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On Perranporth Beach, North Cornwall, just before rain blew in on a brisk nor'westerly, 2024

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unmoored

Voyaging belongs to seamen, and to the wanderers of the world who cannot, or will not, fit in. If you are contemplating a voyage and you have the means, abandon the venture until your fortunes change. Only then will you know what the sea is all about.

Sterling Hayden, from Wanderer (1963)

I sense the weather as I wake, even before I open my eyes.

The hull is still, save for a faint, gravitational shift of tension starboard, between it and the wooden pontoon to which it’s tethered. A shift of tide, not wind. The only sound is my wife’s breathing as she sleeps.

The air in the cabin is cold for a summer morning. The moisture in it has substance; you can almost swill it around your mouth. There’s a thin taste of salt, diesel and wood.

Fog.

I open my eyes to peer through a perspex hatch above my head. Sky the colour of stale milk has fallen across it. I sit up, wrap my duvet around my shoulders, and check the small, brass-encased barometer and clock on the bulkhead above the foot of my bunk. 6.30am: four hours before high water.

In an hour, my wife and I will warp our old sloop from its berth and sail a mile or so north-west across the Tamar estuary on the flood to thread a narrow channel edged by mudflats, at the mouth of a nearby tributary, St. John’s River, to reach a ramshackle boatyard where our boat is to be lifted ashore for repairs.

Fog and unfamiliar waters will make what might have been a careless twenty-minute transit more testing. Up-river are commercial wharves and a naval dockyard. Large ships and ferries ply the buoyed, deep-water fairway in the middle of the river, heedless of small boats like ours — mere pin-pricks, if seen at all, on their radar screens. In such poor visibility, the percussive thud thud of heavy diesels will be the only hint we get of their proximity and course.

Our boat has no radar. No GPS either. The VHF radio has seen better days. Wrack is an impoverished vessel, sea-worn and ill-equipped, almost half a century old, but capable enough under sail. With a fair breeze today, we can make do with a salt-stiffened mainsail, steering compass, and a rough plan of soundings with a small section of shoreline that I’ve traced in pencil from a large-scale chart on the harbourmaster’s office wall.

We moved aboard four months ago, at the beginning of what turned out to be a cold, wet spring. The boat was berthed on a listing pontoon, on the lower reaches of another river, the Itchen, 150 sea miles east of where we are now, alongside a bank of coal black mud that dried at low water and smelled of rotting seaweed and industrial waste. The capricious eddies of a semidiurnal ebb and flow tugged at the keel. Mooring lines creaked as they strained against their cleats.

It took a while to get used to the constant movement of the boat and the noises the river — and the relentless equinoctial wind — drew from its hull and rigging, but they were the least of other things we had to get used to: cooking in a tiny galley, pumping waste from the toilet by hand, even moving back and forth in the narrow cabin or outside, along rope-strewn decks. I had spent my youth living and working on the water but that was nearly half a century ago; my wife had grown up in the rural north of Oklahoma, far from any sea. I’m not sure what we expected but our first month aboard was an unsettling hardship. The cabin was gelid and condensation dripped from the deckhead, portlights and hatches. Brown water puddled at the bottom of every shelf and locker. Mildew and mould were everywhere.

Yet the boat was a refuge. We had wandered in search of somewhere to settle — or, more precisely, somewhere we would be allowed to settle — for four years, moving between whatever cheap, temporary accommodation we could borrow or afford to rent in seven countries, until this unkempt but graceful vessel suggested a possibility of shelter, of ‘fixedness’, even as we were compelled by circumstances to remain mobile, unrooted. We saw it — no, not her — as a floating vardo, spartan but functional, and by the time we slipped our lines from the pontoon and headed downriver, with a spring ebb hurrying us towards the open sea, where we would turn westwards, still uncertain of a precise destination, we had accepted the idea of ourselves as waterborne Gypsies, seafarers not yachtsmen, finally cut adrift from a shore that, we felt, no longer had a place for us.

We reach the edge of the ship channel as the sun rises above the low hills inland. A light northerly and the press of a strong spring flood againt the leeward bow fills the mainsail just enough for a slight wake to trail aft from the transom. By the time we’re reach the other side of the estuary, the fog has begun to dissipate but we’re still taken by surprise when a pair of large tugs, steaming seawards in company, materialises suddenly, as if out of thin air, and crosses our track close astern.

My wife and I stand together in the cockpit and peer forward under the boom, hoping to spot small, plastic, red and green buoys that will guide our course towards the boatyard. I study my hand-wrought chart and try to make it fit with the few features we can see: a pub, a car park, jittery water over shoals that fringe the low-lying shore.

Within a few minutes, we are picking our way across those same shoals. My wife calls out readings from an electronic depth-sounder, none of them reassuring. Our keel is close enough to the river bottom that I can feel a swirl of turbulence around it through the rudder. Two hundred metres off the port bow, through haze, I make out the rusted steel hulks of two river freighters, aground on the mud; they suggest a makeshift breakwater. Several metres to starboard, another improvised breakwater: the large, weather-worn wreck of a wooden fishing boat, its seams swollen and seeping rust, also aground and listing precariously against a high concrete quay. I assume the entrance is somewhere in between. My chart, such as it is, ends at these motley barriers.

We douse our sails and start the engine; with the throttle in neutral, we let the tide carry us closer over the murky shallows. There’s a volley of small arms fire. Then an explosion.

“I’ve seen this movie,” my wife says.

When I was a boy I dreamed of pirate utopias.

They were everywhere in the 17th and 18th centuries, refuges for outlaws and dissolute outsiders. From the island of Madagascar, the renegade captains Henry Every and William Kidd preyed on Arab traders and ships of the East India Companies off the coasts of East Africa and southern India; there were corsair strongholds in the Mediterranean — Ghar al Milh in Tunisia and Algiers — and the Muslim pirate Republic of Salé on the Atlantic coast of Morocco; there were a score of well-known Caribbean refuges, among them Port Royal, a British buccaneer sanctuary on the Jamaican coast, Tortuga on the French-held island of Haiti, and New Providence in the Bahamas, the last an uninhabited island until it was claimed by an English privateer-turned-pirate Henry Jennings and became the hideout of a pirate admiral, Benjamin Hornigold, and later the infamous ‘Blackbeard’, Edward Teach.

These were rough, anarchic places, their shores often defended by ramparts arrayed with cannons, behind which lay improvised settlements of victuallers, armourers, shipwrights, canvasmakers, boarding houses, bars, brothels, illicit traders, ‘fences’, and slavers, all in service to the pirate fleet and its crews. During fair weather seasons, the anchorages would swell to become water-bound townships themselves, with ships of all sizes, many of the captured ‘prizes’, lying in close proximity to each other, a steady traffic of oared lighters and cutters navigating the narrow waters between them.

