Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
008 // Outback Mike (Atkinson) - Lessons from a Life of Adventure
2.5k Plays8 months ago
There is so much more to Mike Atkinson (aka Outback Mike) than what we saw of his 64 days, toughing it out in the wilds of Tassie’s west coast, on the first season of SBS’ Alone Australia (season 2 kicks off 27/3/23).
He’s been having epic expedition style adventures since his first long hike at 11 years old with his family and building towards his first solo trip, skiing from Mt Kosciusko to Canberra, aged 17.
Watching him on ALONE, I was drawn in by his problem solving and seemingly endless tinkering to build a better existence out in takayna/The Tarkine. As you’ll hear in this episode (and can read much more about in his book Modern Day Castaway), his ALONE canoe wasn’t his first.
In this ep we get to know a bit more about what drives this type of life and what it takes in the form of meticulous planning and testing, before committing to something that might cost him everything... and how he once made the decision to call for help.
BTS: If you listen carefully, you might hear aircraft in the background. Yep… if you’re going to be an Air Force pilot, you live near an airbase!
Download the transcript here.
Episode takeaways:
- Why life is better with adventure
- How Mike approaches problem-solving and mitigating risk
- The value of calling for help early
- What a pilot sees from the air (tips for being visible)
- Decision-making in a crisis - how not to be ‘flappy’
- The importance of satellite communication and the value of 2-way devices eg. ZOLEO, InReach, etc
- Choosing who will be your emergency contact
- When emotions can surprise you and how they could affect decision making
- Preparation and planning
- What adventurers can learn from pilots - making plans for every possible scenario, mental checklists and rehearsing them
- Mitigating rescue resources through smart planning
- The issue of sharing locations to ‘special spots’ on social media
- The down and UP sides of risk
- Why hardship is good for us
Links from this episode:
Mike’s website - outbackmike.com
Mike’s book - Modern Day Castaway
Timelapse video of Mike building his dugout canoe
Mike and his kids do the Snowies 10 Peaks Video
Thanks to sponsor Paddy Pallin
****Check out my 4 day (24-27 April) Intro to Navigation Retreat at Corinna, takayna/The Tarkine here.****
Recommended
Transcript
Welcome Back to Season 2
00:00:01
Speaker
Hey everyone, it's Caro here and welcome back to season two of the rescued podcast. I took a little bit of a break over the last few months and I've been working really hard at putting together a really diverse mix of amazing stories loaded with learnings for this season.
Stories and the Power of Storytelling
00:00:22
Speaker
There's going to be a really solid mix of tales from the three different types of guests that we chat with.
00:00:28
Speaker
those who found themselves needing to call for help with that incredible first-person story. We're also going to talk to the folk who respond to those types of calls and then also some experts in different fields like technical or clinical experts or even in policy.
00:00:48
Speaker
When I started this last year, I had no idea what to expect other than I had this really strong belief in not only the power of storytelling as a way of helping us all learn,
00:01:03
Speaker
But also to honour the teller of those stories for the absolute treasure that they hold. And often they don't realise how special that is until they're given the platform, given the space to tell that, to share what they've been through.
00:01:22
Speaker
I've been so blown away by the response to that first season and what it shows is that so many people feel the same way about stories like this and in some cases have even found themselves in similar situations where they've remembered one of my guests' experiences and have been able to apply those learnings to their own adventures when something hasn't gone quite right.
Listener Engagement and Growth
00:01:49
Speaker
Thank you so much for your support and to help more people discover these stories, why not click and share on your podcast app, send it to your friends and it would be great if you can leave a review and a rating as well. You know, these small little acts can really make such a difference. So without further ado, let's kick off episode eight.
00:02:12
Speaker
Rescued is a podcast of conversations with rescuers and those who've been rescued.
Meet Outback Mike
00:02:17
Speaker
It's about the lessons we learn about ourselves, the places we go and why, without judgement, to help us have better adventures, manage risk and deal with the unexpected.
00:02:30
Speaker
there is so much more to Mike Atkinson, or known to some as Outback Mike, then met the eye on the first season of SBS Alone Australia in his 64 days, toughing it out in the wilds of Tassie's West Coast. I was so joined in by his sort of endless problem solving and tinkering to etch out a better existence for himself out there. And I'll tell you what, that canoe wasn't the first one that he's ever built.
00:02:58
Speaker
So this kind of stuff isn't new to Mike. As you'll learn, he's been doing big expedition style adventures for decades. In this episode, we're going to get to know a little bit more about what drives this type of life that he leads and what it takes in the form of meticulous planning and testing before committing to something that might cost everything. And not only that, we're going to hear how he made the decision to once push the button.
Mike's Adventure Beginnings
00:03:29
Speaker
Mike, it's great to have you here on the Rescue Podcast. Thank you so much for coming on board and having a chat with us.
00:03:36
Speaker
I think, you know, if people have seen you in Alone, they've seen that series, they probably may not know a little bit of your background or a lot more of your background. Do you want to just kick off by telling me what kind of a kid were you? I loved the outdoors. I loved camping. I loved going fishing. And I watched the Bush Tucker Man. And that was quite pivotal in wanting to learn about the outdoors and also had that fulfill that survival fantasy of
00:04:01
Speaker
going out on adventures by yourself, in a way, in kind of extreme ways and traveling. I love for Australia and Aboriginal culture as well. I also watched Top Gun, so I wanted to be a pilot and that also had a big effect on the things that I did. But mostly I wasn't a big group person. I just fantasized about being out on adventures, really. And they just, I did my first big one when I was 17. Again, from Kosciuszko to Canberra and
00:04:30
Speaker
After going through that process, I decided that was such a rewarding process that I want to keep doing adventures. And yeah, all those things just kept on running through, flying, military stuff and adventures all throughout my life really until present day. Let's pull apart that word adventure. What does that word mean to you?
00:04:52
Speaker
It's got like three parts, but one of them is unknown. It's an unknown thing where it's outside your comfort zone effectively, and it doesn't necessarily have to be outdoors.
00:05:01
Speaker
Sometimes you could even think of any activity with an unknown outcome. You could think baking a cake can be an adventure. Exactly. You throw the ingredients in, you never know what you're going to get at the end. Yeah. So where do you reckon that came from in your childhood? You said you loved that. You had the bush tucker man that you used to watch. What kind of stuff did you get up to when you were still in school?
00:05:26
Speaker
It's hard to know. I mean, I remember it's from my earliest memories. It's been there. I know my grandfather was taking me out hiking a fair bit when I was a kid. He was in charge of the Himalayan Mountaineering Institute for a while. This is like yonks ago in India.
00:05:43
Speaker
And so I did my first long hike when I was like 11 or something, but he probably had some influence that I don't remember so much because I was too young. But my dad also took me fishing a lot. It was up in the mountains. And a big factor I reckon is that I lived in Canberra with a view over the Brindabella Mountains.
00:06:03
Speaker
I was constantly looking out at the horizon and wanting to know what was on the other side. And I just read a book by another guy that must have lived in almost the same street as me that did the Alpine walking track. And he said that affected him as well. And I mentioned that in my book. I honestly think that that is a factor in wanting to know what's on the other side of
The Philosophy of Adventure
00:06:24
Speaker
the horizon if you just live somewhere where you can always look at it.
