When Lisa Walker sent her heroine out on a pilgrimage to visit all the Big Things in the Northern Rivers and Queensland for her latest novel, it added a wonderfully irreverent twist to the idea of a sacred quest writes Candida Baker.

It’s not often that you get to meet a writer who knows how to build an igloo, but Lisa Walker, the author of the recently released Arkie’s Pilgrimage to the Next Big Thing, could, if push came to shove, rustle you up an igloo in less than a day.

“A small one,” she says, recalling her days as a guide for Wilderness Expeditions in the Snowy Mountains. “We used to take people skiing to the back country and we’d teach them snow skills experience. We could build an igloo and sleep in it for a couple of nights, and of course it’s much warmer than sleeping in a tent. It’s a half-day job for two or three people.”

There’s not much need for igloos in the Northern Rivers where Walker and her husband have lived for the past sixteen years, but Walker’s love of adventure and travel has stood her in good stead for creating the delightfully quirky Arkie, who sets out on a personal pilgrimage to find Australia’s ‘Big Things’.

“Mind you,” says Lisa, “Arkie doesn’t actually like adventure and camping, and I do, but she makes these decisions which lead to a life on the road, and she learns that she has to embrace her pilgrimage in order for it to teach her anything.”

Lisa Walker: “One of the things I do myself, and my characters do a lot of, is dreaming of places where you’re not.”

Walker, who is quickly becoming a writing hit with novels such as Liar Bird and Sex, Lies and Bonsai preceding Arkie’s Pilgrimage, begins the novel with a cliffhanger. Arkie is in Byron Bay on New Year’s Eve, her marriage and her career in ruins, and she has decided to throw herself under the next train into Byron Bay. Those of us who know the town well, will immediately spot the flaw in this plan. There is no train service in and out of Byron any longer, but Arkie hasn’t checked, and is sitting, waiting on the platform. Along comes the enigmatic Haruko who talks Arkie out of the suicide she wouldn’t have been able to commit anyway, and off the two set, partners in a wonderful Australian version of the classic pilgrimage.

One of the reasons that Arkie has decided to personally view as many Big Things as she can is that until recently, she herself was a trendspotter – someone who could spot the next big thing coming along a mile off, and alert the consumer market that it’s coming.

“I got the idea when I read an article about Li Edelkoort, the Dutch trendspotter who is the oracle behind Trend Union – a company that forecasts trends for retail industries,” says Walker. “She’s known to have amazing intuition. She consistently gets it right.”

But Arkie is in trouble. Bored in her marriage, she had an affair that ended badly, and she’s convinced that she’s lost, as well as her husband and lover, her mojo. Her husband has decided to divorce her, and has hired a divorce lawyer to pursue her and force her to accept the divorce papers, and Arkie is doing her absolute best to avoid them, whilst darting all over Queensland and Northern New South Wales, ticking off our fabulously tasteless Big Things – the Big Pineapple, The Big Prawn, The Big Macadamia etc. Japanese temples they are not, but it brings a wonderfully irreverent touch to the idea of the pilgrimage as a sacred journey.

As for the presence of Haruko in the novel, she serves many purposes. “I’ve been to Japan quite a few times in the past few years,” Walker says, “and I was really surprised by how wild and crazy the Japanese girls are. We have this idea that Japanese girls are very proper, but they’re not at all like that. We – the family – went for the skiing, but I fell in love with the culture. I did a temple tour as well, and loved it, and I’ve been back three or four times since then.”

Haruko is a cheerful character – inscrutable, with a great dress sense, and apparently not only sure of herself but happy to take on the somewhat hapless Arkie and re-instill her with a sense of self-worth. It becomes obvious as the novel progresses that theirs is an almost karmic connection, and much of the novel has a sense of unfolding destiny, which gives the narrative a layer of extra meaning. It isn’t often that fiction writers manage to combine the themes of comedy, philosophy and religion successfully, but Walker pulls it off.

