I still have vivid memories of when I was nine, perhaps 10, being with my father as he travelled to some of the fantastic landscapes of northeast Victoria in Australia. Travelling, learning about the landscapes and listening to discussions with people about their work, landscapes, communities and hopes for the future made a big impression. I didn’t realise the significance of this until later in my life, when my university studies took me to studies of rural communities and their landscapes.
This combined with being a walker, cyclist, canoeist and camper for a long time – long enough to remember the pain of walking with external frame rucksacks. When I first discovered hiking (bushwalking, tramping, trekking) I embraced the maps and the ideas of getting from Point A to Point B. I’d walk, camp, walk again to the next point and repeat. I was walking through amazing landscapes and layering sights, sounds and smells of the mountains, forests, national parks and world heritage areas I’d visit.
But gradually I felt there was more.
I began to be drawn to what’s found in landscapes and quickly realised that landscapes are more than a geographic location. I began to wonder what parts of the landscape lie beyond maps, what the maps don’t show, how villages are structured, what’s really underneath something that we think is easily understood. I found myself lingering in places where paths were worn by generations, where conversations unfolded slowly and where knowledge was held not only in texts but in gestures, rituals and stories.
I was no longer chasing landscapes. I was trying to understand how people lived with them and the layers of stories to be found in them.
And here I am now.
For more than three decades, my work has centred on one core question: how do communities strengthen their landscapes and themselves in the face of constant change?
From remote Himalayan villages to coastal towns in Southeast Asia, from European islands trying to balance traditions with tourism and rural Australian communities, I’ve listened to people talk about what matters to them – place, identity, culture, land, livelihood and the fragile balances that hold these together. That long, patient engagement has shown me that community and landscape resilience is not a technical concept or a policy formula – it’s a lived practice. It is something communities create through their everyday choices, their stories and their relationships, often in ways invisible to outsiders.
What makes my perspective unique is the combination of deep field experience, my critical professional practice and a commitment to genuinely participatory approaches. I’ve sat in community halls, on verandas, under trees and on street corners, learning from elders, farmers, youth, women’s collectives, forest-rights groups, fisherfolk and local leaders. I’ve seen how resilience grows not through external interventions but through conversations that recognise local knowledge, honour cultural integrity and allow people to define their own futures. That experience continues to shape my work today – whether I’m developing courses, facilitating workshops, writing books, or designing the LoST framework, which brings community resilience and place-based storytelling into creative partnership.
All this also gave me the chance to take lessons of community and landscape resilience into the world of travel – in particular that which occurs through walking, cycling and paddling.
This deepened my commitment to seeing walking, cycling and paddling as a way to understand more of the stories found in landscapes as well as their historical arcs – something that ultimately became LoST (landscapes of stories and time) as a way of travelling and understanding these layered relationships. It wasn’t enough to tread lightly, we need to tread attentively. LoST moved beyond a tourism merely focused on sites and sights. It became a way of asking: what happens when travel is not about consumption but about relationships? How do we make travel accountable to place? How can we enhance our own understandings of place and support the resilience of those communities living there?
So the two threads – community resilience and LoST – started to complement each other. One is about how communities are able to actively plan their sustainable futures. The other is about how we move through the world in a way that we can support communities to achieve this – either through our professional activities or through our engagement with LoST. Together, they form an approach based on positive outcomes, on community creativity and ultimately about transformations.
There is a third thread – my approach to being with communities and landscapes, whether as a professional in the community resilience space or as a LoST traveller. Whether working with communities, travelling, teaching, or writing, I’m guided by questions like What should we do? How can we do it? and Why should we do it?
Across all of this, my role has never been to ‘help’ communities, but to facilitate the conditions in which their own resilience can flourish. I bring the ability to see patterns across regions and decades, to connect local realities to global pressures and to translate complex social insights into practical, grounded pathways for practitioners, travellers and communities themselves. The unique perspective I offer – rooted in a belief in the power of local voices – underpins everything I create, teach and write.My attempts at trying to resolve these questions in my professional life and, indeed, in my own travels over 35 years have led very specifically to my work, the way I do it and the way I facilitate the LST Collaboration Hub.
Come and join me. You can get in touch/stay in touch via the links below.