00:06:26
Speaker
So would you say you've always had an insatiable curiosity and a wonder? Yeah, yeah. But it's also, yeah, it is. It is a wonder. And in order to feed that wonder, you've got to get to the other side. And then when you get there, there's another horizon and you want to go to the other side. So, I mean, these are obviously kind of traits that instilled in any kind of, I guess, a human or mammal.
00:06:49
Speaker
You know, there is an exploratory nature that we have. Some people have it more than others. And it's an itch that if you don't scratch it, you're less happy. Well, it's something you mentioned a few times in your book and your tagline is, you know, life is better with adventure. It is. I'm actually wearing a shirt with that written on the back of it. And so, well, I first said that was, you know, whenever you do an interview,
00:07:12
Speaker
with any media thing, they always say, Why are you doing it? And you can never explain it properly. So I was trying to look for like a one sentence answer. So I first use that on like a sunrise interview when I was doing, I think that same expedition actually, the Dugout canoe expedition. And then I think I ended up saying that again, at the end of the line, and that's probably the last thing that I say on on a line, but it's basically true that it is better with adventure.
00:07:37
Speaker
And why? Why is life better with adventure? Because it forces you outside your comfort zone. It forces you to find out new things in order to be able to complete your adventure, whether that be some factual stuff or stuff on a topographic map or find out from other humans about how they did things. It's constant problem solving and we evolved in that environment of having to be able to
00:08:03
Speaker
complete difficult things in difficult situations that were outside our comfort zone. So being slightly outside of our comfort zone almost is what's needed of us in order to fulfill our ecological niche in the pre-industrial agricultural revolution where most of our evolution happened. So now that so many of us, we live in an urban environment and where that sense and that concept of adventure
00:08:27
Speaker
is not a part of our everyday life. What would you say to people who were thinking, maybe listening to you and say, oh, well, maybe he's onto something. Maybe, maybe that's what I need in my life. Maybe I need some of this adventure. I totally agree. And I think adventures that simulate what we did in our evolution are the most likely to tick the boxes that keep a human happy. So that's why the kind of survival type adventure
00:08:55
Speaker
or the adventures in the outdoors closely aligned with what used to keep us happy, or at least the niche that we evolved within. Now there's plenty of other things that for some people might be more effective, like the whole trail running revolution and stuff, like people are going hard and stuff. It's still a great adventure. It's not so closely aligned, but there's plenty of expressions of it. Even going to the gym can be a little bit like that. But I just think if you haven't tried that kind of
00:09:23
Speaker
living off the land to some extent outside your comfort zone in the wilderness, you really won't know what you're missing out on.
Military Experience and Adventures
00:09:30
Speaker
And it's not necessarily fun when you're there, but when you get back from it and you have time to reflect, you'll be like, man, I'm glad I did that. I'm going to have another bite of that cherry. And it keeps getting bigger. The bigger the bites of the cherry, the more rewarding it is.
00:09:41
Speaker
Before we move on to some of those adventures that you've had, just round us out on your background about that entrance into the military world and where you were with that. I'll keep referring to the book a lot through this interview because I certainly learnt a lot about your background by reading Modern Day Castaway. I found a lot of it quite surprising in terms of, and I guess it shows that stuff, that what you don't get
00:10:11
Speaker
when a TV program only has a certain number of minutes allocated to an episode, what you don't learn about the people's background. Just fill us in a bit with that. Sure. Career was, I wanted to be the Bush dark man and I wanted to be Tom Cruise, right?
00:10:28
Speaker
I'm leaving school, applied for the Air Force, thinking I get in, no worries, didn't get in. And then I joined the Air Force in this kind of like army type ground defense role, which was really tough, which I draw on how difficult that was still today about how horrible that was. When I meet hardship, I go, well, it didn't suck as bad as that. You sucked.
00:10:46
Speaker
Then applied again, didn't get in, so I went around the world for a year. Pretty, pretty extreme traveling, really. I was hitchhiking a lot and going to some pretty, pretty gnarly places, extreme low budget. And got back from that. The Air Force wasn't taking anybody, so I went to uni to be a geologist, because I thought, well, if I'm not going to end up getting in as a pilot to, in the military, I'll just buy my own chopper, because my mate was a geologist and doing a lot of helicopter flying, and I thought we could be flying geologists together.
00:11:16
Speaker
And during the second year of uni applications opened again, but only for the army. And I'd had a couple of experiences like on that cosy to Canberra ski trip where these army helicopters flew past in formation. I was like, man, I want to do that too. So I thought I will go to the army. That's where Liz Hiddens learnt a lot of his Bush Tucker stuff. I can tick all those boxes on the way and then I'll transfer to the Air Force, which is eventually what I did. It was just a really hard way of doing it. As an army pilot, I did a lot of
00:11:42
Speaker
A lot of traveling around Northern Australia, Papua New Guinea, some stuff overseas. So I got to see a lot of beautiful landforms. And as someone that likes doing adventures, you're constantly circling your map going, oh, there's a good camping spot, good fishing spot. But also I got on as many survival courses as I could, like I did a combat survival course that any air crew member has to do. But then I managed to go with a totally other squadron called North Force, the North Force Survival Instructor Course. And that's basically, it's predominantly Aboriginal unit and they
00:12:10
Speaker
The whole point of that course is so you can survive long-term off the land because they patrol in Northern Australia for security reasons. So that was a really brilliant course. And so I instructed on that course afterwards. And I also did a snow survival instructor course. And I used those skills to ski across Iceland. And I was constantly doing adventures whilst I was a pilot. I just started breaking off and just going out and doing stuff on my weekends. And they grew into bigger and bigger adventures, a lot of them solo.
00:12:36
Speaker
And so, you know, they used to have bets on the board about where I would have to pull an EP when I was on a tinny from Darwin to Derby, stuff like that. But that's where that real, the adventures continued and the learning continued and the mistakes continued. And that's some of the kind of self-rescues that I ended up having to do from those fairly tricky situations.
Self-Rescue and Media Portrayal
00:12:55
Speaker
And that's all of those for really embarrassing and hard work at the time, but they are really the things that you learn the most from.
00:13:02
Speaker
Well, let's talk about rescue then. I guess there's different types of rescue. There's rescues that people initiate themselves, where someone might push a button or put their hand up and go, yep, I'm out of my depth. I need to call in the cavalry.
00:13:17
Speaker
Then there's different kinds of rescues. There's rescues that get forced upon you sometimes by organizations or by structures that we work within sometimes. That takes away a sense of independence and sense of agency. I think they can have two very different results on people. Let's talk about that first one where it's a self-rescue.
00:13:42
Speaker
Can you take us into a moment where you can remember a self-rescue that you had to initiate? Sure. And the first one was actually quite young. I was 16 doing Silver Duke of Ed, which is a scheme where they get kids in the outdoors to undertake challenges. And I did it with two girls and another guy from school. We did it in the Brenda Bellas. And I chose a fairly difficult overland nav through Scrub that was fairly manageable. I think that the distances weren't that great. But one of the
00:14:11
Speaker
people on it had diabetes and that slowed our rate of movement. And fairly quickly, I thought, well, we're not going to make it all the way to the end. So there's no roads in between. So it's probably smarter that we just go back to the start point. Otherwise.
