My Rookie Era: A Teen's Solo Survival Quest in the Australian Wilderness
In the summer of 1971, at the tender age of 15, I left behind the comforts of my family home with a bold, if naive, resolve to live off the land. Convinced that civilisation was meh and surely doomed, I packed a tent, canteen, billy, sleeping bag, cord, emergency rations—two carrots, a bag of soup mix, and creamed rice—and a bushcraft pamphlet that concealed a Women's Weekly cutting of Princess Caroline of Monaco. With the zeal of the truly clueless, I set out to prove the maxim: "Hire a teen while they still know everything."
The Journey Begins
I convinced two fellow members of our class geek club, Peter and David, to join this venture. Together, we chugged along now-vanished tracks through Victoria's central highlands to Molesworth station, then ascended 460 metres over the summit of nearby Mount Concord. Our destination was a grassy flat beside the seductively named Chrystal Creek, a nirvana I had spotted on a survey map.
Day two was spent staggering around in agony, our legs previously exercised exclusively in the school library. David tapped out the next morning, and Peter followed suit after calling me an idiot. So I was alone—but not lonely, for I had my princess. I hung her portrait in the tent, and she was the only human face I saw for the next six days.
Hunger and Hubris
Hunger changes you and your view of the world. I baited a contraption of sticks with a precious carrot and lay waiting on my belly in the damp grass at dawn. Amazed when a rabbit entered the trap, I yanked on a cord to drop it. Just as the thing fell, my anticipated roast dashed into the bracken, sinking my bravado along with my gurgling stomach.
That afternoon, at the creek, the fin of a large blackfish jutted from the shallows. Propelled by a hunter's rush, I splashed upstream after it with a club. There are moments in life when hubris resets your ego. The blackfish, a famously canny species, fled to a deep pool, into which I flopped, club flailing. I had been outwitted by a fish. Dinner that night consisted of one rabbit-gnawed carrot and soup mix.
Struggles and Survival
Day five I spent naked, dangling my clothes over the campfire to dry, and the sixth wearing them damp, smoky, and singed. If only I had known that a fine feast was available from the witchetties in the acacias lining the creek—think egg fried in hazelnut oil with steamed cumbungi bulbs over a warm salad of bracken shoots. Yum. If only.
Then, late on day six, came a moment of triumph: meat. A hapless blue-tongue lizard hissed at me from a granite boulder on the slopes above the creek. Under threat, I justified spearing it—then not illegal—and carried it back to camp aloft, displaying my status as a hairless-chested hunter to an audience of none.
Boiled, the lizard meat exuded a thick yellow oil reeking of iodine into the remaining soup mix, likely due to the poor beast's last meal of millipedes. I managed to get some down, only to later crawl rapidly from the tent into the moonlight, retching. Lesson: always fry lizards in their own skin, if you must.
The Final Days and Lessons Learned
Menu, day seven: the last limp carrot and half the creamed rice. Day eight: the other half. On day nine, I trudged down the mountain at dusk to spend the roughest night of my life on a slatted bench at Molesworth station, scratching at midge bites, literally itching to catch the morning train home.
So what did I learn from my folly? Looking back, I realised that despite my tender age, I had the mettle to brave the wild for longer than some tough guys on a certain TV show. And yes, civilisation has its merits. But even now, years later, I still find the need to seek solace in wild places as a way to understand the place of humans in the world.
Most of all, I learned that we always, always have more to learn. Even at 15.