I was forty-two years old when I came across a copy of Peter Lamborn Wilson’s 1995 book, Pirate Utopias: Moorish Corsairs and European Renegadoes, which connected, obliquely, Wilson’s somewhat idealised take on these unruly havens to his by-then-notorious notion of Temporary Autonomous Zones. First published in 1991 under the pseudonym Hakim Bey, just two years after Timothy Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web, Lamborn’s book, T.A.Z.: The Temporary Autonomous Zone, described a “socio-political tactic of creating temporary spaces that elude formal structures of control”. It also suggested real and virtual ‘territory’ within which anarchic concepts of unrestricted freedom, beyond the reach of government, might be explored. Similar ideas, sparsely defined, in relation to sea-borne communities, had inspired me as a young man, when I first slipped away from a privileged, if peripatetic, upbringing to live alone aboard a tiny sailing boat.

If my younger self had been pressed to describe what a 21st century ‘pirate utopia’ might look like, he might have come up with the ramshackle, almost dystopian seascape that we are entering, tentatively, on a sluggish flood.

Astern of the rotting wooden trawler on the starboard edge of the entrance, a small, former naval ship of some sort with high freeboard lists against the quay, thin water barely covering its propellors, while to port, a row of aged, fibreglass sailboats are berthed along a rickety pontoon secured to the corroded river freighters-turned-breakwaters; the sailboats’ keels are sunk in a glutinous shoal that, we later find out, is submerged just twice a day, for two hours either side of high water. As we drift deeper within, we pass iron-hulled narrowboats in various states of disrepair, rafted together, but disconcertingly out of place on these tidal flats, far from any canal — two young women in long floral dresses atop one of them, sipping from colorful mugs, which they raise to greet us.

Every boat looks lived in, every deck strewn with jerry cans, pot plants, and mildewed canvaswork, coachtops and rigging draped with laundry and improvised awnings. The effect is of a shanty town, a floating favela thrown together by the vagaries of wind and tide, as if the disparate vessels were caught by the tendrils of a slow-moving gyre that eventually stranded them here, in this shallow rural backwater.

A once graceful, large motor-launch, its wooden superstructure gone to seed and patched with random off-cuts of marine ply and sheets of clear plastic, marks the end of the entrance channel. We turn ninety degrees to port into a rectangular pool of oily, brown water enclosed by cement quays and wooden pontoons. Arrayed along the quays, a handful of buildings, some more permanent than others, in stone, timber, and corrugated metal.

We steer towards a slipway; at the bottom of it, lapped by the rising tide, is a insect-like steel structure, a U-shaped gantry on wheels, from which are suspended a set of canvas slings. Men are perched atop the steel beams above the slings which, as we approach, are lowered and the whole structure moves further down the ramp, into the water. We kill the engine; there is just enough way on to drift the boat into its skeletal maw. The slings are raised, slowly, either side of the keel. The hull ceases to respond to the movement of the water. The deck becomes solid underfoot. Then, like some arcane Victorian mechanical stage effect, the boat begins to rise from the sea into the air.

More volleys of gunfire and the muffled thud of an explosion. A whisp of pale smoke rises above a line of trees on the other side of the harbour. Someone shouts a series of indistinct instructions.

“Bloody commandos,” a young woman says. She stands at a counter at one end of a somewhat chaotic kitchen in a small, open plan shed that serves as the harbour’s canteen.

“Training,” says an old man with arthritic hands and rheumy eyes, sitting alone at one of the few tables. Ex-military himself, the small sailboat he has lived aboard, alone, for six years is berthed just a hundred yards from the grassy foreshore that is the staging ground for a series of practice assaults by armed soldiers aboard rubber boats. He has retreated to the café to get away from the noise and for company.

There are three other customers, besides the old man, my wife and me. One is a former marine in his fifties who was discharged with post-traumatic stress and found insulation from his past and a necessary solitude aboard a different boats over the past decade. The others are a gangly, middle-aged South African guy who does freelance maintenance and refitting for the local yard, and a transexual English shipwright with Barbie-esque hips and bust but large, gnarled hands and a waterman’s weathern-worn face. All live aboard boats here and like the old man, come to the café as much for random social encounters as for food.

Everyone converses with each other easily: there is commonality in our lives afloat. But there is also the impression that we are all untethered and adrift. The lack of individual fixedness (that word, again) is stark. We talk of boats, sea passages and ports of call but there is no sense of place, of belonging. None of us have a home in our heads to return to — maybe this last defines the elemental difference between recreational sailors and sea-dwellers, between the guests of high-priced marinas and the liveaboard outsiders moored here and elsewhere in the obscure reaches of other estuaries and tidal creeks around the British coast — but very few of us have been pressed into this circumstance. It is a choice, or sometimes a lawless inclination, driven only in part by a desire to feel free of some of the strictures and conventions of life ashore.

Disappearance is an art and those drawn to a life on the sea are adept at it. Community among seafarers is temporary and non-committal at best. Even here, among a fleet of decrepit boats that rarely put to sea, the comings and goings of individual liveaboards — some of whom crew other people’s boats for a living — are like hauntings. For all the 20th century theorizing about pirate utopias and temporary autonomous zones — the former focussed on the consensus and lack of hierarchy at the heart of piratical decision-making (and a lack of tolerance for autocratic captains) — and the history of rigid command structurea and iron discipline imposed over centuries on sailing ships’ crews at sea, most seafarers are now, as in the past, introspective proto-anarchists, resolutely solitary, who, when ashore, might be mistaken for ghosts.

At sunset, the quayside is empty. The boatyard’s tradesmen and office staff have retreated to their homes and whatever awaits them there. A few, dim lights can be glimpsed through portholes or perspex hatches but few people. The light winds in the estuary have dissipated and the air has begun to cool. The tide is at its lowest ebb — in the harbour, now empty of saltwater , the keel of every vessel has been swallowed by an expanse of grim sludge

Standing on a short jetty, my wife chats with a much younger woman who is taking in bed linen left to dry along the boom of a small, gaff-rigged, wooden sailboat.

“How long’re you around for?” she asks my wife.

“Until the boat’s done,” my wife says.

“And then?”

We both shrug, not knowing.

First published in Dark Ocean, an anthology from The Dark Mountain Project, UK, 2024.

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Heading to sea on the ebb from L'Aber Wrac'h, northern Brittany, at dawn (in the distance, the silhouette of La Vierge lighthouse), 2024.

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castaway: an interview

Traveller and diarist C.C O’Hanlon spent most of the first half of his life at sea aboard a variety of vessels until marriage, children, and ill health held him ashore. He has come to think of himself as a ‘castaway’.

Now in his late 60s, C.C. is still as restless as he was in his youth. During the past decade he has wandered ceaselessly, from Australia to France, Germany, the U.K., Morocco, Italy, Ireland, and Spain. Recently, he has come to rest on the Salento Peninsula, in southern Italy, where he and his wife of 33 years, Given, are restoring a 200-year-old limestone village house.

C.C. was one year old when he first went to sea, a long voyage to Italy from Australia aboard an old Italian immigrant ship, accompanied by his parents. He became a qualified sea navigator in his early 20s. He funded the building of a small yacht of his own by delivering other people’s yachts and writing and photographing for UK and North American yachting magazines.