00:14:26
Speaker
someone will actually have to come looking for us. So we did that. And then we tried to walk around to attract to the endpoint as well. It didn't work. So we just basically just returned to the start point. And I think, oh, it's fine. We'll just hitch out tomorrow and get to a phone, because this was pretty mob by phone and everything. It was early 90s. And I heard a car coming up a day after we were overdue. And I thought, oh, great. And it turned out to be a cop car. And I'm like, oh, good. I'll flag him down. And the guy sort of jumped out of the car before the car stopped. He's like, oh, are you Michael Atkinson? I'm like, yeah.
00:14:54
Speaker
someone say from police rescue, everyone's looking for him. I'm like, Oh my God. And so they literally were, we had like heaps of vehicles and a big base camp set up at Piccadilly circus and all that stuff. It was nuts. And the newspaper, the camera times interviewed us and we ended up on the front page of the newspaper and it was just like, you're kidding. And I remember reading the story again.
00:15:13
Speaker
That does not reflect at all what happened. You know, we were not in a survival situation, but if you read the story, that's what it sounded like. And so that was a learning point, too. It made me worried about ever getting in the news for being rescued. But I also it was a good lesson to learn that newspapers don't tell accurate stories. Yeah. And that would have been back in the days, too, when Duke of Ed, you had teachers or an adult with you like you do these days. Well, I felt
00:15:40
Speaker
I feel lucky that we didn't get that heavily supervised. There was a teacher that was supposed to come out and check on us, but I knew that he was doing another camp somewhere else on the South Coast that weekend. I'm like, I don't think he's going to come and check on us. I feel sorry for him because he would have got roasted over the coals when we didn't show up.
00:15:55
Speaker
I felt like we were given more responsibility as kids and I recently helped out on a jig event camp here from the school that my kids go to and it was it was too heavily supervised to be honest and not challenging enough and that I feel like that's cheating kids a bit but then we are so risk averse these days that I kind of I don't think the school has much choice to give kids freedom so
Parental Fear and Children's Adventures
00:16:17
Speaker
it's it's not their fault.
00:16:19
Speaker
So how old are your kids? You live, you've got a family. Yeah, 13 and 15. So yeah, we just finished a seven-day trek across the Snowys, which is pretty hardcore, but they're like the outdoors as well. So would you be happy for them if they said, hey, Dad, we're going to head out to wherever your local mountains are and going out for a couple of days? Sure. I'd be encouraging it. So I did my first overnight camp with my parents when I was 13.
00:16:43
Speaker
And I was just lucky that my mum allowed me to do that stuff. Most other mums at that stage wouldn't have allowed me to do that. So I've just been, had the freedom to make mistakes and learn things the hard way since I was so small that even by the age of 13, I was pretty responsible because I was given that freedom. And that's why so many kids are denied the opportunity of these days. And when you think of that being denied that opportunity and what sort of brings that kind of thinking about whether it be, you know, past experience or a lot of fear, you know, plays into parental roles.
00:17:14
Speaker
What it's actually taking from that experience of that child, if adventure is what makes life better and how we learn, and especially around that problem solving stuff as well, which during those teenage years is such a great time to be getting a hold of that problem solving.
00:17:33
Speaker
Oh, yeah, for sure. And the responsibility. Yeah. Yeah. They're just the freedom to make a mistake. Yeah. And then you have to solve it for yourself, which is basically what happened on that Duke of Edinburgh when we got rescued, when we didn't need to be rescued. I wouldn't actually change anything the way I do that even now.
00:17:48
Speaker
But at least we were given the chance to make that mistake. We didn't even have to make a mistake. It was funny. It was funny. It's a funny experience. Would you look at your exit from a loan as being similar in that someone else initiated, pulled the ripcord on you as opposed to being able to pull out when you felt you needed to be?
00:18:12
Speaker
Well, I can't talk too much about it, really. I did not feel that I needed to be removed. I didn't have any symptoms. That Monday cast of expedition, my physical degradation was 17 days beyond the point that I was removed on a line when I finished that expedition because I didn't put weight on beforehand. So I'm totally familiar with what the symptoms of starvation and degradation feel like. That's why I was totally confident in the fact that I'm like, I felt it was unnecessary.
00:18:42
Speaker
Must have been incredibly tough. Yeah,
Support and Rescue Stories
00:18:44
Speaker
still is. Yeah. Massive thanks for the support from the team at Patti Pallen, who since 1930 have been leaders in travel and outdoor adventure. In fact, did you know that Patti himself, a member of the Sydney Bushwalkers Club, was a volunteer in the original Search and Rescue Arm of the Federation of Bushwalking Clubs in New South Wales? Hmm, nice one Patti.
00:19:07
Speaker
So let's look then at a rescue that you did initiate. So can you think about a time in your life when you have, and you know, there's one that you mentioned in the book. Yeah. And it's during that really important kind of planning and preparation stage, which we're going to get to pretty soon. But yeah, do you want to talk to me about that? Sure. So when I was, so I built the dugout canoe. So I basically, for this expedition, my plan was to place myself in the shoes of a shipwrecked
00:19:37
Speaker
sailor, a genuine one from 1846. And he came ashore from his shipwreck with all these tools. And I thought, I wonder if he could have made a dugout canoe and sailed it to a rescue haven that Governor Bly had set up in Cape York. I was hoping it would take four months and it ended up taking 14 months because the whole time I was just stressing the whole time like, man, I know what the seas are going to be like up there because I've done a lot of stuff in northern waters in small boats and it's scary.
00:20:01
Speaker
including two cyclones in small boats. It's scary. So I was losing all this sleep over, you know, I know this isn't gonna be able to survive the conditions that I've been in before. I need to keep making it bigger and better and all this kind of stuff. So I ended up taking almost a year longer than I expected. And then I was approaching the dry season, which is the safest time to do it. And I was running out of time to test it before I headed up on the expedition. So, you know, there was no great weather window that presented itself.
00:20:30
Speaker
So I took the weather, I knew that the conditions were rough, the winds were tending a little bit too far offshore than what I would have liked and that there was bad weather forecast coming in that night. So not by any stage ideal at all. But if I waited for another month to get another window, then that would expose me to higher risk when I'm on the expedition because now I'm
00:20:54
Speaker
increasing on the cyclone season. So I had to take a risk then to reduce the risk later. I set up on this beach in Fingle Bay and there's this old salty guy that's the local kind of marine rider and fishing expert guy. And he was down there and he's like, what the hell is this guy doing? I ended up interviewing afterwards and he's like, what is this lunatic? What's he doing in that boat? It's never going to make it. Anyway, so I set off and the conditions changed. There were several things that went wrong. And that's what happens on adventures. Wind shifted further offshore.
00:21:23
Speaker
There's a current without flowing from the port because there'd been some recent flooding. There was a certain twist of the East Coast current due to this headland I was on and also some equipment broke. This sail rest at the top snapped and a few things. So basically, I wasn't able to sail into the heads of the port. And after this equipment broke and I
00:21:44
Speaker
really got the sale up again. I knew that that's it. I'm drifting out to sea. I can probably survive the night, but these nasty winds are coming in. And I'd already been liaising closely with the marine authorities there because they were quite interested in what I was doing. And I asked them, am I complying with all the rules? And they actually gave me some extra safety stuff. So we were liaising closely. And I knew that they would be out and about. It was Saturday afternoon at about 2pm.
