Issue 180, Winter 2021

Wild

Australia's Wilderness Adventure Magazine

Wild4 min read
Wild Letters
[Letter of the Issue] Dear Wild (Re: Your ‘Luxury Lodges = Wilderness Lost’ articles in #178 and #179), We are experiencing the confluence of three significant factors. One is the rise of uber capitalism and the ruse that business generates most of o
Wild1 min read
Wild
EDITOR: James McCormack PROOFING AND FACT CHECKING LEGENDS: Martine Fogg, Ryan Hansen, Maya Darby INTERN: James Tugwell DESIGN: Sam Grimmer, James McCormack FOUNDER: Chris Baxter OAM CONTRIBUTORS: Megan Holbeck, Lachlan Gardiner, Catherine Lawson, Ja
Wild1 min read
On The Cover
“This is the photograph I’d always dreamed of, yet didn’t think possible: Ben Armstrong places the first ever turn in the Federation Peak couloir, and does so in truly remarkable bluebird conditions, an event almost impossibly rare. Back in 2017, I h
Wild3 min read
Pale Blue Dot
It wasn’t quite a ‘Pale Blue Dot’ moment, but it was humbling nonetheless. I was putting together the spreads of every cover Wild has ever run and … actually, before I go on, maybe I should take a step back and talk about the pale blue dot. If you’ve
Wild4 min read
Never Give Up
Forty years ago, Wild emerged on Australasia’s magazine racks and keen lovers of the natural planet have enjoyed it ever since. It is sobering to think that most current readers were not on the planet when Wild was born. However, I was—along with man
Wild3 min read
Mid-life Reflections
Forty years is a long time, whether for a human, a business, or a magazine. And when you consider how much has changed since 1981, it’s amazing that Wild Magazine is still going. We’ve gone from A-frame tents to ultralight flies; steak and potatoes t
Wild3 min read
Constancy Amid Change
It was exactly forty years ago that we’d hitched to Melbourne from Adelaide via Arapiles. The journey had started auspiciously by scoring a lift in a pink Cadillac convertible. Luckily it had been sunny, the wattles were in full bloom, and as always,
Wild3 min read
The Future Is Now
To celebrate Wild’s anniversary, I decided to revisit Issue #1 to see how outdoor gear has changed in four decades. As I turned the pages, names from yesteryear came flooding back—Puradown sleeping bags, Brixia boots, Typhoon foul weather clothing. T
Wild2 min read
In Brief
Fracking, a process for getting gas out of deep shale rock by drilling horizontally and injecting chemicals that fracture the rock, is one of the biggest environmental threats to the NT. It mostly happens in remote Aboriginal-owned land, and is deepl
Wild4 min read
Reef Regeneration
The Great Barrier Reef follows the Queensland coast—from the remote tip of Queensland all the way down to the iconic Lady Elliot Island offshore from Bundaberg. This immense length of over 2000km spans 14 degrees of latitude, with the Reef home to a
Wild3 min read
Practice MakesPerfect
In recent years, avalanche safety has become a welcome and increasing priority for the Australian winter backcountry community. This cultural shift has been spearheaded by the grassroots organisation Mountain Safety Collective (MSC)—who Wild featured
Wild5 min read
A Gathering Of The Tribe
Cam Walker is a victim of his own success. The organiser of the Victorian Backcountry Festival (a celebration of ‘all things backcountry’: alpine touring, XC skiing, split-boarding, snow camping, winter photography and more) is, well, no longer the o
Wild4 min read
Q + A with POW’s Josh Fletcher
Protect Our Winters (POW) is a not-for-profit organisation that’s mobilising the winter sports community for positive action on climate change. Since its formation in the United States in 2007, POW now has over 130,000 supporters, and has formed chap
Wild7 min readChemistry
The DWR Conundrum
Leave No Trace. These three words are gospel in the bush. We carry our rubbish out, cook on gas stoves, stick to formed trails. We do this to reduce our impact on the areas we love. Of course, some don’t place much faith in the principle of Leave No
Wild2 min read
THE Wild FILM FESTIVAL
To celebrate Wild’s 40th birthday, we’re having a party. Well, actually, a party in the form of a film festival. We’ve put together a great selection of films that celebrate not just Wild Magazine, but Australia’s wild places and its adventurous comm
Wild3 min read
Nathan Mcneil
Filmmaker (and Wild contributor) Nathan McNeil talks about the genesis of the movie, and the difficulties in filming and moving through Southwest Tasmania. “Rob Saunders mentioned a loose plan to go to the Southwest National Park in Tasmania to find
Wild1 min read
Subscribe To Wild Since 1981
Wild is no ordinary magazine. Since its establishment in 1981, Wild has been the inspiring voice of the Australian outdoors. It is a magazine of self-reliance and challenge and sometimes doing it tough. While it is not necessarily hard-core, what it
Wild5 min read
A Snow-starved ‘Stralian Soul
Born in 1882 to wealthy parents, Freda Du Faur grew up in Ku-ring-gai, Sydney. There she learned the basics of rock scrambling, but it was her first family visit to the mountains of New Zealand that really set her heart alight. She persuaded her fath
Wild8 min read
Therapy Gone Wild
(Warning: This piece discusses suicide, self-harm, and mental illness.) The wilderness has long provided solace to humans, welcoming us in all our troubled incarnations onto its surging rivers, lonely backcountry trails, and windswept mountain summit
Wild3 min read
A Wild-inspired life
