'I killed and skinned a wallaby and used its fur to carry fire sticks': Incredible story of how one woman abandoned city life, soap and shampoo to live wild in the bush for 12 months

Claire Dunn, 31, lived in a self-made waterproof shelter for 12 months

She killed and ate a wallaby, diamond snake and an injured bird to survive

Roadkill of kangaroos, possum and bats were part of her regular diet

Three years on, she still finds it hard to adjust to living back in 'civilisation'


' I tried not to be disgusted but it’s a very intense experience to skin and gut a large animal such as a wallaby.'



This is Claire Dunn's recount of trapping, killing and butchering an animal during an extraordinary and challenging year of living in the Australian bush.

She went from a comfortable city existence to hunting her own food, building her own shelter and existing without such everyday basics as soap, shampoo and deodorant.

Four years on and now living in Newcastle, she has written a book about her time in the bush 'My Year Without Matches: Escaping The City In Search of The Wild', which includes the moment she felt comfortable with catching the wallaby.



Home comforts: Claire Dunn works on a coil basket at the shelter she built herself. She said that finding out the structure was waterproof was one of her best experiences during her year in the wild Bird's eye view: Dunn surveys the New South Wales wilderness, half an hour from Grafton, which she called home for a year. She undertook the experience to get back to nature Dunn thoroughly enjoyed her own company for most of the year in the wild 'I didn’t feel ready to take from the land until towards the second half of the year then I really started to think it was the right time like I have permission,' she said.

'I started experimenting with setting traps and actually caught a wallaby. Then it was the confronting process of actually killing a wild animal and having to prepare it, eat it and use every part of it possible.' Dunn, 31 at the time, used the wallaby’s hide as a bag to carry her fire sticks.

Such scenes became a part of life after she decided to join an Independent Wilderness Program at Halfway Creek, half an hour from Grafton in northern NSW. A campaigner for the Wilderness Society at the time, Dunn had become a 'pale-faced greenocrat' who was desperate to get back to nature and just ‘be’.

Manual labour: Using a grasstree (Xanthorrhoea) stalk and just elbow grease, Dunn coaxes a coal from the wood shavings in the notch of her Wild Tobacco base-board Ouch: She could soon light a fire in a matter of minutes but the technique caused painful blisters and callouses to erupt on her skin Full time task: Making and maintaining fires took up huge amounts of time and did not become any easier as Dunn's time in the wilderness progressed After a two-week course to study the basics and to prove she wasn’t on the run from the law or completely insane, (something she would questioned often on her mission), Dunn set out with two other women and three men in 2010.

However like straight out of a soap opera or reality show, it quickly became evident that not everyone had signed up for the same experience. One man left the program to join the army, while another kept taking off into Grafton to have his own kind of fun. Meanwhile romance blossomed at Halfway Creek, with one woman dropping out after she fell in love with a bird expert and the remaining two became a couple. This left Dunn to truly experience the wilderness in all of its glory. Eagle-eyed: A keen ornithologist, Dunn often spends time observing the bush birdlife from her sit-spot on the root-ball a fallen Scribbly Gum amongst the bracken Hunter: Dunn weaves a basket to catch eels in the river. The fish are lured into the trap with meat and then get stuck as they cannot swim backwards ‘It annoyed me because what I pictured was a group of people who go very deeply into their own experience and a group that support each other in our solitude,’ she said.‘There was a certain amount of conflict especially in the first month – that classic group thing of “forming, storming, norming”.’ ‘But we are all still friends apart from the couple who don’t talk to each other anymore.' On an appearance on the Today Show on Tuesday, Dunn described her four seasons immersed in the bush as a 'chose your own adventure'. 'I didn't see a lot of the others... especially in winter when I went into my own little hibernation,' she said. Dunn described her first week as 'salt on the senses' as she contended with 'boiling' temperatures, mosquitoes and flies as well as finding a suitable spot to build shelter. 'Figuring out how to build a shelter that would keep me dry in torrential rain and warm in subzero temperatures for a year - I was pretty overwhelmed,' she said. 'And then there was fear of the dark, I mean, I was terrified of spending a night alone in the bush.'

Dunn (with another wilderness participant left) learned fast that her companions were after different experiences in the wild: Two became a couple while one man spent his time going into a nearby town One of her most horrifying moments included waking up in the middle of the night to a snake t rying to get into her mosquito ne t , but Dunn said her biggest concern was packs of wild dogs. Roadkill of kangaroos, possums and bats were part of her regular diet and the group, before partially disbanding, did share the experience of hunting a diamond python for dinner. 'I was definitely the most gung ho in terms of taking it to the extreme, ‘she said. ‘I believe everyone got exactly what they needed - there are no hard and fast rules about what the experience should be like.' As irony would have it, the only time Dunn suffered from food poisoning was not from a wild animal but from 'slimy tofu that had been hanging around for weeks.' Dunn said she also had access to bulk dry foods, which was critical to her first month, but said she was eating some type of bush food daily with hunting progressing throughout the year. Sturdy: Dunn poses by a lean-to. She said that one of the hardest tasks was getting used to life in the city when she left the bush behind Back to the city: Dunn is now 35, working as a journalist, writer and speaker, and living in Newcastle Despite the physical challenges she faced, Dunn described the experience as incredible and said she confronted a lot about herself that she did not know after spending that much time alone in the bush.

'I did a lot of walking and wandering, I really saw how deeply conditioned I was to always be doing something and always be busy,' she said. 'It was a hard lesson in just learning to let go and listen and be.' But not all of Dunn’s tales involved gore and grime. Despite not owning soap, shampoo or deodorant (she allowed herself the luxury of toothpaste), Dunn’s hair never felt so radiant. ‘The tannins in the waterhole made my hair really shiny and lustrous,’ she said. ‘It was better than when I ever walked out of the salon – it felt really clean in summer but in winter - I got pretty grimy.’ A profound moment was when she discovered her self-made shelter was water-proof. ‘There was torrential rain and I ran into having no idea it whether it was weather-proof when I realised that it was and it could keep me dry was amazing,’ she said. Dunn had a love/hate relationship with fire and persisted with rubbing sticks together until sparks were created. ‘I was crying and I had blisters the size of 20 cent coins which were bleeding,’ she recalls. As much as Dunn was looking forward to returning to the land of the living, she found it difficult to adjust and compared it to a feeling of grief. ‘I was craving cafes, occasions to wear a dress and friends but then I found the city overwhelming and overstimulating and four walls made me I feel claustrophobic,’ she said.

‘I felt I had left behind that incredible relationship I developed with the bush and the intimacy with my food.’ Dunn is now a freelance journalist and has focused writing a book on her experience since being back. Her book 'My Year Without Matches: Escaping The City In Search of The Wild' is out now.