00:22:07
Speaker
And I thought, it is more responsible for me to swallow my pride, call them now, when they can just literally zip out, turn you back through the heads than me to suck it out and stay out here and then be setting off my EPIRB at 3 a.m. 30 miles offshore in a 30 knot wind. Yeah. So that's what I did. I ended up just being able to do it on my mobile phone and they came out. But I, because it's such an unusual looking boat,
00:22:32
Speaker
They were like, oh, can we put this on the Facebook page? I'm like, oh, I cringe, but I'm like, oh, you just helped me out. I'm not going to say no. So they put it on their Marine Area Command Facebook page and it went viral and got in the news and the Daily Mail did a story on it and all this kind of stuff. So everyone knew. So that kind of, I felt that used up my brownie points for a rescue.
Reconnaissance and Rescue Operations
00:22:53
Speaker
before I'd even had it off on the expedition. And I questioned whether I should even go on it because it's just going to look so bad because everyone's going to go, he needed another rescue and he didn't even make the test sail. So I ended up changing a couple of things. Most importantly, I took a little backup electric engine just to get me out of trouble. It only had an hour of battery, so it's not like I could cheat and use the thing the whole way. But it was just to get me out of a tight spot.
00:23:18
Speaker
But that was a tricky one, but I feel that was the right call to call early when it was minimal impact and also minimal, less safety risk on behalf of those who are going to pick me up rather than waiting. And that's what like a life or a career in aviation is all about, that kind of decision making.
00:23:35
Speaker
And also knowing, because I've been the one flying the rescues before, whether it's in a helicopter or an airplane, militarily. So it's just like, you know, I know those guys want to be knocking off at 5pm tonight. They don't really care what happens at work during the day. This is going to stuff them around the least. And so that that's kind of helpful too. But yeah, just sometimes sucking it up and making an early call is going to be the best outcome.
00:23:59
Speaker
Let's flip and look at the time when you said flying to rescues as a pilot. Is there any that stand out that you think we can touch on now?
00:24:10
Speaker
I mean, I was a reconnaissance helicopter pilot, so rescue wasn't our primary role. Like I certainly, you know, I've picked up a girl from a village in Papua New Guinea that had two busted legs and I was flying an Air Force airplane on the search for MH370, that Malaysian plane that crashed out over the Indian and stuff like that. But I reckon the main bit of vice or experience to pass across would be as a reconnaissance pilot, probably our primary job is to be able to locate people and vehicles for military reasons, right?
00:24:38
Speaker
And it is incredibly hard to do from a moving aircraft. And when you're on the ground and you're looking up at the sky, there's nothing in the sky except this one dot that's an airplane or a plane and it's really, really noisy. So you think naturally, well, if I can see them, they can see me.
00:24:53
Speaker
But when you're up in the sky and you're looking down the ground, it's like trying to walk a whole hole of golf and there's one ant hiding in a blade of grass. And each blade of grass, you know, in this case is a tree. So if you think they've seen you, they probably haven't. Like if you see someone, we're going to, you know, well, in a chopper, we're going to hover and make hand signals at them. But in a plane, they're going to circle you.
00:25:13
Speaker
a lot. And so you really need to put yourself in a pilot shoes, which is very difficult if you haven't seen a perspective from the air that much. And you just got to make yourself as visible as possible. So like reflection is extreme is the best. Like if you can use a signal mirror or something like that, but that, you know, if it's cloudy or nighttime, that won't work.
00:25:32
Speaker
So that'll be the best shot. But getting somewhere clear, that's why staying next to your vehicle is so important because vehicles are easy to find. And a lot of the rescue scenarios that I'll place myself in for films, for example, like this one in the Kimberley with these aviators, their plane was found weeks before they were found. If they had stayed with their plane, they would have been okay. But hats off for doing what they were doing. I thought it was pretty epic what they tried to do and escape by themselves.
00:25:56
Speaker
Yeah, you do need to put a lot of effort into making sure that you're as visible as possible. Like those little space blankets that you can carry, they're like really cheap. They're literally a space blanket, but they're shaped like a sleeping bag and they're fluoro orange on one side. And I use carry them all the time. They're massively good for multipurpose stuff you can
00:26:14
Speaker
You can use them as a tent, you can get in them, stay out of the rain, use them as a dry bag. But you can also slit them if you need to and make one side fluoro or silver. And they're really, they stand out a lot for being rescued. So yeah, it's really hard to see a person.
00:26:30
Speaker
don't rely on that fact that it's going to be able to see me, put a lot of effort into being visible. And that's what a lot of what combat survival course is about in the military is how to make a signal fire and those kinds of things that you make this big triangular fire. And if you're looking down from a plane and you see this triangular fire, the only people making a fire in a triangle is someone who wants a rescue. But these days, really, these days, technology has progressed to the point where you can use your iPhone or you can use a satellite tracker like Zolio or something like that.
00:26:59
Speaker
Just mitigate that risk by taking an electronic tracker, I would recommend. That comes into the whole planning and preparation phase. That was what really stood out when I read your book about the amount of detail that you went into and the amount of time. Like you said, your original time scale was pushed way back because of some of the things that you learned during that problem solving preparation stage. Can you just talk to us a bit about
00:27:27
Speaker
planning and preparation, and the kind of links that you go to. You might have found this from those articles that came out of the Facebook post being shared. People who don't know the full story will make assumptions that, oh, this guy's a cowboy. Oh, he's not really thinking through things. Talk to me about some of that stuff that happens pre-inadventure.
00:27:51
Speaker
Sure. And that is standard. And you will always have a lot of people that doesn't matter what your preparation is. And that stops a lot of people from doing adventures. And that is a bit of a shame. So if you're doing an adventure and it all feels wrong, that's a normal feeling. But as far as the planning and prep goes, particularly for rescue and mitigating safety risk to myself, but also mitigating the amount of resources that would have to get spent looking for me, I did put a lot of effort into that. So primarily, it was how am I going to survive?
00:28:21
Speaker
So, I mean, if anyone that's read Solo that Andrew Macaulay, he rode across from Tasmania to New Zealand, he ended up passing away. And I mentioned him in the book as well. His story and the book that his wife wrote and the documentary that made about him is really heart wrenching, but it does force you to acknowledge what your family will have to go through if you don't make a back from one of these things. But I just thought to myself, I must have at all times a life jacket on me. That hasn't appealed being it.
