rewild yourself

Claire, tell us a bit about yourself.

I’m based in Melbourne, and my focus for the past fifteen years has been researching and exploring nature connection and ways we can reconnect with communities. I run a business called Nature’s Apprentice, which offers wilderness rites of passage, deep nature connections, reconnection workshops, retreats and one-on-one mentoring. I’ve also written about my experiments in the two books My Year Without Matches and Rewilding the Urban Soul.

What kind of childhood did you have?

I had a free-ranging childhood with not much screen time. I grew up in a family of five kids on a farm in the Hunter Valley, on a river. It was very much an outdoors lifestyle. My parents are both horticulturalists and farmers. We were constantly surrounded by plants and food growing, rivers, trees and adventures. We were also a very high-achieving, academic, sporty type of family. But it was quite a nature-connected childhood, which I feel really grateful for.

Before you started Nature’s Apprentice, what were you doing?

I worked for lots of grassroots environmental organisations, including working as a campaign manager for the Wilderness Society for many years. I started realising that the root cause of the ecological crisis, and the reason we keep having to save all these places and species, is Western culture’s profound disconnection—its separation from the natural world and also from the sense of community. It was a really strong pivot for me to start addressing the human–nature connection and ways we can experience our interconnectedness.

The first book you wrote was My Year