My rookie era: I lived off the land for a week – by day five I was naked, my clothes dangling over the campfire

At 15 I proved the maxim: “Hire a teen while they still know everything.”

That summer of 1971, I judged the world and concluded that civilisation was meh, and surely doomed. So with the zeal of the truly clueless I resolved to try living off the land, and left behind my comfortable family home and smirking parents.

Equipped for an epic, I’d packed a tent, canteen, billy, sleeping bag, cord, emergency rations (two carrots, bag of soup mix, creamed rice) and a bushcraft pamphlet protecting a Women’s Weekly cutting of Princess Caroline of Monaco.

I’d convinced fellow members in our class geek club, Peter and David, of the venture’s virtue, and together we chugged along now-vanished tracks through Victoria’s central highlands to Molesworth station, then ascended 460 metres over the summit of nearby Mount Concord to the nirvana I’d spotted on a survey map: a grassy flat beside the seductively named Chrystal Creek.

There are moments in life when hubris resets your ego. The blackfish (a famously canny species) fled to a deep pool, into which I flopped, club flailing. I’d been outwitted by a fish. So dinner: one (rabbit-gnawed) carrot and soup mix.

Day five I spent naked, dangling my clothes over the campfire, and the sixth wearing them damp, smoky and singed. If only I’d known a fine feast was available from the witchetties in the acacias lining the creek (think egg fried in hazelnut oil) with steamed cumbungi bulbs over a warm salad of bracken shoots. Yum. If only.

Then late on day six, triumph: meat. A hapless blue-tongue lizard hissed at me from a granite boulder on the slopes above the creek. Under threat, I justified spearing it (then not illegal) and carried it back to camp aloft, displaying my status as a hairless-chested hunter to an audience of none.

Boiled, the lizard meat exuded a thick yellow oil reeking of iodine into the remaining soup mix (probably due to the poor beast’s last meal of millipedes). I got some down anyway, only to later crawl rapidly from the tent into the moonlight, retching. (Lesson: always fry lizards in their own skin, if you must.)

Menu, day seven: the last (limp) carrot and half the creamed rice.

Day eight: the other half.

And day nine, trudging down the mountain at dusk to spend the roughest night of my life on a slatted bench at Molesworth station, scratching at midge bites, literally itching to catch the morning train home.

So what did I learn from my folly? Looking back, that despite my tender age I had the mettle to brave the wild for longer than some tough guys on a certain TV show. And OK, that civilisation has its merits. But even now, years later, I still find the need to seek solace in wild places as a way to understand the place of humans in the world.

Most of all, I learned that we always, always, have more to learn. Even at 15.

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