He has the hard-shelled demeanour, brawny bulk, and gnarled, bearded features of an old salt but C.C. is a surprisingly thoughtful, informed observer of nature and an expressive writer. Earlier this year, the respected Dutch publisher, Thomas Rap, announced that it had commissioned him to write a non-fiction book about the sea and his uncomfortable relationship with settlement and the shore.

It felt entirely appropriate that we should connect by email from seas at opposite ends of the European continent — me by the Baltic in Jurmala, Latvia, he by the Adriatic, in Puglia, Italy.

How did you become a castaway?

I stumbled ashore, somewhat damaged, in my 30s and let others convince me it was time to settle. Big mistake. I ended up rootless, a nomad, more unsettled than I had been at sea. I’ve been stranding ever since on a series of different shores.

Which has been your favourite voyage so far?

My very first passage alone in a very small yacht from the island of Jersey, in the English Channel, to Crosshaven on the south coast of Ireland, a distance of about 290 sea miles. This was in the mid ‘70s, before everyone had GPS. I had a couple of compasses, a wristwatch, a radio receiver, a barometer, and an old sextant I was teaching myself to use. Paper charts. Hardly any safety gear.

It wasn’t an epic voyage. I was very inexperienced. It took about three days. But when I finally made landfall, I felt like I had mastered some arcane craft, an ancient magic. I could find my way across a featureless sea.

What challenges are there in leading a life as a castaway?

For me, living close to the sea — being aware of its presence, being alert to its constantly changing state — and yet being frustrated, often, because I’m unable to actually get out there on it.

I miss voyaging.

What inspires you?

Unusual young people, like Hannah Lily Stowe, whom you’ve featured here. And certain solitary, rarely remarked upon, but rather extraordinary people who live (and voyage) at the margins, like Kris Larsen and Nick Skeates.

Also maps. Or, more specifically, nautical charts, maps of the sea. I have, maybe, a couple of hundred of them, many more than half a century old. I read them as I would a book.

A chart is a wondrous artefact.. At first glance, it’s just an annotated image of a stretch of water and its littoral, a repository of essential data. But a chart is filled with history, geography, oceanography, metereology and several hundred years of maritime lore and experience, all conveyed in a visual language that has evolved over centuries.

A chart can pique your curiosity about the physical world: the magnetic anomalies of the north-east Pacific, say, or the inshore canyons of the Atlantic coast of Portugal, which can form waves that reach a hundred feet in height. Or it might draw you into a real-life adventure up the Congo, the world’s deepest and maybe most mysterious river.

Is there a book about the sea that you would suggest to read?

There are two:

My childhood favourite was Arthur Ransome’s We Didn’t Mean To Go To Sea, published in 1937. I wish more kids would read it these days and imagine themselves sailing the tiny Goblin without adult supervision across the grey North Sea.

The other is The Starship And the Canoe, an unusual double biography of a famed physicist who dreamed of designing massive, improbably powered rocket-ships and sending them on manned voyages to Mars, and his son who lived in a tree, in between voyaging in hand-built, sea-going kayaks along the north-west Pacific coast, from Canada to Alaska.

What does the sea mean to you?

Possibilities! Every encounter with the sea is different. Nothing there is fixed or immutable, nothing is ever the same. When you venture out into it, you can never be sure what to expect and that element of uncertainty — of expectancy, of risk — is at the heart of sea-faring.

The sea always provides powerful experiences, whether it’s excitement, wonder, awe, puzzlement, terror, misery, tedium, frustration, longing, self-doubt, deep satisfaction, loneliness, or enlightenment — but never quite when or how you might expect them.

You can never take the sea for granted — it might, after all, take your life — and whatever you get from it, good or bad, savour it, no matter what.

First published in The Sea Library magazine, Latvia, as part of a series, When I Grow Up, edited by Anna Iltnere, 2021.

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First light beyond the beachfront, Tangier, Morocco, 2024.

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the berlin myth

"There is always a myth about a city that may or may not line up with the reality of what its like to live in that city. For Berlin, the myth is that it's incredibly cheap, with endless resources, and everyone there is creative. This myth does not line up with reality..."

– Jessa Crispin

[from her podcast, Public Intellectual, USA, May 2018]

https://open.spotify.com/episode/1lFS4FRGbmsHSvliTsUkBI

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C.C. O'Hanlon and his wife, Given, at Café à l'Anglaise, Tangier, Morocco, 2024. Photo by Finn Lafcadio O'Hanlon.

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a wreck returns to sea

"...C.C. was in a marina in Southampton and I was in a farm in the border of Devon and Cornwall — the internet was patchy and lagging a bit but we managed to chat for half an hour or so."

– Fernando Sdrigotti, novelist and blogger

[streamed from The Leftovers, UK, April 2023]

https://open.substack.com/pub/theleftovers/p/a-wreck-returns-to-sea

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An autumn storm approaching Port Chantereyne, Cherbourg, on the Contentin Peninsula, France, 2023.

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from my bookshelf

Pytheas of Massalia was a Greek geographer, explorer and astronomer from the ancient Greek colony of Massalia — modern-day Marseille, France. In the late 4th century BC, he voyaged from there to northwestern Europe, but his detailed account of it, On The Ocean, survives only in fragments, quoted — and disputed — by later authors such as Strabo, Pliny and Diodorus of Sicily. The Extraordinary Voyage Of Pytheas the Greek by the noted British historian of ancient maritime Europe, Barry Cunliffe, attempts to draw out the reality of what was an extraordinary sea journey, from the Western Mediterranean north along the Atlantic coast of Europe to the British Isles, then even further north, to the near-mythic land of Thule. Cunliffe makes a strong case for Pytheas being “the first European explorer”, while identifying the most likely locations of Thule, sought so avidly by 19th and early 20th century adventurers and artists.

James Hamilton-Paterson’s Seven-Tenths: The Sea And Its Thresholds, published in 1992, more than two thousand years after Pytheas’s On The Ocean, is an ambitious, expressive exploration of the vast aqueous wilderness that covers three-quarters of our planet by a writer of remarkable literary accomplishment (he was one of Martin Amis’s professors at Oxford). Plumbing humanity’s complex, multi-faceted relationship with the sea, Hamilton-Paterson writes vivid, meditative passages about, well, everything — fishing, piracy, oceanography, cartography, exploration, ecology, the ritual of a burial at sea, poetry, and even his own experiences living for extended periods on a small island in the Philippines.

Tom Neale’s autobiography, An Island To Oneself: Six Years On A Desert Island, describes an altogether smaller, more solitary world: the island of Anchorage, part of the Suwarrow Atoll in the South Pacific. Born in New Zealand in 1902, Neale spent most of his life in Oceania: after leaving the Royal New Zealand Navy, he worked for decades aboard inter-island trading vessels and in various temporary jobs ashore before his first glimpse of his desert island home. He moved to Anchorage in 1952 and over three different periods, lived in hermitic solitude for 16 years, with rare visits from yachtsmen, island traders, and journalists. Among the last was Noel Barber, a close friend of my late father: he gave my father a copy of Neale’s book, in Rome, shortly after it was published in 1966 (I still have it). Neale was taken off his beloved island in 1977 and died not long after of stomach cancer.

