James Dobson

The Cooks River: Australia's sickest urban river is located in the glamorous and famously pretty city of Sydney. This makes sense, given it’s also Australia's largest, hard-surfaced, drainified, leaky-sewered, city. In my little red kayak I decided to trace all 23km of the Cooks River, inspired to do so after paddling my boyhood river over 4 days in the name of Backyard Adventuring. Finding it not only challenging, but shocking in terms of its ill health, I’ve since shifted from wanting to see the wildest and most pristine places on earth, to the most degraded and sick. This is a journey of ill-health, sadness and hope; putting a test to the local saying, ‘if you fall in, you’ll dissolve’.

As there are 1440 minutes in a day, and Beau Miles love planting trees, he decided to plant a tree a minute for 24 hours. It was (swear meaningfully) hard.

This is the story of spending a night in a big old gumtree. Strapped to three builders planks (one of which had a large crack that I thought was spilled paint) I slept with one eye open, which was pleasant because I could see the view. Originally driven by the premise of backyard adventuring, using old climbing equipment, dodgy ladders and 4x4 recovery gear, a simple night out, 30-foot up, ended up being a reflection of how much I like trees, particularly the vulnerable Strzelecki gums I live among. Dinner, breakfast, bad coffee, podcast, and sitting on a park bench I should sit on more often, Big Gums is the story of a man who is no longer a boy, spending time with an endangered, iconic tree.

Eating only the contents of 191 tins of beans over 40 days transforms Beau into The Human Bean, and in doing so gives him a front row seat into how one food, totally and utterly, dictates how he feels. Beau uses his intimate knowledge of running to compare his former self to his bean-self, logging lacklustre training for an ultramarathon that he plans on running during the final day of the experiment. Epiphanies are had, saddles are blazed, and genuine insight emerges from what is strangely appealing day-to-day of mediocrity.

Packing on the pounds after writing a PhD, Beau's running again. He's also back in the shed; fixing stuff, making things, tinkering. For most of us, running was once a form of survival, hunting- or being hunted. Now, it can be as meaningful, or meaningless, than any other aspect of life. Running for Beau is practical- it gets him places, yet like a lot of runners, deeply embodied.