Twice a week showerer, bad at shaving, runner, paddler, maker, doer, new dad, storyteller. Beau Miles would cross the Nullarbor Plain on a crap bike for a large serving of liquorice, long pot of tea, homemade red wine and spotty bananas. PhD in adventure, not as many scars as you might think and a few world firsts. No longer able to win the Tour De France, scared stiff of getting old.
Today, Beau Miles is on the blog to answer a few of our questions about his brand new book, The Backyard Adventurer. Read on!
Beau Miles (Photo by Bryan Hynes).
Please tell us about your book, The Backyard Adventurer!
BM: Life affirming intimacies, challenge, curiosity and reality-checks are under our noses in the roads, hills, suburbs and backwaters of our home turf if we care to look, which as adults we often don’t. The Backyard Adventurer is about being critical of the human condition, our individual roles and lives within it, and the great meaning-making potential of adventuring by foot, over water, up a tree or in how or what we eat. It’s also to have fun, humility, and irrelevance in how we spend our time.
You’ve spent years travelling the world, and recently moved to country Victoria. What made you decide to settle down there?
BM: It was never really a question of where to live when I finally thought to settle down (5k from where I grew up), but more a question of when. Unlike Thursday pub night during university, which was the most forward planning I’ve ever done, settling down was never a strategic decision. It just happened. Having filled the pages of a few passports, and vaguely sick of chasing up cash for jobs that were one-offs in places I’d likely not go again, my decision was mostly a strange and organic surprise at having lived in one spot through a full set of seasons. All of a sudden, I’d gone through my full wardrobe without packing or unpacking. My desire to be on a plane had evaporated somewhere along the line. Helen had a lot to do with it, as did a tenured posting at Monash University as a full time academic when I finished my PhD, but for the most part it was a seamless transition of seeing more in one place, and knowing I had a lot to gain by not going anywhere all that far. It was also a realisation that for an Australian, my range can still be staggeringly large and diverse. Victoria alone is the size of the UK, with deserts and ocean and snowy peaks and wild rivers – enough to keep me entrenched in curious pursuits for the rest of my life. Like the great placebo effect of sugary pills, my new form of adventure became closer to home, riddled in personal connections, and has me home most nights of the week.
The pandemic has had most of us housebound for the last year and keen for some local exploring or new projects. What would be your top tip for any aspiring Backyard Adventurers?
BM: Trust yourself. The trick to leading a curious life is to actually do the oddball things you think up – and we all have odd ideas. Following tangents is hard, so giving a strange thought time and energy- to the point of working it into a viable experience, is what I recommend the most. I can’t convince myself that I’m special, or odd, or all that smart, so my advice to people is to indulge tenuous ideas because they’re the most capable of doing them justice.
Can you share one of your favourite experiences from the book?
BM: Paddling to work took four days, 40 hours of which was pure travel. Paddling and dragging the kayak was tremendously hard, rewarding, and weird. It was adventure on a plate, all within sight of my regular commuting route the entire time. I would not do that particular adventure again, but it genuinely shifted my sense of home, work, adventure and a place I thought I knew. Following my boyhood river made me realise how deeply sick it was (which has now been supersized into a Screen Australia series called Bad River). Paddling a mostly bad river, riddled in moments that are beautiful, rare, and special, is the kind of experience that takes a few days to complete, but takes months and years to unpack properly (such as the book chapter …).
‘Paddling a mostly bad river, riddled in moments that are beautiful, rare, and special, is the kind of experience that takes a few days to complete, but takes months and years to unpack properly.’
What’s the thing you’ve achieved or explored that you’re the most proud of?
BM: Other than baby May, who shifted my sense of humanity in a split moment, I’m proud of my doctorate in that I don’t like sitting down all that much. I get disappointed in myself when my fingers – particularly my pointer fingers and thumbs – loose the side-cracks and deeply held dirt left over from day-to-day work. In a more simplistic way, going for a run when I don’t feel like going for one always feels like a momentous (and self-rewarding) victory. When I don’t eat the full bag of liquorice, I physically tap myself on the back.
Can you tell us a little bit about the writing process for this book?
BM: Writing about yourself can be the easiest and hardest thing you’ll ever do. On the one hand it’s like breathing – regurgitating masses of experiences, ideas, words and thoughts of life that often flow like a geyser. Then, on less flowing days, or days when I’d rather be out banging a hammer or digging a hole, I circle around a single idea, event or story that seems stymied to near see the light of day – many of which don’t. Tea, wine, coffee and bananas were my stable and for the most part, I loved the process. First one down, next one on the way.
What do you hope readers will discover in The Backyard Adventurer?
BM: A good yarn. One bloke’s oddities and habits weaved poetically and candidly into adventure and how this questions their own day to day. I don’t expect, or even condone doing what I’ve done, but I like the idea of a reader pausing within moments of the book and thinking ‘I have an idea …and I’m bloody well going to do it …’
And finally, what’s up next for you?
BM: I’m halfway through filming ‘Bad River: adventure on Australia’s sickest water’, and I’m completely saturated (physically at times, certainly mindfully) with all the greatness and calamity of being human. Due out in book form at some stage, and film series before the end of 2021. Lots of other YouTube gold each month also for the remainder of the year … it’s busy, and I love it.
Thanks Beau!
—The Backyard Adventurer by Beau Miles (Brio Books) is out now.
The Backyard Adventurer
After years of adventuring around the globe – running, kayaking, hitchhiking, exploring – Beau Miles came back to his block in country Victoria.
Staying put for the first time in years, Beau developed a new kind of lifestyle as the Backyard Adventurer. Whether it was walking 90km to work with no provisions, building a canoe paddle out of scavenged scrap or running a disused railway line through properties, blackberry thickets and past inquiring police officers, Beau has been finding ways to satisfy his adventurous spirit close to home...
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