The Starship And The Canoe by Kenneth Brower, published in 1978, is an unlikely dual biography of a father and son that draws intriguing parallels between the ambitious ideas of renowned British theoretical physicist and mathematician Freeman Dyson — who, in the early 1970s explored concepts for interstellar travel, settlements on comets, and nuclear rockets that might propel mankind to the outer reaches of the universe — and his wayward son, George, who lived in a self-built tree house 30 metres up a Douglas fir overlooking the Strait Of Georgia, in British Columbia and devised large canoes based on Aleut baidarkas in which to paddle north to the wild, uninhabited littoral of southern Alaska. Brower’s descriptions of long passages with the younger Dyson in the cold, sometimes fierce tidal waters between Vancouver Island and the Canadian mainland are gripping and I have read them again and again. It is, unarguably, my favourite book.

The late, New Zealand-born doctor and sailor, David Lewis, is not as widely known as he was half a century ago, even by avid readers of sea stories, but from his earliest memoirs in the 1960s — of his participation in the first-ever singlehanded trans-Atlantic race (The Ship That would Not Sail Due West), and of incident-prone voyages to far-flung coasts with his young family (Dreamers of the Day, Daughters of the Wind, and Children Of Three Oceans) — to his practical, first-hand studies of instrument-less ocean navigation among South Pacific islanders, (We, The Navigators and The Voyaging Stars) in the 1970s, Dr. Lewis was not only the late 20th century’s most remarkable and intelligent writer on the sea and small-boat voyaging but also one of its most adventurous. My favourite of his several books: Ice Bird, published in 1972, an account of a gruelling, almost fatal voyage from Sydney, Australia, in an ill-prepared, steel, 32-foot yacht to achieve the first singlehanded circumnavigation of Antarctica.

It’s said that spending time anywhere with Lorenzo Ricciardi, late ex-husband of Italian photographer Mirella Ricciardi, was an adventure. A film-maker and former senior advertising executive, once described by a British writer as “a penniless Neapolitan count”, he gambled at roulette to raise enough money to buy an Arab dhow, which, in the 1970s, with little seafaring experience and plenty of mishaps, he sailed from Dubai to the Arabian Gulf, and from there down the Arabian to coast of Africa, where the dhow was shipwrecked among the Comoros Islands. The Voyage Of The Mir El Ah is Lorenzo’s picaresque account (illustrated by Mirella’s photographs). Astoundingly, several years later, Lorenzo and Mirella Ricciardi completed an even more dangerous, 6,000-kilometre voyage across Equatorial Africa in an open boat — and another book, African Rainbow: Across Africa By Boat.

Italian madmen aside, it used to be that you could rely on surfers for poor impulse control and reckless adventures, on the water and off. Back in the late 1990s, Allan Weisbecker sold his home, loaded his dog and a quiver of surfboards onto a truck, and drove south from the Mexican border into Central America to figure out what had happened to an old surfing buddy — in between checking out a few breaks along the way. In Search Of Captain Zero: A Surfer's Road Trip Beyond The End Of The Road is a memoir of a two-year road-trip that reads like a dope-fuelled fiction but feels more real than William Finnegan’s somewhat high-brow (and more successful) Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life.

Which brings me to Dana and Ginger Lamb. In 1933, these newly-weds would certainly have been looked at askance by most of their middle-American peers when they announced that they weren’t ready yet to settle down and instead built a 16-foot hybrid canoe-sailboat and set of on what would turn out to be a 16,000-mile, three year journey down the Pacific coasts of Mexico, Guatemala, Salvador, Nicaragua and Costa Rica to the Panama Canal. Dana’s 415-page book, Enchanted Vagabonds, published in 1938, was an unexpected New York Times best-seller and today is more exciting to read than the ungainly, yawn-inducing books produced by so many, more commercially-minded, 21st century adventurers.

First published in Sirene, No. 17, Italy, 2023.

[ccohanlon]

how i live

I woke at midnight, last night, to a hard sou’westerly and the floor moving in three directions at once — pitching, rolling, rising-and-falling. Now, six hours later, the wind has moderated. Everything is still. The rest of the world is obscured by grey mist and sporadic showers, as if the sky has fallen across the shore.

I climb up a short ladder to the companionway to check that all is well on deck — it’s the first thing I do every morning — then I return to my bunk to download email and read a couple of news sites on a laptop before my wife wakes and we have a cup of coffee together across the varnished teak table that separates our bunks.

We talk about what we want to do today and waste a minute or two trying to agree a time-table before giving up. For half a decade, we have scraped by with a minimum of routine or planning. We are singularly unadept at making lists or coordinating diaries. We end up doing most things together. Today, we will pick up some paint and shackles at a chandlery and find a local metal fabricator to repair or replicate a damaged stainless steel stanchion. We also have to buy some groceries. But first I want to repair our rubber dinghy.

My wife and I live on a 32-foot sailboat. It is a life-raft of sorts. It is also an island on which we are trying to regain an unsettled but sheltered freedom after several years of being homeless. Most days, we feel like castaways, with no hope of ever being rescued.

It’s hard to explain how we ended up here. Moving aboard was not a ‘lifestyle choice’ but an act of quiet desperation. We had dropped out of a life in which I had somehow ended up running two well-known, medium-sized companies, one of them publicly listed — before those roles, I had been a musician, gambler, seaman, smuggler, photographer, magazine editor, and governmental adviser — and we had taken to wandering slowly across Europe, the UK, and North Africa. After a year holed up on the southern coast of Spain, a few miles east of Gibraltar, riding out the worst of the pandemic, we moved to southern Italy, where we acquired, and set about restoring, a small ruin, part of servants’ quarters attached to a 16th century Spanish castle, in a village not far from Lecce, in Puglia. We had just completed the work, two years later, when the local Questura, the office of the Carabinieri that oversees Italian immigration, rejected our third application for temporary residence and issued a formal instruction to us to leave Italy — and Europe’s Schengen zone.

The boat was not something we thought through in any detail. I had spent a lot of time at sea in my youth and had lived on sailing boats of various sizes on the Channel coasts of England and France, as well as in the Mediterranean. Which is to say, I had an understanding of their discomforts. But the prospect of resuming a life that, before we ended up in southern Italy, involved moving every three months — not just from one temporary accommodation to another but from one country to another, so as not to contravene the terms of our largely visa-less travel — had exhausted us. I made an offer on a cheap, neglected, 45-year-old, fibreglass sloop I had come across online and organised a marine surveyor to look it over for me. He gave it a cautious thumbs up.

I won’t forget my wife’s dolorous expression, a month later, when she saw the boat for the first time. It was in an industrial area of Southampton, on a dreich morning in early spring — bitterly cold, windy, and raining. Around us, the Itchen River’s ebb had revealed swathes of black, foul-smelling mud. Raised far from the sea, on the plains of north-eastern Oklahoma, my wife told me later she had been praying that our journey to this glum backwater was part of some elaborate practical joke.