00:28:50
Speaker
Not an EPIRB because they're too big. A PLB is obviously a smaller version of an EPIRB with slightly less battery life and doesn't float. But if it's attached to me, I'll be floating. So that stayed on me the whole time. Then I also, one of the other safety risks was being eaten by a crocodile. And it's unusual that if you're getting your leg chopped off by a crocodile that you're going to pull your EPIRB out and send that off. So I knew that I had to have some way, I didn't have to, but it would make it a lot easier for me to be found if I wasn't in a
00:29:19
Speaker
like a state of well-being that I could set my beacon off, but particularly it would allow the authorities to find where I am if I just caked it instantly for some reason. So by setting off my satellite tracker twice a day, once when I got to
00:29:40
Speaker
my place that I was going to anchor for the night or camp, and then another one set off in the morning, that way they would know that I survived the night. They would all, they'd get this breadcrumb trail and know that, okay, this is roughly how far he's traveling each day. And I told my mum who was managing my sort of search and rescue stuff, that if you didn't see one of those for three days, then to tell the authorities. And I'd already written out all these plans for the authorities with all the stuff that I was carrying and all this kind of stuff. So they could instantly see that, know exactly what my experience level is, what my capabilities were, and that kind of stuff.
00:30:09
Speaker
Can I just ask you about that emergency contact? Because I was curious that you didn't have your wife Melinda as your contact. You chose for it to be your mum. Talk to me about that decision. We deal with the stress of life-threatening situations in a similar way, but we do it opposite sense. So I put all my focus in, how am I going to stay alive? And I think of every single thing that can go wrong.
00:30:37
Speaker
And then how am I going to mitigate that? She deals with me being away on risky things where she completely focuses on everything else to the point where if she has a bit of free brain space, she's going to go do another task so she can't think about what I'm doing. So if I'm sending her the locations and hey, look, this, you know, if she's getting the idea that something bad's happening,
00:31:00
Speaker
that's a huge stress on her and she's managing, you know, family, kids, house, that stuff. Whereas my mum, generally, she, she volunteers all the time and she also understands me very well as, as well. So something's going wrong. She, she trusts me. She's not going to panic. And this has happened once before in the Kimberley where
00:31:18
Speaker
my uncle was getting a bit worried about something that happened to me because my satellite messages were coming from the middle of a creek. He thought of crocodile. It might be transmitting from a crocodile stomach. My mum was like, no, I don't think that's the case. And in the case, it was actually a dry riverbed and I'd walked out in the middle of the dry riverbed, but he didn't know it was dry. So she's a steady hand to be giving my details to. So that just took that responsibility off Melinda. So basically, Melinda knew that no news is good news. If I'm not hearing from my mum, Rosalie, then everything's going well.
00:31:45
Speaker
What I'm seeing and hearing from you now is stuff that surprised me reading because I think there's this sense that I guess it's harking back to that Top Gun thing. You think it's this male adventure and indestructible and this sense of going out, but you touched on a few times about the emotion of adventure and how emotion quite often welled up
00:32:09
Speaker
And so what's interesting about that is that it's only in relation to my family and how worried they are about me. So even then, where I'm getting emotional, it's because I'm thinking in my mind, how is it good? It's only when I think about people worrying about me. Whereas for actual risk for myself, getting emotional is completely irrelevant and it's a lack of focus. So there's no point to it. So like I have never
00:32:37
Speaker
Like I mean, I would never cry over risk in a risky situation.
Emotional and Cultural Sensitivities
00:32:42
Speaker
It's just it's not even if that's entering your mind, then you're not you're not focusing well and there's techniques that I've learned and I teach to other people about how not to focus on that kind of thing.
00:32:53
Speaker
So yeah, emotion for me is reserved for the impact I'm having on other people if something happens to me. And so the reason that got emotional is because I was also comparing the survival situation that I was in to what this shipwreck survival was in, which was
00:33:10
Speaker
forcing me to liaise a lot with Aboriginal communities and they were telling me about the massacres and all the stuff that happened to their communities. So I was linking the, imagine if I was an Aboriginal person and it was my loved ones that were getting massacred, like how would I feel? So that really linked very strongly. And so I would get really emotional chatting to elders and stuff because it really hits home when your loved ones aren't coming home. And I felt like I was possibly about to put someone else through that.
00:33:36
Speaker
In the very start of the book you talk about from having discussions and asking for permission and seeking those relationships with the elders of the places you were traveling through, you talk about not sharing location details and the actual specifics of sites. Can you explain to us a bit about the thinking behind that? Because I know these days social media is a challenge in terms of protecting place.
00:34:05
Speaker
Yeah, it makes sense. I mean, if you've got a secret fishing spot and you tell people where it is, it's no longer a secret fishing spot and there's no fish to catch there anymore. And that's the same in many adventure situations, which is why I try where possible, particularly in remote areas, not to name places, particularly on things like Instagram. Like even I was in a hut there in the high country a couple of weeks ago and on Instagram, I put a comment in there that would just allow people to know that I didn't really want a guessing game to start about which hut it was.
00:34:32
Speaker
they can go to my YouTube video and figure it out, you know, because you can see there. But Instagram's one in particular, but in general, like beautiful, remote, unknown sites, once they're uploaded to something like Google Maps, particularly with a photo that makes it look beautiful, then in 10 years' time, it'll probably have a four-wheel-drive track to it, you know? If it's a sacred site for Aboriginal people, that's the last thing that they want. So I've been specifically told by elders, do not
00:34:58
Speaker
Ever put coordinates to the places you've been on anything electronic and so when I was Looking at the Cape York I was myself trolling through Google Maps and I came up with these this really awesome place Which I don't want to talk too much about because I don't want to send people on the trail But it was really beautiful and I thought I'm gonna go there and I figured out how it's gonna get there and
00:35:17
Speaker
And I asked the traditional owners, you know, can I, you know, I've got permission to be in their country. And I said, oh, by the way, can I go to this place? And they're like, no, no, no, no. People have started going there. And so they really don't want that at all. So yeah, that is important. And it's nice to know as humans that there is places that are beautiful and that I don't know the location. So don't give away the really beautiful remote places.
00:35:38
Speaker
There's something about holding the sense of wonder about that, in that actually not having the answers to everything. When we're planning and preparing for an adventure, like you said, you think through every single possible thing that could go wrong, and then you look at how to mitigate those. You plan to this nth degree, and it's like, oh yeah, I've got all these knowns.
00:35:59
Speaker
But to always hold true that there's always going to be something we don't know. Yeah. Actually, I think it's a great way of keeping ourselves humble and keeping us in that sense of wonder. I agree. Yes, you're right. It's not just for the benefit of the remote place. It's for the benefit of us humans to know that those places exist.
00:36:15
Speaker
In some ways, that's one of those risks if you think of what are all the possible things that could go wrong. Not only to myself, my family, and the things physically that could go wrong, but I guess environmentally and socially, there's other things that we could consider.
00:36:33
Speaker
I agree. I feel that if it's done right and people just know that that general corner of Australia has beautiful stuff in it, but I don't know exactly where it is, that means when a mining company wants to go and put a pipeline right through the middle of it, they'll be like, oh, no, I saw something once and that was in that area. And that's not a good idea. Like the Kimberley, for example, Tiwi Islands, like there's lots of beautiful places where I think the right amount of exposure provided it's not
00:37:00
Speaker
specific to the actual location, I think has more benefit than risk, like then the detriment. Well, tell me about risk assessments then. Because if I was just thinking, oh, this weekend I want to head out and have a bit of an adventure. I'm inspired by listening to all this.
