Tree change: a short hike from home, the "sunrise tree" provides a elevated view of the heathland around Claire Dunn's camp. Photo: Ben Ey

I thought I knew the forest until we moved in together. And then, as is often the case with flatmates, I realised I barely knew it at all.

It had been an easy assumption to make since I was a forest campaigner, I lived and breathed all things wild. I could tell you the forest's names and numbers, its borders and boundaries; I could spout lists of its inhabitants and the percentage likelihood of their survival. It was the kind of knowledge that made me think I knew the forest better than I did.

Negotiating the wilds within proved my biggest challenge.

It wasn't until I was standing in front of a blank canvas of scrubby bushland contemplating how I might build a shelter with only natural materials that I realised how very little I knew.

Feeling the friction: Dunn lights a fire at the expense of painful blisters and calloused skin Photo: Ben Ey

Early on, as swollen insect bites joined together to resemble some venereal disease, I contemplated leaving. But there was no going back. We had made a contract, the forest and I. I was to spend a year as its apprentice, stripped bare of modern comforts, at the mercy of the elements, learning the art of wilderness survival.


It was a big ask, but the reward was even bigger: my freedom. Life had come to feel like a gilded cage. Once a passionate activist, I had become another pale-faced greenocrat, saying the right words but with a hollow voice. While secure, my life of partner, friends and community was also stifling, another demand on my diminishing energy.

It was just the busyness of it all. The relentless onwardsness of life in the city. I fulfilled one round of societal obligations and a new round began. I ticked something off my to-do list and another entry took its place. The life that was once a consuming passion was now consuming me. I longed to stop. I daydreamed of kicking off my shoes, walking out the office door and not stopping until the city streets turned to leaf litter under my feet.

Moth to a flame: Dunn enjoys the warmth of a fire in her shelter. Photo: Ben Ey

Then an email popped into my inbox – a year-long "Independent Wilderness Studies Program" was being run on the north coast of NSW. My heart did a cartwheel. Imagine that. No emails, no buzzing phone, no 5am media releases. To qualify, I had to study the basics over two week-long courses, and prove that my motivations weren't madness or law evasion.

But madness was a word that regularly sprang to mind when I attempted to marry "shelter" and "waterproof" with paperbark and grass. Building a humpy was just the first challenge. The caveman curriculum also included fire-making with sticks, hunting and trapping, tanning hides, bush food, basketry, animal tracking, rope and pottery making.

In the absence of rules, I invented some of my own. While I predicted my matchless fire-making commitment might put a dampener on my tea addiction, I didn't foresee the painful blisters the size of 20¢ coins it would leave on both palms. My wild-meat-only rule initially threatened anaemia, and later extreme nausea when I was up to my elbows in wallaby entrails. Tanning its hide with brains and sewing it into a top, I was at least starting to look the part. A raw-food diet looked appealing.

Negotiating the wilds within proved my biggest challenge. Solitude was a harsh companion. Lists continued to pile up in my journal and my desire to slow down was hampered by an inner accelerator pinned to the metal. Rather than become a bush ninja, I realised the true task of my year was to break my addiction to doing, and learn how to just be.

My new furred and feathered friends were my greatest teachers. I sat for hours watching and listening to birds. The feeding frenzies, territorial skirmishes, family fights and courtships were better than anything seen on TV.

By the end of the year I'd begun craving cafes and an occasion to wear a dress, but overall I was surprised at how little about modern life I missed.

Adjusting to life back in the city has been tougher than I anticipated. I ache for nights by my fire in my shelter. Sometimes I imagine the walls around me vanishing, the neighbours looking at each other from their couches, gathering together to build a circle of shelters, to cook over a fire and tell stories. How much more fun we'd have.

Since my return, friends tell me I'm softer, more present. Although I am less certain, groundless almost, since my year in the bush, in a fundamental way I feel stronger. When life threatens to suck me into the whirlpool, I retreat to the city's parks and pockets of green. It's enough, I've found, to bring me back down to earth and remind me that less is more. I'm realising that wilderness is everywhere, that it is less of a place and more a state of being.

The forest modelled this to me and I remain its aspiring apprentice, these days with cup of tea in my hand and a pillow under my head.

Claire Dunn is the author of My Year Without Matches: Escaping the City in Search of the Wild (Black Inc), in bookshops this week.