At 15 I proved the maxim: “Hire a teen while they still know everything.”
That summer of 1971, I judged the world and concluded that civilisation was meh, and surely doomed. So with the zeal of the truly clueless I resolved to try living off the land, and left behind my comfortable family home and smirking parents.
Equipped for an epic, I’d packed a tent, canteen, billy, sleeping bag, cord, emergency rations (two carrots, bag of soup mix, creamed rice) and a bushcraft pamphlet protecting a Women’s Weekly cutting of Princess Caroline of Monaco.
I’d convinced fellow members in our class geek club, Peter and David, of the venture’s virtue, and 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 to the nirvana I’d spotted on a survey map: a grassy flat beside the seductively named Chrystal Creek.
Day two we spent staggering around in agony, on legs previously exercised exclusively in the school library. David tapped out the next morning. Peter, the next, 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 changes you and your view of the world. There was food out there somewhere, to be foraged, trapped, hunted. I baited a contraption of sticks with a precious carrot and next dawn lay waiting on my belly in the damp grass. 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.
But that afternoon at the creek, the fin of a large blackfish jutted from the shallows, and propelled by a hunter’s rush, I began to splash 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’d been outwitted by a fish. So dinner: one (rabbit-gnawed) carrot and soup mix.
Day five I spent naked, dangling my clothes over the campfire, and the sixth wearing them damp, smoky and singed. If only I’d known 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, 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 (probably due to the poor beast’s last meal of millipedes). I got some down anyway, only to later crawl rapidly from the tent into the moonlight, retching. (Lesson: always fry lizards in their own skin, if you must.)
Menu, day seven: the last (limp) carrot and half the creamed rice.
Day eight: the other half.
And day nine, trudging 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, 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 OK, that 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.