There is a whole genre of YouTube videos created by those who live on sailboats full-time and voyage all over the world. The most popular, the so-called ‘influencers’, are young(ish) couples or families with capacious, often European-built, plastic catamarans or monohulls. Their videos focus less on the gritty, day-to-day grind of boat maintenance and passage-making and more on sojourns in ancient, stone-built harbours in the Mediterranean, white, sandy beaches and palm-fringed cays in the Caribbean, or improbably blue lagoons and solitary atolls in the South Pacific, where they barbecue fresh fish, paddle-board, kite-surf and practice yoga and aerial silks for the envy of hundreds of thousands of followers. My wife’s and my life aboard together is nothing like any of this.

We are both in our sixties — I am just a year away from seventy — and we have spent more than a decade on the move around the world, at first following eclectic opportunities for employment then, when those opportunities receded, in search of somewhere we might be able to settle with very little money. Four months after moving aboard our boat, we still think of ourselves as vagabond travellers, our boat a shambolic, floating vardo that we haven’t yet managed to turn into a home. We’re not really ‘cruisers’, despite the sense of community we sometimes find among them, but we are seafarers — historically, a marginal existence driven by necessity. A recent, 150-nautical-mile passage westward along the south coast of England was a shakedown during which we learned how to make our aged, shabby vessel more comfortable and easier to handle and to trust her capacity to keep us safe at sea.

She bore the name Endymion when we bought her — after my least favourite poem by John Keats (“A thing of beauty is a joy forever…”) — but we re-named her Wrack. Depending on the source, ‘wrack’ describes seaweeds or seagrasses that wash up along a shore or the scattered traces of a shipwreck, either of which might be metaphors for my wife and me in old age. It is certainly how we feel when we’re not at sea. Life aboard Wrack is spartan — fresh water stored in a dozen polyethylene jerry cans, no hot or cold running water, no refrigeration and when the temperature drops, no heating either — so, from time to time, we concede the cost of berthing in marinas to gain access to on-site laundries, showers, flushing toilets, and wi-fi. Whether we’re berthed or anchored somewhere, we shop for food once a week — mainly vegetables, fruit, bread, pasta, and rice but little dairy and no meat — and eat one meal a day, cooked in the mid-afternoon on a two-burner gas stove.

The days we spend in close proximity to others’ lives ashore remind us how disenfranchised ours have become. We were homeless before we acquired Wrack, but now we are without a legal residence anywhere, even in our ‘home’ countries. We enter and exit borders uneasily as ‘visitors’, our stays limited to 90 or 180 days, depending on where we are. We have no access to banking, insurance, social services or, with a few exceptions, emergency health care. Even the modest Australian pensions we have a right to can only be received if we have been granted residence in countries with which Australia has reciprocal arrangements — and we haven’t. It’s hard even for other live-aboards to understand how deeply we are enmired in this peculiar bureaucratic statelessness. It’s harder for us to deal with it every day.

But life afloat provides consolations. We are ceaselessly attuned to the weather and our boat’s responses to subtle shifts in the sea state, tide and wind even when we are tethered to a dock. We appreciate the shelter — and surprising cosiness — the limited space below decks affords us but the impulse to surrender to the elements and let them propel us elsewhere is insistent. Our best days are offshore, even when the conditions are testing; the world shrinks to just the two of us, our boat and the implacable, mutable sea around us. Whatever problems we face ashore become, at least for the duration of a passage, abstract and insignificant. We sail without a specific destination — ‘towards’ rather than ‘to’, as traditional navigators would have it — and without purpose. Time drifts.

At least half of every day is spent maintaining, repairing, or re-organising the boat, an unavoidable and time-consuming part of our days, especially at sea. When we’re at anchor or berthed in a marina, we do what we can to sustain ourselves. Most afternoons are spent prospecting for drips of income from journalism and crowd-funding — a source inspired by those younger YouTube adventurers — or adding a few hundred words to a manuscript for a non-fiction book commissioned by a Dutch publisher, whose patience has been stretched to breaking point. Because of our visitor visa status, we can’t seek gainful employment ashore, and we have long since lost contact with any of the networks that once provided us with a higher-than-average income as freelancers. Our existence, by any definition, is impoverished and perilously marginal, we have little social life, yet we make the effort to appreciate our circumstances, even if it’s just to sit together in silence and absorb the elemental white noise of wind and sea, to do nothing, to not think.

Our precariousness burdens our four adult children, who have scattered to San Diego, Sydney, Berlin and Rome: “Where are you now?” our youngest asks. “How long will you be there?” We speak to each at least once a week. Not all of them long for fixedness but they do want desperately for us to have a ‘real home’, somewhere we can assemble occasionally as a family. We will be grandparents for the first time, soon. Like our few friends, our children worry that we might become lost — in every sense.

My wife and I are uncomfortably aware of our financial and physical vulnerability but at our ages, we can no longer cling to the faint hope that there’s an end to it. We have committed to an unlikely, reckless voyage. All we can do is maintain a rough dead reckoning of its course and embrace the uncharted and the relentless unexpected.

First published in The Idler, UK, 2023.

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Rusted or splintered hulks and cement-filled pontoons form makeshift breakwaters for Carbeile Wharf, a tidal boatyard and Mad Max-adjacent live-aboard community in Torpoint, Cornwall, 2023

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on the art of liz cullinane

The fragments drew me to the work: wood, bone, sea shells, a ribbon of map reduced by razor to frame a minimum of topography — a few contour lines, a couple of roads — each of which I took in at a distance of inches before I withdrew to look at the painted surfaces: a seascape in triptych, I thought at first, before it occurred to me that, despite its title, Swell, part of it could just as well be a landscape derived from everything that had been excised from the map; even now it remains unresolved.

This lack of resolution is elemental to Liz Cullinane’s art. In the paintings that are framed without extraneous objects or attachments, there is the nagging suspicion that something is missing, as if the simple observations of shells around shallow, tidal rock pools are merely the loci of other artefacts the placement of which might cause us to reassess what we are seeing but also what we are assuming. Maps recur in many of Liz’s pieces, along with the physical evidence of an Irish littoral (the sea washes many of her works) but the artist herself, especially her relationship to these places, eludes us. This is a deliberate self-negation and yet, inadvertently, it draws attention to an undercurrent of absence and of loss, not all of it personal, that pervades these works and splices them to other strands of Liz’s prodigious creativity — as a writer and singer, and as a designer for film and the performing arts.

There are clues in the collage, In Absentia — an antique teething ring, a baby shoe, a silver devotional medal (the French call it a médaille miraculeuse) depicting Our Lady of Graces, and a painted sea and sky commemorate the cillíní, Achill’s mass grave sites where unbaptised babies were interred — but a deeper pain, a corrosive regret, is literally pinned within it, stark grief for a child or children closer to the artist’s heart. This is, again, left unresolved in the work, leaving the viewer to reconcile a grim curiosity and a natural emotional conflict.

Liz Cullinane is, in this sense, very much an emerging artist, still grappling awkwardly with the raw, emotive power of her ideas and her diverse physical materials, eschewing a conventional attachment to an artistic ‘practice’ so that she remains free and unencumbered to immerse herself within the jagged narrative of her psyche and allow it to flow through whatever physical medium is best able to contain and communicate it. In this exhibition, the narrative is fragmentary, unexplained, but all the more unsettling because of that.

