Brett Campbell

The Cooks River: Australia's sickest urban river is located in the glamorous and famously pretty city of Sydney. This makes sense, given it’s also Australia's largest, hard-surfaced, drainified, leaky-sewered, city. In my little red kayak I decided to trace all 23km of the Cooks River, inspired to do so after paddling my boyhood river over 4 days in the name of Backyard Adventuring. Finding it not only challenging, but shocking in terms of its ill health, I’ve since shifted from wanting to see the wildest and most pristine places on earth, to the most degraded and sick. This is a journey of ill-health, sadness and hope; putting a test to the local saying, ‘if you fall in, you’ll dissolve’.

In 1864 the mass murdering pastoralist Angus McMillan cut an ambitious 220km path through the mountains between two remote gold mining towns in the heart of Victoria, Australia. 120 years later a group of bushwalkers stitched the trail back together. When Beau Miles found out about the track he decided to run it, thinking ‘gee, this track has a story to tell’! Running 73 km a day for three days over steep, often unmarked terrain, and having grown up thinking McMillan was a colonial hero, there was a lot of terrain, and thinking, to be absorbed. He’d finally embarked on a running adventure that wasn’t just about running.

Beau Miles searches the bush for his cameraman's wallet

Setting off with no food, water or shelter, Beau Miles walked 90km to work a bunch of years ago to see if a stripped back adventure could give him the kind of buzz that far away, exotic, heavily planned expeditions have given him over the years. It did. Different, but familiar feelings of challenge and insight came through. When he was asked to give a lecture about adventuring at a new building at his university, he said ‘no worries, why don’t I walk to work and deliver the lecture as soon as I get there’? So he walked to work, again.