Go George Monbiot. Thank you for caring, even at the expense of your own well-being.
And some excellent Career Advice from the same for those who want to live free.
Category: Environment
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Like Nowhere Else
Seeing as we will are heading up here I have a bit of invested interest in this. Honestly though, I’d like to see the whole world protected from the greedy human industrial machine. Australia does a fair job of reserving tracts of land for wildlife sanctuary, but this is one thing that could always be improved upon. We could always do a better job of looking after this planet and we could never do too good a job.
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Camping
What drives us to camp? Is it a cry back to our primal days? A chance to live as we used to? To absorb nature? Is it the dream of rest and relaxation? Because all these things seem to exist more in either the anticipation or in the reflection of the actual event. The actuality is full of modern contrivances so that we do not have to live as ‘primitively’ as we might like to think ourselves capable of. In part I might welcome the opportunity to sleep out in the open and live off bush berries for a few days if it seriously cut back on all the cooking & cleaning I had to do!
But, the memories make it worth it…
The Australian bush is beautiful and it was fun to cook on the fire, build sandcastles, collect shells, discover our own ‘Mermaid Cove’, swim with the fish, dive in the surf. And we saw a lot of wildlife, from crabs to possums, a red-bellied black snake, a very friendly goanna and of course kangaroos and a wallaby.
We slept to the scratching and scrounging of who-knows-what animals, and gum leaves and sticks falling on our tent, in fact it was an area prone to trees falling and we saw one suddenly & entirely collapse only a hundred metres from our campsite. Which kept me awake at night! In the morning it was noisy! So many birds just having a party.
I felt absolutely exhausted by the end, cooking & cleaning in makeshift conditions, dragging the kids around the beach and back, but times like these call for extra effort and the memories will always be special.
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Camping
Our mindset is adapting to a nomadic lifestyle we will be taking up in April/May next year. We are preparing ourselves to ‘rough it’, albeit in a Solar Powered Motorhome complete with kitchen, toilet, shower and beds, glorious beds! I feel like last weekend was our first taste of what this will be like, as, though we’ve camped out before, this time we undertook it with the full understanding that this lifestyle was coming upon us very quickly.
It was glorious, truly, glorious, to cook by our campfire, by gas lamplight, to put the kids to sleep in their car bed (a brainwave, as one of our swags was unusable), to wake up from my dozing by Henry shooing of the biggest fox he’d ever seen, who left reluctantly, to eat some chocolate together by the campfire under the stars while the kids slept and finally to wake in the cold in the middle of our patch of temperate rainforest. It was such a refreshment to me, as I have been struggling with our morning routine at home for a while. It brought me back to the reality of family life, love, life experience, exploring through my childrens eyes while being able to show them new things about the world.
I do just love, deeply, intrinsically, the natural world and I can not imagine living without access to the great natural regions of our planet. Regions that have thankfully been saved by conscientious governments and those fringe & passionate greenie groups. We stopped off at the Franklin-Gordon Wild Rivers National Park in Tasmania on our honeymoon, and I am grateful for the effort of those initial Greens for their persistence in saving such a beautiful natural sanctuary. I wish there was more of such landscape and less of our offensive modern edifices and contrivances.
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A Tree
I saw here a potential picture that beckoned from across an empty campground. I am forever thankful that I did not pass this by, but instead walked my pregnant self the few hundred metres to take a couple of pictures. They are photographs that I will never grow tired of.
Tulitha King 