Safety, Planning, and Decision-Making
00:37:16
Speaker
It's not just as easy as stepping out your front door and heading to the bush somewhere. What do you do when you're trying to think through a risk assessment? And to those of us who might not know what that is, what does that look like?
00:37:28
Speaker
For me, I mean, I don't follow a set thing. A great deal of risk assessment is how experienced you are. So there's two types of risk. There's perceived risk and actual risk. So if you don't understand something, your perceived level of risk might be very different to what the risk is. Sometimes you'll think it's way riskier than it is. And other times you'll think it's no risk at all and it's really, really dangerous.
00:37:52
Speaker
So that's the more experienced you are, the more accurate your risk assessment is, which is why I was up all night for almost a year stressing about the waves I was going to encounter. If I didn't know that those waves could pop up like that and I hadn't been in a cyclone in a four metre tinny.
00:38:06
Speaker
I would have had a false sense of security that the risk wasn't as high as it was. My accurate assessment of the risk was really stressful, but it was extremely accurate. When you don't understand the risk, you need to be more conservative, of course. If you haven't done lots of stuff, then pick a smaller goal. I really think if you just take a communication device that's going to work outside of mobile coverage, that's probably the
00:38:30
Speaker
the best risk assessment you can do because you can always just message somebody. Now there's a time and a place for not having that, but what I particularly like about the satellite trackers is you don't talk to anybody. So that not only relieves the pressure of having to talk to someone,
00:38:46
Speaker
But it stops you breaking out of that mental space as well. So it's okay just to press a tick button and everyone knows where you are. And if you need to, hey, I've twisted my ankle and I've lost my diabetes medication. Help, you know? So I think that's a really important mitigator. Obviously, things like knowing how to deal with a snake bite and a few basic first aid stuff is important as well. But these days,
00:39:07
Speaker
mitigation is a lot easier even for solo adventuring and I kind of encourage solo adventuring provided it's you acknowledge the risk that you're taking and you take some tracker thing that means you can call for help if you need it. So making decisions like that to take a tracker and like you say like a Zolio or something like that and that process of decision making can seem a lot more straightforward when you're
00:39:30
Speaker
in that planning phase, in that preparation phase. What about having to make decisions in stressful times or in crisis moments? Is there anything in particular, a story or a situation you can think of? There's several aspects to that. There can be many reasons why it's more difficult to make a decision in stressful situations. For example, like driving license.
00:39:53
Speaker
getting a driver's license. I was 17 and I was really concerned the whole time about, oh, did I go over the speed limit back there? And if so, am I going to pass my test? And what I should have been thinking about at that time is, am I blinking the turn right here? So my focus was not in the present, it was somewhere else.
00:40:11
Speaker
flying is extremely high pressure. I did reasonably well through all my army helicopter stuff, but when I transferred to the Air Force and I was flying jets, it's really top of the line stuff and I wasn't performing as well as I should have and I started failing some rides and I looked at how I was focusing and I realized that I was focusing incorrectly and I actually went to, I was at an instructor development seminar and they had a speaker from a sports psychologist from the States and he was talking about
00:40:37
Speaker
how sports people do it, like Tiger Woods, for example. And he's an 18th hole and there's all these people crowding around. He could be thinking in his mind, or if I slash this ball, I'm going to hit that old lady in the head. The wind's really strong. I might, you know, how am I going to do this? And if I lose this shot, I'm going to lose my number one ranking. That's normal human behavior to think like that.
00:40:57
Speaker
But if you come up with three statements about yourself, which you know to be true, that can get your mind back into focus, such as, I'm Tiger Woods. I've practiced more than any of the other guys on this golf course. So I don't care that it's the 18th hole in it or this wrestling on it, iron and nail it.
00:41:13
Speaker
I don't care that it's crosswind because I practice my crosswind game better than anyone else. Am I going to slice it, hit that old lady in the head? No, this is my chance to show these people how good I am. Once you have that positive mindset, it flicks you into just focusing on what matters. Is my stance correct? What's the range of the whole? Have I got the right club?
00:41:32
Speaker
I think whether you're an ambo and you're peeking out because you're new to the game and you're worried about how you're going to perform when you get to a nasty accident or whether you're a mountain guide that doesn't have much experience with a cliff rescue and you're worried about how you're going to do it, that mindset, that technique is quite a useful one. If you don't have that technique and no one teaches it to you and you don't really practice it,
00:41:54
Speaker
then experience obviously helps. And so for me, like, because I've been gaining the experience as I was a little kid, it's hard to understand why you would ever flap in a situation in an outdoor situation. But because the aviation thing was so different, I was kind of flapping a little bit. But I was able to get around that through using these psychological techniques.
00:42:14
Speaker
Do you have a personal story about an incident or rescue during an outdoor trip when something didn't quite go to plan? Maybe you got lost, injured, let down by some gear, preparation or something else. Look, honestly, it can happen to any of us at any time, regardless of how experienced we are. And it's by sharing these stories and tales that we can all learn and help to avoid them in the future.
00:42:38
Speaker
So if that's you, I'd love to hear from you. So please drop me an email to rescued at lotsofreshshare.com. That's rescued with a D. What about fear and how fear can affect you in the middle of a crisis or in an adventure?
00:42:57
Speaker
Yeah, it certainly can. And that's where that pre-analysis of what the risks are going to be and the setting up of a set bunch of procedures that you're going to follow when that situation happens allows you to focus completely on it. You know, so for example, when I was doing my Kimberly expedition and I made that feature film about, I would, I would think, right, okay, I'm selling all my catamaran that I made out of seaplane flights and
00:43:24
Speaker
something snaps and I'm playing towards the shore. What am I going to do? And I'll run through in my head. Okay, first thing, because I've been through this situation before and I ended up, this is in a cycle and by the way, I ended up getting smashed up on the rocks and having to self rescue. And then I thought about that thing many times. I should have checked the anchor out. Why didn't I not check the anchor out? So I basically
00:43:42
Speaker
This one, I knew what to do. I'm going to check the anchor out first, and that'll prevent me from getting on the rocks, which will give me enough time to do this and then that. And so I'd have all of these procedures in what I would do set out in a logical order that you can constantly improve the more experience to get. And now as a filmmaker, I realized I'd go through that situation. I'd go, you know what? At no stage did I turn the camera on. So I would go back, rehearse it in my head.
00:44:02
Speaker
turn the camera on, then throw the anchor out. The placement of my cameras. That's the way to deal with high pressure, high performance situation is to have thought about what could happen, have a set plan that you know so well you automatically start executing. That's what being a pilot is all about. I was going to say, we see images of pilots in cockpits all the time with their checklists, endless checklists. There's a checklist for any scenario that is likely or unlikely even
00:44:32
Speaker
to emerge, but you've got a way of dealing with it.
00:44:35
Speaker
Exactly. And as a pilot, there's two types of checklist. There's boldface checklist and there's non-boldface. Boldface is the stuff in boldface writing that you have to know for memory. As a military pilot, you have to know like just reams of information kind of boldface. And when you teach someone or when you learn this stuff, you have to not only say the word like boost pump off, you have to move your hand and physically move the pump. So if I'm assessing a guy as a flying instructor, has he learned his checks well enough?
