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 edges – of what parts of the landscape lie beyond maps, of what’s beyond the mountains in the distance, of how villages are structured, of what’s 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 focused on going from A to B – I wasn’t chasing landscapes. I was trying to understand how people lived with them and the layers of stories to be found in them.
Through those university studies and my professional practice, I focussed on community resilience and its intersection with sustaining landscapes. In every place I visited or worked, either in Australia or internationally, I saw that strength wasn’t just in resources—it was in relationships: between people, with land, with history. I began to explore how communities weather uncertainty, how they adapt while holding onto what matters and how they proactively plan for the future. The essence of this understanding? Conversations.
“By being in a landscape, we have conversations with these spaces that are shaped by human activity and also with the people who have been shaped by these landscapes
Layering experiences and understandings of processes of community resilience and their connections with landscapes 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 became 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 weave together. One is about how communities are able to actively plan their sustainable futures. The other is about how we move through the world with care so 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 hope, 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?
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 LST.
Come and join me. You can get in touch/stay in touch via the links below.