Notes for Liz Cullinane's exhibition, Seatangled, on Achill Island, Ireland, August, 2023.

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Becalmed at dusk in the English Channel, waiting for the start of the west-going ebb to pass notorious Portland Bill, 2023.

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boatpacking

Ask an Australian about their earliest childhood memory and chances are, they’ll tell you about their swimming lessons.

Learning to swim was, still is, a rite of passage for the 85 per cent of Australians that grow up within 50 kilometres of the sea. On the northern beaches of Sydney, where I was born, it meant being driven to the beach very early every morning in late spring and early summer to stand shivering with a dozen other kids in a sea-water pool hewn from rock, awaiting a turn to swim lengths — crawl, breast stroke and back stroke — under the gaze of a leather-skinned, relentlessly fierce, late middle-aged man in a wide-brimmed, straw sun-hat. He barked commands like an army drill sergeant, “Straighten your legs! Bend your elbows! Keep your head and shoulders in the water!“, but everyone endured it without complaint. As much as we hated it, we regarded it as an initiation of sorts, one we didn’t want to fail.

At age eight, I was given my first boat, a 2.6-metre, plywood, snub-nosed sailing dinghy. Every day during summer school holidays, I got out of bed before dawn, packed a plastic box with zinc suncream, sandwiches, fruit, and water, then walked a mile or so to a beach on an inlet sheltered from the sea. My dinghy was stored there on a launching ramp and it took me less than an hour to clean out the inside of the hull, raise its varnished wooden mast, and hoist its sails before coaxing it down the ramp on makeshift rollers to the water. Once afloat, my youthful imagination could conjure all kinds of voyages of discovery and adventure, helming my small ‘ship’ for miles through deep water enclosed by dense subtropical forests atop low sandstone cliffs and beaches accessible only from the sea. Like every good explorer, I kept a log in a ring-bound notebook and drew charts littered with esoteric symbols and notations.

I was 21 when I taught myself to navigate properly, on the agitated grey-brown seas off the south coast of England. My first boat was an exercise in economy and minimalism — a skinny, fibreglass, seven-metre sloop, sparsely equipped (two sails, a bulkhead compass and a paraffin stove, nothing else), with a cabin barely deep enough to sit in. It reflected my admiration for a generation of singlehanded sailors, mostly French and English, who had set off on epic voyages in the early ‘60s aboard boats not much bigger than mine, and even a few that were smaller.  After rudimentary sea trials in the sheltered waters of the Solent, between the south coast of England and the Isle of Wight, I unshipped the outboard engine and rusted metal fuel tank that I’d bought with the boat and abandoned them on a disused jetty on the upper reaches of the Medina River; I stole a long oar from a rowing club to replace them. I made a hand lead and line and acquired an anchor, 30 metres of chain shackled to three-stranded nylon rope, an ancient hand-bearing compass, a plastic transistor radio, a few tools, and two plastic bags of victuals — long-life milk, Mars bars, apples, canned food and cereals. Then I sailed for France.

I lived aboard there for two years, even in winter, drifting westwards along the southern shores of the English Channel, poking my bow into rivers and creeks on the coasts of Normandy and northern Brittany, learning to be a seaman. Sometimes I kept company with French sailors the same age as me, who were doing much the same thing but aboard leaky, wooden gaff-rigged boats they had either inherited from a parent or found abandoned to mud and rot up some backwater. They taught me two important skills: how to cook a complete meal in a pressure cooker on a single burner paraffin stove and how to scull. They managed the latter with impressive speed and élan, one-handed, standing astride narrow cockpits or rope-strewn after-decks, often within the confines of a small, rock-strewn tidal harbour crowded with fishing boats. Being engineless was, for all of us, a matter of reckless pride.

The French also taught me to be less fretful about the shortcomings of both my skills as a navigator and my boat — to be, somehow, less rigorous about being a ‘proper’ seafarer, and actually enjoy being at sea. They reminded me that sailors never sail ‘to’ anywhere, they sail ‘towards’ and that the real joy of a small boat, especially one as small as mine, with barely half a metre of freeboard, was its proximity to the sea itself. As the shaman-like solo circumnavigator, Bernard Moitessier, noted in his 1971 book, The Long Way, “…concentrating on a magnetized needle prevents one from participating in the real universe, seen and unseen, where a sailboat moves.”

When I finally weighed anchor in Brittany for the last time, in the Aber-Benoît River, and negotiated, on the pre-dawn ebb of an early autumn neap tide, the rocks and shoals off its mouth, I set a course true north and did not bother to refer to a compass or chart for another 18 hours, until I glimpsed the loom of Start Point lighthouse, in Devon, off my starboard bow.

My time in France underscored that I didn’t really want to be a ‘yachtsman’. I wanted to be a ‘waterman’, with skills on boats and boards and the vagabond instincts of someone like George Greenough, an extraordinarily inventive board-shaper, surfer, boat-builder, sailor, and cameraman. George created the 1970 cult surf film The Innermost Limits Of Pure Fun. He had also been the focus (and narrator) of another, acclaimed surf film, Crystal Voyager, released in 1973, in which Australian film-makers David Elfik and Albert Falzon followed him through the construction of a 37-foot, fibreglass sailing boat in his parent’s backyard in Santa Barbara, Southern California, and on a voyage to the offshore Channel Islands — and elsewhere along the west coast — in search of uncrowded sets to ride on his innovative, concave-hulled knee-boards. For George, life was not about competition or ticking off destinations and accomplishments but rather an ascetic, uncluttered, everyday relationship with the sea. It echoed the spiritual simplicity of Moitessier.

I encountered Emmanuel and Maximilien Berque many years later, in the early 2000s. It took nine minutes, the time needed to view an excerpt from their award-winning, self-produced and filmed 16mm documentary, Inside Outside, to realise that their DIY projects were an adventurous, evolutionary leap forward from Greenough. Identical twins, French nationals born in 1950 in Casablanca, Morocco, the Sorbonne-educated descendants of noted Arabists and landscapers, they had spent their early twenties in south-west France where they were among the first to surf – and photograph – the various banks and point breaks along the east coast of the Bay of Biscay.  

In the early ’80s, they designed and built a 4.8 metre trimaran daysailer in plywood and dubbed it Micromegas. With little sailing experience but an interest in celestial navigation, they set off for the Canary Islands, west of Morocco, in what became a gruelling series of stormy coastal and offshore passages. They spent over a year living in the open air on the tiny vessel. Not surprisingly, it put them off sailing for another decade. Then, in 1995, they designed and built a beautiful, strip-planked, lug-sail ketch, Micromegas II, just four-metres long. They sailed it – without engine, electronics, adequate stores or basic safety equipment – first across the Atlantic, from the beachside town of Contis, in south-west France, to Guadeloupe in the Caribbean, then to Miami, Florida. In 2003, two years after their book about this voyage, Les Mutins De La Mer, became a minor best-seller in France, they did it again, designing and building a strip-planked, 6.5-metre, lugsail schooner-rigged proa, Micromegas III, weighing just 300 kgs. With even less equipment — this time, leaving their cooker, as well as compasses, sextant, watch, almanac, nautical tables, radios, GPS, and basic safety gear ashore – they set off from the Canaries towards the small island of La Desirade in the Carribean, relying only on the sun, moon, stars and trade winds swell direction to guide them. 27 days later, their landfall was perfect.

