk in.

The weather? In typical Tasmanian tradition it clears and then thickens to enclose us. Fortunately, there is no strong wind, no blizzard conditions. It could be a lot worse. Ahead, the slow plod through the snow at the end of which we plan to pitch our tents by one of the lakes. We walk on.

It happens as we are passing one of the tarns. She feels it in her stomach. Cramps. What is it? Food poisoning? We hope not. We stop to assess the situation. She sits on her pack, bent over in pain. Let’s wait and see how it goes is the decision.

And go her pain does, as mysteriously as it appeared. But the day has moved on, the going is too slow. We realise we will not make our planned campsite in daylight. That, and considering our friend’s stomach problem, convinces us that returning the way we have come is the best decision.

She made it out as easily as she made the walk in. What her condition was due to, we had no idea. In retrospect, I wondered if it had to do with the exertion of walking through the snow. Yet, she was an experienced walker with a hardy disposition. I guess it is one of those unexpected things that happen in the mountains.

The experience reinforces what we already know. When conditions are bad or when something happens, it is better to go back than go on.

Injury

Mid-1970s
Frenchmans Cap Track, Western Tasmania

I have to quicken my pace, I know. But I can’t. I can’t because I‘ve injured my knee, injured it back there, back there on the mountain that when I look back appears as a big quartz monolith shining in the afternoon sun.

We were near the end of day three of our walk into Frenchmans Cap, a big, pointy peak standing above the canyon of the Franklin River in South West Tasmania. Our plan was walk in to Tahune Hut on day one, climb the peak on day two, walk out day three. Simple. But somewhere on that mountain, up there above the treeline beyond Artichoke Valley and around Lake Tahune I injured my leg and my knee was letting me know about it. I can still walk okay though at a slower pace than my companions. There are no spasms of great pain, just a constant ache that tells me I had better adopt a steady pace and try to avoid slipping and damaging it further.

Avoiding slipping out here on the Loddon Plains is something of a challenge. This place is not called the Sodden Loddons for nothing. The trail is not a well made and maintained track. It could best be described as a route traversing the flat, button grass plains between Frenchmans and the flying fox across the Franklin. Years of bushwalkers boots tramping a path across a soil that never dries out had turned the trail into a mud bath into which our legs sink knee deep at times. Let’s just say that the trail is a long, linear bog.

There is only this single route into Frenchmans. Moving out from the carpark we crossed the Franklin on a flying fox. That’s a shallow wooden box hanging from a cable strung between pulleys on high platforms at both ends. Our means of propulsion was pulling ourselves across in this contraption, hand over hand, along the cable. After this it was out onto the Lodden Plains. Then, the long boggy walk, step after step, the pace becoming monotonous and the mind drifting to drier places.

Eventually we noticed how the land was rising. We were now in the foothills of Frenchmans Cap. After that, it was up and up until we came to this wonderful little alpine lake with this welcoming little hut on its shore. Tahune Hut.

Tomorrow, we ascend. That was the plan. Tomorrow, though, I don’t ascend because somewhere up here in the mountains my knee has started to hurt with this dull but persistent pain. It will accompany me through the next day, all the way out.

I make it out okay. No serious damage. Just a twisted muscle, maybe. Yvon Chouinard of Patagonia adventure equipment fame said that the adventure doesn’t really begin until something goes wrong. I get what he says, but, maybe, I’m happy with unadventurous walks into mountains from now on.

• Search and rescue: the dilemma of Tasmania's wild places
• Looking for the lost
• A lake, a peak… how a video raises deeper questions
• Lost in the mountains
• Of mountains and luck: how I got into outdoor guiding
• Adventure, innovation and decline: my time in the adventure equipment industry
• How photography saved the wilderness
• Adventure alone
• Two tales of the mountains
• Wandering: it’s about being and doing
• Alone, and the value of bushcrafting
• The OM1 — a photographic tool of the mountain walker
• Pilgrimage
• A Solomons adventure: not quite a working holiday

Misadventure in the mountains was originally published in PacificEdge on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.