I found the photo below on my mobile telephone yesterday when I was clearing out files and tidying away the last of my pictures from our South Australia trip. It is taken from a sandstone cliff top overlooking the Woronora River in the Sutherland Shire on the south side of Sydney. It looks like wilderness but is instead on the edges of Sydney and lapped on all sides by suburbia. I was doing what I do when in Sydney to visit my Mum, spending my spare time between visits with her either wandering in the woods or climbing on the boulders near my brother's house.
On this particular day, I was walking along a bit of track that I had stumbled onto late the evening before and had ear-marked as warranting further exploration. I am a sucker for a bit of track. If I find even the thinnest hint of a foot pad I simply must follow it to see where it goes. My significant other thinks this is my own particular brand of FOMO. Not fear of missing out on the deal of the month but the idea that I must see what is at the end of the track, on the other side of the island, or over the next ridge.
Soon after this photo, I came to a junction marked by an old sign. I took the left hand fork and found myself on an increasingly faint trail heading down towards the Woronora River. In parts, it was covered with bark and nearly overgrown, but, this was obviously once a passaged route. There were rough stone stairs in places and even a handrail in one spot. After a 100 metre descent, I came out at the river by a deep pool where the sun was shining through eucalyptus.
I was out of time and had to turn back, but, my eye, which is good at reading faint tracks and foot pads could discern a hint of track continuing on. Who knows where this track might lead? Clearly I would have to come back.
At the beginning of the pandemic, one of my nieces was forced to cancel her holiday to New Zealand and was lamenting the loss of this opportunity to adventure. I mentioned that she need not give up adventure as there are literally hundreds of places in NSW which offer adventure. Perhaps not on the scale of the New Zealand Alps but for my very urban niece, a bushwalk in the Budawangs, a sea kayak along the south coast, a descent of a canyon in the Colo, would all provide more adventure than she could handle comfortably. Given that being uncomfortable is what adventuring is all about you have instant adventure. With the conceit of youth, she "tsked" me and said that there was nothing adventurous she could do without getting on an aeroplane to New Zealand.
It is interesting how we have come as a society to define adventure. Merriam Webster defines adventure as an "exciting and remarkable experience" or "an undertaking usually involving danger and unknown risks." My niece thinks adventure can only be had in foreign lands under the guidance of professional "adventurers." One of my other young relatives has an even less inspiring definition of adventure as a short walk from the trail head because that is what most people are capable of.
My personal definition of adventure is more along the lines of Bilbo Baggins' idea: "nasty, disturbing, uncomfortable things! Make you late for dinner!" I am, however, a big fan of the idea of adventuring in your own space, near to where you live. Obviously, this is better for the planet; the less we all fly around in big jets the better off our environment will be. And, instead of everyone queuing up to get the same cookie cutter photo for anti-social media we might have truly unique experiences.
Ultimately, I think our youth are losing the ability to adventure which is, in its essence, simply walking beyond your furthest known point. Adventure, it seems, is now defined by a catchy hashtag on social media, and no other location will do.
On one trip to the Shire, after I had been rambling about in the woods for a few hours (my attempts to link various tracks together having ended, as they always do, with some minor bushwacking), I tried to encourage my young relatives to explore their own backyard. I explained how quickly they could get into the nearby bushland and that the cool thing about the Shire is that you can literally walk into the bush from almost any neighbourhood and keep walking for 20 or even 40 kilometres in any direction before you will encounter more suburbia. There are tracks everywhere, simply waiting to be discovered or rediscovered. The youth looked at me aghast: "But how will we know where we are going?" They asked. "You won't," I said, "and that's when you'll know you are having an adventure."
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