00:45:02
Speaker
For example, my helicopter, throttle, boost pump, fuel for battery frictions off. When your mouth stops talking, your hands already know where to go. That's another thing in a survival situation in an aeroplane. You need to have practice all your procedures to the point where your hands just go where they go. The same way that you drive a car and you automatically blink and you look over your shoulder and you know where to go. That's automatic, but it's practiced. You can drive to work on autopilot.
00:45:28
Speaker
because, and you get to work and like, man, did I even drive here? Because your body's really good at multitasking if it knows the tasks really well. So with boldface and with emergency prep, like if you're an ambo and you're a top of your game, you just know exactly what to do when, but it's guided by a very thorough checklist, which is reviewed. And when something's missing, it's placed in there and memorized to the point where that new step is in the process. So that's how to optimize performance in a hybrid situation.
00:45:54
Speaker
So even just thinking of the more day-to-day adventures that some of our listeners that we'd get up to, going for a hike, whether it be a single-day hike or a multi-day hike, you've just come back from the snowies. Let's say you're in a situation where
00:46:09
Speaker
You're camping up on the main range. The winds are not what was planned. You've got gusts up to 80km an hour. The tent was four-season, but it's kind of, for some reason, the poles snapped or something. Yeah, very nerfy times. Sounds familiar, doesn't it? They say poles have snapped for whatever reason. Equipment failure. Having already thought through that that could be something that could happen could be a great way to help you have a much better outcome.
00:46:37
Speaker
Absolutely. And then when you've prepped to that point, you're no longer flapping because you've already decided. When you wake up that morning and you saw that the fog was down here, you're like, you know what? Just double check that I've got my baby bag on the outside. You know what I mean? So the more experience you become, the earlier on you plan for that eventuality. But when you're a newbie, like the first time I skied from Cozy to Canberra, it was
00:47:00
Speaker
It was 92. And we had just out of fluke, we had the coldest night in Australian history. The night before it was minus 23. I think the night we're out, I think it was about minus 17. And we're in like sleeping bags that weren't, my mate was in a sleeping bag that wasn't even rated below zero. So you just end up dealing with those things. Whereas now I'd be like, well, I've had that experience. So you just, you plan differently. So that's the thing about adventure. It doesn't matter how experienced you are, curveballs are still going to come. I've rarely found myself on a flat though for a long time.
00:47:28
Speaker
But we all know people who flap, and I love that you use the word flap because there's people who get a bit flappy. It's like a crisis goes on and it's just like, say you're in a party and someone slips and falls, breaks something.
00:47:42
Speaker
Yeah. And knowing what you'll do and practicing it in your head, having those kind of checklists, even if they're just only mental checklists going through things can just completely change an outcome for someone. And I also think, particularly in the first aid sense there, that like many people, if I see a really bad injury, particularly if I'm myself, I feel a little bit faint.
Risk Management and Personal Growth
00:48:01
Speaker
And I know that I feel a bit faint if I get a nasty gash in myself, so I try to expose myself to as much blood and guts and gore as I can to help normalize that. So like when I get a needle at the doctor or an IV, I watch them do it, even though I don't particularly want to. And so I've given myself, because I was a combat medic in the army as well, because our tropical squadron didn't have a search and rescue facility up in Darwin, so they trained us to be combat mechs.
00:48:24
Speaker
And so I've given myself IVs and it's really uncomfortable putting a large needle into your foot. Actually, I learned to do it in my foot because then you got both hands free. I started out trying to do it into my arm. So I think there's a responsibility to do that. So you might be driving along with your family one day and there's a horrible accident and it might be one of your loved ones that's got a horrendous injury that if you just can't deal with it, that's kind of, I kind of think
00:48:47
Speaker
You need to, for your whole life, be exposing yourself to as much injury and ability to perform in a horrible first aid situation so you can perform when the time is needed. What about another point of planning, which I don't know if too many people think about is, you know, we plan because we have this curiosity, we have this question, we want to answer all this. What's on the other side? Or, you know, what about that end goal?
00:49:14
Speaker
And I think, you know, in mountaineering, we think of it as summit fever. And what if you can or can't reach a place that you're going? And at what point do you make those critical decisions to change your end goal? Yeah. And that just comes down to our risk management plan. And one thing that is normally overlooked with risk management plan is you've got to weigh up the upside.
00:49:37
Speaker
you know, and not just the downside. And if this is something really important to your life, and this is a one off opportunity, you know what, it's okay to take a bigger risk. You know, like if you got a people look at guys, 18 year old guys doing motocross, and they're doing triple backflips on a motorbike. For them, that's their entire career and their sense of self worth. It's worth them trying a quadruple backflip. For me, it's not because it's not my sense of self worth. It's not how I make my income. So
00:50:03
Speaker
Yeah, you do have to be prepared to say no and not achieve your goal if the risk is too high. And that's why you need to be practicing risk decisions since you're a little kid. If you just start when you're 18, you get bit out the door. That's when you make the really bad decisions. What's the solution? How do we bring this back into our culture?
00:50:23
Speaker
I just think, allow kids to be exposed to risk from toddlers. Allow them to fall off the playground and smack into their face and then they'll realise not to do that. Just give them that chance to find their boundaries the hard way, not be told what they are. Absolutely. You talk of your love for solo adventures. Something that comes up a lot of the times, people thinking about loneliness.
00:50:46
Speaker
You talked to me about that sense of, to use the name of the program, alone. So aloneness versus loneliness. Well, when I go out on my adventures, like alone or even the, you know, the Great Barrier Reef trip or any of them, I'm not phased at all by being alone. And I think that's just because I've been exposed to it. The first time I ever did my first solo thing by myself, I was actually 18, I was traveling or 19, traveling the world after not getting into being a pilot.
00:51:15
Speaker
And I was in Italy and, you know, I was living like real poverty. And I just thought, OK, I don't want to sleep in this train station. It looks pretty dodgy. I'm just going to climb up that mountain. And the whole night I was like, oh, man, is there lions and tigers in Italy? I got no idea. So I was peeking the whole night and was really uncomfortable and stuff. And then I just sort of had to repeat that to the point. So that was way outside my comfort zone.
00:51:36
Speaker
And now it's just totally in my comfort zone because I've just been exposed to it. And most of that is just because I never had a friend around at the time that was in that position with the equipment available and the time off work and all that kind of stuff. So it normalizes over time. So that's probably, I think, the reason that I find it completely normal.
00:51:55
Speaker
and other people that do it a lot get to that state as well. What about fatigue? Thinking of those multi-day adventures, the really long ones. You've mentioned the Kimberley. You've mentioned the East Coast in the Dugout. What are some of your other big multi-day
00:52:15
Speaker
I've skied solo across Iceland and across the desert. I sort of half-crossed that to cross the back again in the Saudi Arabia with camels that I owned. Yeah, there's lots of long solo ones, but the most difficult, to answer your question about fatigue, by far the most difficult was the Barrier Reef one because I'm starving at the same time and there's huge energy expenditure all the time. So yeah, you feel really, really tired.
00:52:37
Speaker
And it sucks. And you have to film on top of that. And so you basically, you just have to divorce the side of your brain that gives in to discomfort and just go not listening, get up and go. It became harder on that barrier reef one because it was to the point where if I ignore that too much, I'm not going to make it because I was stuck on an island for 10 days with no water. And that was becoming more of a hard decision because it was going on for so long.
