A handful of photos. A few words. And an unfamiliar name. That’s how it started. One ordinary evening (‘ordinary’ in the sense that I was doing the usual—avoiding sleep in favour of scrolling through maps and websites for more inspirational photos and trip reports), I happened across an intriguing post on a blog: ‘The Trading Route: Goulburn River National Park, NSW’. The blog was awildland, and it’s the work of Craig Fardell and Chris Armstrong, frequent contributors to Wild Mag (Ed: In fact, they’ve contributed the track notes to this very issue). And just as they’d done repeatedly in the past, the pair presented me with a national park I hadn’t the foggiest about, in a region I’d not explored before. Craig (AKA Caz) is an excellent photographer, and the images he captured showed a landscape possessing the kind of natural, subtle beauty that Russell Coight (Glenn Robbins’ fictionalised survival and wildlife expert character) might describe as “ethereal”.
“Check this out,” I said to my wife, Martine.
She rolled her eyes. Here we go again, I knew she was thinking. Can’t we just go to bed?!
“We should check it out!” I persisted.
She agreed.
And then we forgot all about it for a whole year.
I didn’t forget; I put it on the backburner. There was always somewhere more spectacular to go, something more exciting to do someplace else. (Hang on, that makes me sound like a right snob, doesn’t
