Where it all began
This blog was first published on awildland.blogspot.com.au on 11 October 2023, the last blog ever to appear on that historic site.
It all began with awildland.blogspot.com.au - a free, open access blog page detailing our many Australian adventures. It was a place for us to hone our crafts and express our love of adventure, exploration and the Australian landscape.
The first story (pictured above) was published on it in 2012. Now the blog page boasts 137 posts detailing adventures from every state and territory in Australia. Maybe you’ve read some of them?
At its inception, the awildland team were based on the north coast of NSW and a lot of the stories on that blog page focus on the beautiful landscape found there. However, in December 2014 we set off to explore wild places across the country and have been based in various states and locations since. For the last 5 years we have been based in Tasmania with winter stints of work in Alice Springs, NT.
But, if you have read our blog or followed our socials, you probably noticed that it all went really quiet in 2020.
The lapse had many causes - changes in writing motivation and writing time were the main two. Even the simplest of blogs takes many hours of research, writing, and compilation but our commitment to spreading the word about adventure and nature earnt us nothing. For the blog to continue, we needed something to supplement or supercharge the motivation required to keep blogging. Moving to Tasmania also had a big influence. This state already has many, many online resources, blogs, video channels, stories and chats about adventuring. It is an adventurers’ playground.
So we took a step back, enjoyed our adventures for a while, wrote and photographed for ourselves. Thinking all the time of how to mix things up.
The end result is this website!
“Awildland I wouldn’t change anything about your blog…what sets your blog apart from all the others is the wonderful storytelling and attention to detail you put into every post. It is truly inspiring and captures the beauty of our wild places so well. You perfectly depict the mood of places and the experiences you have through your writing and your photos, all without having to resort to providing detailed track notes, GPX files or explaining where a place is and how to get there.”
Awildland.blogspot.com.au will continue to exist as an archive, as long as blogspot exists. We may move some of the more relevant pieces to this site and any new blogs will appear here rather than there.
But this website gives us greater flexibility and the chance to be more dynamic and varied as well as giving us a platform to promote our professional writing and photography.
Our plan is to make the photos gallery ever-changing with the best on offer and not always tied to a story. Already it contains many never-before-published images. These images stand alone as things of beauty and exploration. The blog posts may be less frequent but still informative with a stronger focus on the story they have to tell, the histories in place and the things we can all do to ensure nature thrives into the future.
The idea is to evolve - us and this site; for the blog to evolve with nature and its voice.
