I was having lunch with a friend the other day while she told me about her latest camping adventure with her husband and kids on Moreton Island. She was radiant and sun‑kissed, windswept, full of that outdoorsy smugness people get when they have spent three days pretending they enjoy sleeping on sand. I shifted in my chair, already itchy at the thought of grit in my shoes and laughed when she suggested I join them next time. She grinned and said, “That’s right, you don’t do nature,” and we both knew she was absolutely correct.
This is exactly why I saunter into the Shangri‑La lobby like a returning monarch, why the Calile Hotel is a basic human need, why I believe “roughing it” means a hotel without room service or a pillow menu. Nature has been trying to assassinate me since the 80s. Fortunately for me, Mother Nature is incompetent.
The first sign was the house in Alderley my parents moved us into when I was a child. The backyard wasn’t a yard at all, it was a wild, overgrown jungle full of things that slithered, darted, and buzzed before I even saw them. Snakes, lizards, spiders, bugs! Brisbane’s entire cast of creatures seemed to have chosen our place as their headquarters. The palms pressed in close; the long grass hid God knows what, and the gum trees loomed over me like they were waiting for me to step out of line. I hated it. Every inch of it felt alive in the wrong way.
Just when I had adjusted to living with a backyard that wanted me dead, my father decided the Enoggera Army Barracks Father–Son bonding weekend up the Sunshine coast — where the bush meets the sea — would be a great idea. It was the 80s: the era of stubbie shorts, questionable parenting, and cane toads with the confidence of a pest that’s been told it can’t be killed easily — so notoriously indestructible that Queenslanders pass around cane‑toad folklore with the same enthusiasm CWA members pass around scone recipes.
The trip was meant to be wholesome. Instead, it was a military‑themed disaster. The highlight — or lowlight — was getting my foot wedged in a chunk of coral so tightly I genuinely thought I’d have to leave it behind and start a new life as a one‑footed child. A rescue party of fathers and sons gathered around me. It took five grown men — Vietnam veterans, no less — to free my foot. The next day, I was handed a semi‑automatic machine gun. Supervised, yes, but still: who gives a child a machine gun and says, “Have fun, mate”? My father stood behind me, telling me to hold it steady while I complained that it vibrated and my arm hurt. I wanted to go home. Along with being bored.
As if that wasn’t enough, we then spent a night under a hutchie — a tent with no walls or floor — in monsoonal Queensland rain while cane toads jumped around like they were performing a cursed production of Riverdance. Each one uglier, wetter, and more determined than the last. My father watched them with delight, pointing them out as if they were rare wildlife. One brushed against my leg. I briefly considered holding my breath and losing consciousness.
Not long after, we moved to Tasmania, where my parents decided Scouts would be a great distraction. I thought of it as my own personal hell. You are meant to learn knots, teamwork, survival skills. I learned that snakes don’t give a single shit about your badge progress. One slithered across my path and I produced a noise so high‑pitched it could have cracked the Antarctic ice shelf. The leaders called it “character building.” I called it my first spiritual confirmation that nature was not my friend.
I will never forget the snake looking at me with its huge black eyes, calculating, sizing me up. As an eleven‑year‑old, it looked like an enormous legless beast emerging from the brown and khaki bracken. To say I was traumatised is an understatement — not to mention it was a tiger snake. It could have ended very badly. I do, however, have a great appreciation for snakeskin goods — though the fewer alive, the better. So no, I didn’t get on the Steve Irwin bandwagon. I’m certainly not a wildlife warrior; more a wildlife collector, but only ethically sourced. The lesson was simple: venomous snakes and the north‑west region of greater Hobart are not a good combo. I didn’t last long in Scouts.
Then came the grand finale: the Mount Wellington “team‑building” bushwalk with my father’s colleagues from work. A trip that included the staff’s children, for reasons still unclear. It was a disaster from the moment everyone met in the car park. You could feel the dread. You could smell the regret, mixed with eucalyptus and Wallaby shit. You could see the rain clouds gathering like they were waiting for their cue.
The rain was biblical. The mud was everywhere. Morale was already dead. My father behaved as though he was leading an elite expedition through the Andes, powered entirely by delusion and misplaced enthusiasm. Halfway up the track, an elderly nurse — large in size and not built for bushwalking — slipped off a log with an almighty crack that reverberated through the mountain. She broke her arm. The adults reacted like they were in a live episode of RPA filmed in a swamp. My father still insisted it was “a great day!” because he was committed to the bit in a way that should have earned him a medal.
I was a kid, soaked, freezing, and laughing so hard at the dysfunction of this ridiculous adventure that my father’s colleagues thought I was unhinged. I’ve always attributed laughter to my survival; I find it comical the way humans bumble along in life. I embrace my unhinged ness to its full maximum these days, I mean why not. Life is too short not too and let's face it life is very unhinged at times.
After all that, is it any wonder I sprint toward civilisation? Give me plush lobbies, blackout curtains, staff who call me “sir” so I can correct them and say, “Please call me Léon,” and a shower that explodes water like the Trevi Fountain. I don’t camp. I don’t hike. I don’t “connect with nature,” and I am totally fine with that. Nature had multiple opportunities. It failed every single one. Spectacularly