00:53:05
Speaker
How does fatigue affect your decision making at that point? Or were you switching back into that psychological, okay, this is something I've planned for fatigue. I know I need to just bring out a checklist and kick my own ass and get out of bed. Yeah, I didn't need a checklist for that. I just didn't have a choice. I guess exposure to hardship and being able to compare it to other hardships, it just makes it easier to be able to deal with the next one.
00:53:29
Speaker
So that's why having a big stock up of hardship is a good thing behind you. So I keep drawing back to that horrible year in there in the Air Force when I was 18. And so particularly if you if you live a comfy life and you never experience hardship, sometimes the worst thing that's ever happened to you is maybe someone's mean to you. Like, whereas if if
00:53:45
Speaker
So yeah, like your benchmark or your low tide mark is it's important to have a couple of low tide marks in your mark in your life because it makes you happy because you got something to compare how bad life can suck. And that's the whole aim of life these days is to have it so comfortable that you never experience anything detrimental, which actually doesn't have the effect of making you happier. Just means that everything's almost the worst thing that's ever happened to you the whole time, you know? So adventure sort of
00:54:10
Speaker
forces you to end up in a situation that really sucks, but you would never volunteer to be in that situation. But seeing as you don't have a choice, you just suck it up and then all of a sudden you're happier for it. And like doing that trip with my kids just recently, it did suck a lot of the time. They didn't enjoy it, but they're happy that they did it now that they finished it. I'm looking forward to going and watching that YouTube video, by the way. So would you say there's a certain comfort that you get from discomfort?
00:54:33
Speaker
Not at the time, but it does scratch an inch later that makes you happy. At the time, it just sucks. Yeah, but you can choose to dwell on that or not. You can choose to focus on something else that's positive.
Future Plans in Filmmaking
00:54:48
Speaker
Like so in Tasmania, it was freezing cold, pretty hungry. So I would just think, most of the time I was concentrating on the task that I was doing to catch fish and trap patty mills and stuff. But if I did have free time because it was raining and it was dark and I'd already done all my tasks for the day,
00:55:02
Speaker
then, you know, I'd think about, okay, what am I going to do at home with the kids and, you know, how am I going to fix the bagola? So I'm always got tasks in my mind about, so I'm not just sitting there stewing on, oh, this really sucks. And why am I doing this? Like, you can waste a lot of focus wondering about why you're doing something that isn't productive. And I just try to avoid those thoughts. You're giving yourself tasks, even if they're mental tasks, you're stepping through things.
00:55:27
Speaker
Yeah, not necessarily for the sake of it, because I needed to go through those tasks because I do need to paint the bagola. But yeah, so picking useful things. Like if you're doing it just for the sake of switching focus, it's not as good as if you really need to think about something. So that's why being busy is good. It's healthy. How do you now plan for future adventures?
00:55:47
Speaker
given the experiences that you've had in your past adventures? I mean, I just go around it exactly the same way, really. I don't really want to be exposed to that such crazy risk on an ocean for so long again, but I'll probably end up doing it. But it hasn't really changed that much, actually. I'm just excited about that I'm getting better at being able to capture it and tell the story on film. That's another side of it that adds another layer.
00:56:14
Speaker
But I don't think I'll change anything about how I approach things. Do you feel that you made mistakes in the Great Barrier Reef journey that you learned from? Well, I'm certainly not going to do that again.
00:56:29
Speaker
No, not really. Of course, you know, I'd be more experienced that next time, but nothing really springs to mind. And particularly if you make a decision and you can remember the reasons why you made it, I'm never hard on myself afterwards about it. You know, if it's really important decisions, I write a list of pros and cons and things. But I was really happy with how I went about it.
00:56:48
Speaker
So what is the future then? What are some of the things coming up for you? What's in the pipeline? Well, I need to just get the film out, but I've been doing these other adventures overseas and stuff that have come up off and that takes a long time to edit them. I'm looking at trying to outsource the editing at the moment. And then I want to do YouTube shorter adventures and that just gives me the freedom to do something, hopefully send it off to an editor and then go to the next one and just have more freedom to pivot and go in a totally new direction if an opportunity comes up rather than putting on my exit month basket for like a three year adventure.
00:57:17
Speaker
And so is that the Mike Atkinson that we see these days? Is Mike Atkinson the filmmaker and adventure? Or is it Mike Atkinson, the adventure filmmaker? Yeah, no, it's adventures first. I only want to do stuff that's worth doing for the sake of doing. Yeah, but I guess they're quite interwoven now.
00:57:33
Speaker
What I found interesting is that your adventures seem to have, there's an origin story to them. For instance, the story of the shipwreck. For the feature films, yeah. There's a lot of story development and research that goes into that. It takes a long time to come up with that idea. Really, it starts as a very general one and gets more specific. I had to go to Queensland to find out where they used to try and get to. I knew it was somewhere on Cape York. That takes a lot of development. You're not going to put that much effort into each YouTube thing, but I can certainly just look at other rescue
00:58:02
Speaker
people who've been in situations and follow that theme for a bit.
00:58:05
Speaker
Yeah, that does certainly slow a project down having to do that amount of research. For sure. So finally, where can people learn more about what it is that you're up to? My website is Outback Mike and saves my Instagram. I think it's Outback underscore Mike. But if you just go to my website, Outback Mike, you'll see everything. I'm doing a podcast to where I interview other adventurers for my own sake, as much as anybody else's. Yeah, there's lots of different ways, but my YouTube channel is Outback Mike as
Conclusion and Upcoming Opportunities
00:58:30
Speaker
well. So that's the best place to find me.
00:58:32
Speaker
Is that .com.au or just outbackmike.com? .com. Great, Mike. It's been an absolute pleasure chatting with you today. Thank you for sharing your stories. And yeah, I can't wait to go and see that Snowy Mountains trip and also can't wait for that film to come out. Thanks a lot for having me.
00:58:47
Speaker
Well, I feel like that chat was a journey in itself and one that added so many facets to what I knew about Mike Atkinson than what we saw on Alone. Father, husband, son, author, Duke of Ed Volunteer, filmmaker, pilot, combat medic, intercourse, adventurer and meticulous planner.
00:59:09
Speaker
If you're thinking you'd like to work on your planning or preparation for adventures, why not join me in Lutruwita, Tasmania, from the 24th to the 27th of April this year, 2024, when I'm going to be bringing my introduction to navigation course to the beautiful heritage village of Corinna, deep into Kaina, the Tarkon, on Tassie's wild west coast.
00:59:33
Speaker
Over four days, you'll learn the essentials for on and off track navigation, build your confidence in finding your way in the bush, and for making wise decisions in the outdoors. Spaces are limited to just 10 people, so check out all the details on my website, lotsafreshair.com. That's lotsa with an A. I'd love to see you there.
00:59:55
Speaker
The Rescued Podcast is produced on the unceded lands of the Gundangara and Darug people of the Blue Mountains of New South Wales. I pay my respects to elders past and present and acknowledge their enduring connection to and care for country. Special thanks to our sponsors, Patti Powen. This has been a Lots of Fresh Air production.