These voyages were, by any measure, among the most extraordinary undertaken in small sailboats during the last century — the Berques did it one more time, in the late 00s, in a red and white catamaran so small it looked like a toy — and they belied the laid-back personae of these aging, enviably handsome, artist-like surfer dudes. Despite the fragility and obvious discomfort of their vessels, the Berques were so damn cheerful and at such ease, even in the worst conditions, that it’s tempting to dismiss them as reckless and lucky. They weren’t: their loose, joyous empathy with the ocean’s mutable nature — typical of a lot surfers — underpinned a zen-like willingness to abandon the usual human impulse to try to exert a semblance of control over, well, anything. You couldn’t help but envy their… soul.

Maximilien died in 2021. He “fell asleep peacefully, but didn’t wake up anymore … gone naked and without any instruments,” his brother wrote.

During a long, wandering life, I’ve rarely encountered men and women like the Berque twins. When I have, they were often water people, but a few were also found among the dirtbag climbers of the American north-west, in Oregon and Washington state, and the endurance cyclists I happened came across on unmapped trails through the ragged hills and desert flatlands of the south-west. The so-called ‘bike-packing’ ethic of the latter (no lycra, no panniers, no tents, just narrow frame bags, groundsheets and a lightweight daypack) was a shore-bound echo of the pared down, spartan ‘sea being’ of the Berques and Greenough. It inspired me to think harder about how I could tread lighter as I travel, at sea and ashore.

I‘ve adopted the term ‘boatpacking’ to describe what I wanted to do on my own voyages: go simple, uncluttered, and light, as much as I could. I know of venturesome dinghy sailors — like the foolhardy Frank Dye and his wife Margaret, in the ‘60s, and Roger Barnes, today — who organised gear stowage, cooking and sleeping aboard their tiny, un-decked craft without conceding anything to the inessential, including comfort. An American writer, surfer and shaper Christian Beamish had the same approach on a voyage in a home-built, 5.4-metre, Nordic-style, open sailing boat south from California along the Pacific coast of Mexico’s Baja peninsula.

My love of small boats has never left me. Most I’ve owned have been under eight metres long, engineless, and ill-equipped but I have sailed long distances in them. Taking heart from the (mis)adventures of the late New Zealand doctor-sailor, David Lewis — whom one obituarist described as “a typical Polynesian sailor, getting into trouble through haste and neglect, then, with near superhuman courage and seamanship, fighting his way out of it” — I have weathered encounters with strong winds, frighteningly steep seas, fast tidal races, and rocks, lots of rocks. Yet even in my late 60s, despite arthritis and chronic sea-sickness, I still can’t be persuaded that bigger is better. A well-built small boat is stronger per square foot than one twice its size and behaves much like a cork in a heavy seas. Its sails and other equipment are lighter and easier to handle. Although it does get desperately uncomfortable and wet when (not if) the weather turns bad offshore, the risk of sustaining a serious injury in a cabin that allows you only to sit or lie down, is relatively low.

I am searching for another boat in which to voyage again, while I am still able. It will be under 9-metres and given my meagre resources, more than 40 years old. I long for an epoxy-plywood catamaran designed by the late James Wharram, but the few I have found for sale are unaffordable. So it will be a monohull, fibreglass or epoxy plywood, preferably shoal-draft, tiller-steered, with robust anchor gear, a couple of manual bilge pumps, and no engine. I will steal another sculling oar. I have come to terms with the unarguable benefits of GPS chart plotters, AIS transponders, compact radars, digital weather maps but I can’t afford them. I will also have to do without high-priced protective clothing strung with buoyancy aids, safety harnesses, lights. and personal GPS locator beacons.

It already feels like an adventure.

First published in Sirene, No.16, Italy, 2023.

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Dusk over Ostiense, Rome, 2023.

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into the outback

The track to Palm Valley is an unlikely route for a tour bus. It begins just beyond the Hermannsburg aboriginal mission, 72 miles west of Alice Springs, in the arid, red-dirt emptiness of Australia’s Northern Territory. A large, weather-beaten white sign warns, No conventional vehicles to proceed beyond this point. For 12 miles, the rough-hewn track winds around the dry bed of the Finke River, over angular steps of solid rock littered with sharp chippings and soft patches of alluvial sand, to a deep gorge where rare species of palms, including prehistoric cycads, inexplicably flourish.

It’s hard work even for a four-wheel-drive truck. Not surprisingly, the chrome-plated coaches running daily between the Alice, as Alice Springs is known, and Ayers Rock do not include Palm Valley on their itineraries.

There are a lot of lonely places in the Territory. As the local license plates boast, this is outback Australia, the heartland of popular imagination, where fewer than 150,000 people occupy over half a million square miles of land, half of it a vast semidesert, the Red Center of the tourist brochures, and the other half, the tropical ‘top end’, a little-explored tangle of rough bush and rain forest and mangrove swamps growing into the Arafura Sea. The maps show only a handful of long roads through it all. The majority of water features on this map do not contain permanent water, travelers are cautioned. For anyone depending on conventional vehicles, much of the country is inaccessible.

The tour operators realise this and a few have adapted the fine Aussie pastime of bush bashing, pushing rugged four-wheel-drives across the rough, spinifex plains of the outback, to the benefit of the Territory’s booming tourist industry. Nowadays, depending on how long one wants to go bush and how much discomfort — heat, dust, mosquitoes, flies (especially the flies!), poisonous reptiles — one can take, there are a number of well-organized, adventurous and downright unusual safaris reaching even the most isolated stretches of the Territory.

Bill King’s Australian Adventure Tours is perhaps the best-known of them. Mr. King pioneered commercial four-wheel-drive expeditions not only throughout the Territory, from Ayers Rock to Bathurst and Melville islands, but nearly all of Australia’s seemingly endless wilderness, including the wild, jungle-like country of Cape York in Queensland and the hot, desolate ranges of the Kimberlys in northwest Australia. His company now offers 104 tours. The shortest is a three-hour bus ride around Alice Springs; the longest, a 30-day trek across the Northern Frontier: north to the Kimberlys from Alice Springs via the Tanami Desert, west to the pearling port of Broome, on the Indian Ocean, east to Darwin, Bathurst and Melville islands and the Kakadu National Park, south through aboriginal lands to the Gulf of Carpentaria, then back down to Alice Springs.

But outback itineraries would be less practical, and not nearly as much fun, without reliable off-road transportation. Bill King has, among other vehicles, the Unimog or, more properly, the Mercedes-Benz UL1700L, a desert cruiser powered by a 5.7-liter direct injection 6-cylinder turbo-charged diesel with eight forward and eight reverse gears, which can carry 21 people in air-conditioned comfort. Its slab-sided body, painted battleship-gray, and raised high off the road on big, heavy-tread tires, encloses a walk-in pantry, tool shop, a field kitchen, an ice box and plenty of storage space for the tents, bedrolls and other items necessary to survive, let alone have a good time, in the outback.