It is hard to believe that Wild Magazine is 40! Almost the same age as me. As the publisher of Wild, I prefer to stay in the background and leave our amazing team led by Editor James McCormack do the talking. However, on an occasion like this it felt
Wild5 min read
Best Wishes
Happy Birthday Wild! Congratulations on reaching 40. Chris would be proud indeed to see how Wild continues to celebrate wild places and seek their preservation. On looking again at the ideals Chris set out in the first issue of his dream—a dream he h
Wild11 min read
Wild at 40
Looking through any old magazine is like opening a time capsule from another era, revealing the dreams, the heroes, the aspirations and the achievements. The first impression of Wild Issue #1 is that it’s so tactile, so real. You can see the grain in
Wild1 min read
PRODUCTION IN THE ‘80s OF Wild
Though these days Wild is produced using modern, digital production and design techniques, it was while recently reminiscing about Wild and its longevity that I was brought back to some of the old publishing techniques used in the early days of deskt
Wild2 min read
DESIGN & LAYOUT
By the late 1980s, after I’d been working here for a year or so, Wild took a step into the digital age, at least where design was concerned. After purchasing a computer, founder and then Managing Editor Chris Baxter moved the magazine into the ‘moder
Wild1 min read
Editing
Articles selected for publication were firstly typed into a computer using Wordstar, a basic word-processing program that we used with an MS-DOS operating system. As I had basic typewriting skills, learnt at high school, I was usually the person to d
Wild1 min read
Mapping
Interestingly, the red dots used to show routes were not drawn using an ink pen; instead we used characters from sheets of Letraset. (Letraset was a company that produced plastic sheets of letters, numbers and symbols in various fonts and sizes. Thes
Wild1 min read
EVERY Wild COVER EVER
Here’s Wild’s editor’s fave: While Martin Stoll’s photo for Issue #175 is probably the most meaningful Wild cover ever, I can’t go past 1987’s Issue #23 cover as my personal fave. It’s silly, muddy, and screams Tasmania. Issue #22’s was up there, too
Wild5 min read
Reflections on 40 Years
In recent years, quite a few strangers have greeted me like a long-lost uncle. I get big handshakes. Even the occasional hug and kiss. These chance meetings often bring forth reminiscing. Unprompted tales of ridges scrambled and gorges followed, not
Wild14 min read
One Grand Winter
It seems the walls of this chasm are perspiring. Snow and ice are releasing off the rock in a never-ending cascade, flowing freely down a seemingly endlessly vertical shaft that disappears from view over what is most likely a cliff. Far below, the co
Wild8 min read
Weta heck are We?
Nick had forgotten his harness. Just like that, the alpine summit we’d come chasing suddenly seemed impossible to reach. It was a crushing blow; getting that far had already involved what alpinists technically term ‘a fair whack of effort’. There had
Wild8 min read
Life In The Freezer
The tales of explorers trigger excitement and awe in most of us. They’re stories of people leaving behind the safety of the known and comfortable to forge routes across extreme and remote lands while facing unimaginable hardships. Polar travel seems
Wild9 min read
A Bikepacking Evolution
When the bike-tour company shuttle driver arrives at our motel in Omarama, he is visibly distressed to find our gear piled on the driveway. His usual Alps to Ocean (A2O) clients have a wheeled suitcase and a daypack, ride rented e-bikes between lodge
Wild11 min read
Curse Of The wild Bush Horses
The Byadbo Wilderness isn’t a tourist destination. It’s not pretty. There are no facilities. A few rough fire trails haphazardly follow key ridges, and yet I’m always overjoyed when I come through McGuigans Gap into Kosciuszko National Park’s southea
Wild5 min read
Mount Zeil/Urlatherrke
If it weren’t for the fact that Mt Zeil/Urlatherrke is the Northern Territory’s highest peak (1,531m), I doubt it would ever make anyone’s peak-bagging bucket list. And even being one of Australia’s State 8 (the highest peak in each Australian State/
Wild4 min read
The Walk
This is an unusual set of track notes to write up. Climbing Zeil is like an old-school choose-your-own adventure. With no track, no good topo maps, and with the land being so open with few big obvious features, there’s no point giving blow-by-blow, t
Wild2 min readChemistry
Lifa Infinity Pro
Now, hopefully you’ve read Xavier Anderson’s piece ‘The DWR Problem’ in this issue of Wild. If you haven’t, check it out (p42), but in short, most Durable Water Repellent treatments involve the use of PFCs, which are harmful to both humans and the en
Wild2 min read
Vectiv Exploris Futurelight
I like hiking boots. Big ones. Big leather ones. Big heavy leather ones. But one reason I’ve usually opted for them is that, in my experience, shoes aren’t robust enough to handle what I throw at ‘em. I’m what you’d call a ‘clumsy’ hiker, and it resu
Wild4 min read
Aether Plus 85
I wanted to try out my son’s Osprey Aether Pro 70L pack for a multidayer at Mutawintji. I called it ‘borrowing’. My son called it ‘theft’. My wife arched an eyebrow. I mean, hello, it was me who’d paid for the thing! Anyway, I pulled off the heist, a
Wild1 min read
[Wild Shot]
Jeremy wins an OSPREY TALON 22 PACK, valued at $199.95. With trekking pole, ice axe and bike helmet attachment points, it’s a versatile, multisport daypack, at home bagging peaks or on cycling adventures. For a chance to win some quality outdoor kit,

Wild

More Issues From Wild