Alice Springs is a convenient base for Australian Adventure Tours, as it is for dozens of other tour companies in this part of the Territory. Each year, thousands of visitors crowd this pleasant and thriving near-city — no longer the ramshackle outback town of Neville Shute’s novel (but still in the middle of nowhere) — from where, they can get to the spectacular, orange-colored gorges cut by ancient flood waters in the steep, quartzite walls of the surrounding Macdonnell Ranges or — farther away — to the Olgas and the Territory’s main attraction, Ayers Rock.

A powerful fascination with this “immense pebble rising abruptly from the plain” (as the explorer W. C. Gosse described it in 1873) is one of the few things white Australians, let alone other tourists, share feelingly with the continent’s indigenous peoples. Solid and inspiringly strange, the Rock - the aborigines call it Uluru - embodies the Dreamtime, the ancestral legends of aboriginal prehistory. Despite the deeply felt objections of aboriginal elders, tourists climb to its summit in the quiet, cool hours before dawn and watch the rising sun illuminate the domed heads of the Olgas, Katatjuta, 20 miles to the west —one of the Territory’s most compelling sights.

Roughing it is an essential part of the outback adventure. On a Bill King tour, life is reasonably easy with a cook, as well as an experienced bush driver and guide, on hand at their campsites. On the Red Center itineraries, standard coaches and a choice of motel accommodation are provided for those inclined to travel less rigorously.

For those with an insatiable streak of masochism, going bush and roughing it can be taken a step further. Rod Steinert, a well-known local guide and tour operator, organises bush survival programs of up to three days in the harsh semi-desert south of Alice Springs. The approach is simple enough: for $75 each a day, a small group is led across the badlands by aborigines who will instruct in the crafts of the nomadic hunter-gatherer. Sleeping outdoors with poisonous snakes and rodent marsupials understandably might make one nervous, so creature comforts — camp beds, swags, conventional food and water — are carried if required.

Mr. Steinert also offers less drastic itineraries, including wild-life safaris in which, with any luck, one can try roping a wild camel or dogging fast moving hordes of wallabies, as well as day trips to cattle stations and aboriginal missions.

Rod Steinert is himself a student of aboriginal lore and I first met him at Ewaninga, an aboriginal ceremonial site on the Old South Road to the Alice. A talented raconteur, he was carefully explaining the complex rock carvings at the site to an elderly couple from South Australia. Despite the heat, which quickly sucked the moisture from our skin, and the annoying persistence of the flies, he managed to convey the awe of ‘the duck Dreaming’ and its very real relationship to the blistered surface of a nearby clay pan. “The tribal elders didn’t read these carved lines,” he said as he traced them with his fingers. “They’d look away and then recite the legend from memory; some of these lines were simply reminders.”

Aboriginal culture permeates the Territory and rock paintings. Carvings and other artifacts can be found practically everywhere. Later, while drinking black billy tea together and munching spotted dog, a kind of raisin pudding laden with syrup, Mr. Steinert told us, “Don’t believe it when you hear that the significance of these and other markings are long forgotten. There are elders, very much alive, who understand them. They could explain them if they wanted to - but they don’t want to.” Mr. Steinert is sometimes recommended as a guide to visiting anthropologists by the aborigines’ Central Land Council, which administers the land rights of central Australia’s huge aboriginal reserves.

For the scores of small, four-wheel-drive operators advertising unusual overnight camping tours from the Alice, the routes now extend as far east as the old Arltunga gold mine and ghost town on the edge of the Simpson Desert, as far west as Palm Valley and the Finke River National Park (or, in Mr. Steinert���s case, the Yuendumu aboriginal reserve), and as far south as Ayers Rock and the Olgas. In the north, the 'top end’, the rain forests, fast running rivers, deep gorges, hot springs and even the wildlife, particularly east of Katherine and in the Kakadu NationalPark, are perhaps even more beautiful — if commonly unreachable at certain times of year because of monsoonal floods.

However, there are alternatives to a four wheel-drive for traveling in the outback: camels, for instance.

Noel Fullerton and camels are seemingly inseparable. Among a plethora of colorful characters in the Territory, Noel Fullerton is one of the more sober and enduring. You can even find him on postcards: a squat, barrel-chested fellow with a mane of long white hair and a sunburned, bearded face not unlike an Afghan trader’s, he is commonly pictured atop a dromedary in the shade of a eucalyptus tree. He started the infamous annual Camel Cup Race down the sandy bed of the Todd River and won it five years in a row. He rode a camel up the steps of the Federal Parliament building in Canberra to protest the delay in extending the Ghan, the railway between Alice Springs and Port Augusta, South Australia, to Darwin. And now he operates safaris on camel-back from his ranch south of the Alice.

Throughout the year, with the exception of January, Mr. Fullerton and another guide lead caravans of up to 10 camels on one of three routes, depending on the time of year, usually in a series of daily treks from a base camp in the Rainbow Valley. The most interesting of these is probably through the Finke River National Park to Palm Valley, following as it does the path of the earliest explorer, Ernest Giles. Like others in the outback travel business, Mr. Fullerton is prepared to tailor an itinerary to suit individual urges — one customer, a young American woman, reportedly spent three months just wandering with one of his guides through the Krischauf, James and Macdonnell ranges and the hard plains between.

The outback is not a place in which to take chances. Unless one is experienced, an outback safari of one sort or another led by a competent guide is the best way to get into the rugged scenery, the unusual flora and fauna and just the silent, endless space of it all. Even if one is prepared, there is always an element of risk.

I recently went bush with a couple of friends in a Japanese-built four- wheel-drive truck. Loaded with camping equipment, food and a .44 magnum rifle (which nobody used), we went looking for a track to Mount Conner in the twisted scrub 20 miles south of the newly-laid Lasseter Highway to Ayers Rock. We could see the mountain from the highway, a long flat ridge of crumbling purple rock standing alone in an expanse of yellow spinifex, but the track was harder to find. We followed a few disused drovers’ routes into dead ends before coming across an unlikely looking turnoff covered in fine red bull-dust and sand.

“You’ve got to be bloody careful,” warned the proprietor of the Curtain Springs roadhouse, back at the highway. “It’s rough going, so don’t even try it without four-wheel-drive. And let me know before you set off. If you get into trouble, I’m the one who’ll have to fetch you out.”

He wasn’t kidding. It was a slow haul, scraping past the gnarled branches of trees blackened by bush fire and easing the wheels over the bleached-gray remains of corral fences. Finally, we stalled; the truck sank belly-deep into a sand dune. We deflated the tires and unchoked the wheels and tried to ignore the sine-wave tracings of snakes that were everywhere in the sand.

We wished we’d taken a tour round the Alice instead.

First published in The New York Times’ Travel & Leisure section (under the by-line, Chris West), USA, 1984.