“I watch the highway go by and ponder my situation. I am on the run from my husband’s divorce lawyer, my mojo is still missing in action and my demon ex-lover is lurking . . . But, all things considered, my pilgrimage is going well …”

Walker tells me that her next novel is about a girl living in Brisbane but with an obsession about Paris, and it occurs to me that obsession is a common occurrence in her books. Characters become fixated on other characters, or on places, or on an idea, and I wonder if she is at all obsessive in her personality. She laughs. “Just a bit,” she says. “One of the things I do myself, and my characters do a lot of, is dreaming about where you’re not. I dream about places, obsess about them, read travel books…in a way it’s like the writing process, except that by the time I’ve created this full-on picture of the place I’m obsessing about I don’t want to go there anymore – I’ve lost all interest!”

Despite having three books published over the past few years, Walker says that each book is a challenge. “People have said I’m prolific, but I don’t feel prolific,” she says. “I struggle to get my 1000 words a day done.” These days her wilderness experiences are a bit more mild than igloo-building – she works across the Northern Rivers as a Community Relations Ranger with National Parks and Wildlife. She and her husband and their two boys live in Lennox Head – within, as it turned out, easy reach of Arkie’s Big Things. “I did start out with much more ambitious ideas for her ‘pilgrimage’,” Walker says, “but in the end containing the journey made the book more manageable.”

I’m not going to give away whether Arkie discovers the meaning of life, recovers her mojo and repairs her marriage – you’ll have to take your own journey with the book to find out, but you won’t be disappointed.

Arkie’s Piligrimage to the Next Big Thing published by Bantam Australia, RRP $32.99, 368pp

See more at: randomhouse.lisa-walker/arkies-pilgrimage-to-the-next-big-thing

For more information on Lisa Walker go to: lisawalker

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Candida Baker travelled to Carnarvon Gorge in Queensland’s Central Highlands and discovered a hidden world, full of beauty.

Let’s get it out of the way. Carnarvon Gorge is gorgeous. There. Now we can move on.

In all my years in Australia the closest I’d been to the gorge, which is hidden in the rugged ranges of Queensland’s Central Highlands, was Roma, where I’d spent my twenty-first birthday looking unsuccessfully for a phone booth to ‘phone home’ to the UK. These days Roma is about the last spot – apart from the small town of Injune – where you can get mobile reception before you face the last narrow 150 kilometres of road liberally peppered with mining trucks, and the final 22 kilometres of dirt which take you into the gorge itself.

I hadn’t expected to see emus but as we reached the final stage of our 12-hour drive, there they were, a mob of them grazing on the sunlit plateau surrounded by the massive sandstone cliffs that are the only hint of the wonders to come. As we wended our way across the flat brown landscape with its cattle grids and creek crossings it seemed impossible to imagine that we were about to descend into one of the most varied and verdant landscapes in Australia, a place that is also home to some of the country’s most important and accessible Aboriginal rock art.

Just one of the massive eucalyptus trees that grow in profusion through the gorge.

It started simply enough, the odd palm dotted here and there, the plain giving way to folding hills, until almost imperceptibly the dusty beige and olive greens gave way to lush rainforest colours, with towering eucalypts, cycads, ferns and palm trees as far as the eye could see.

We had decided to camp in the National Park camping ground, next to the river and right at the start of most of the walking tracks. As we pitched our rooftop tent with the sounds of the river and a symphony of bird noise in the background, I couldn’t wait to start our bush-walking adventures. Walking is what the gorge is all about, and it’s the walks that attract approximately 65,000 visitors per year – many of them from overseas – to this relatively remote National Park.

Walking the river track through Carnarvon Gorge.

If I’d thought that the dusk symphony was loud it was nothing in comparison to the dawn chorus. The Gorge has populations of everything from Brolgas to Fairy Wrens including many birds on the endangered list. On the bird list were some species I’ve never heard of – the wonderfully named Bush Thick-Knees, the Buff-Rumped Thornbill and the Pallid Cuckoo just a few examples.

The 35-kilometre gorge was created by water erosion through the soft sandstone over millions of years, and with the riverbed as the main feature, it’s easy to follow the walks, which run off to the sides taking detours up into hills and gullies, revealing such natural wonders as the Aboriginal Rock Art Gallery, Ward’s Canyon, the Amphitheatre, the Moss Gardens, Cathedral Cave and Big Bend.

We decided to try and cover the first three of those on our first day out, which turned out to be a little ambitious for two Golden Oldies, but we managed to walk the 14km round trip in about six hours, and it was definitely worth a few arthritic twinges.

The Art Gallery: nature, beauty, history and humanity all in one place.

Our first stop was the furthest away – the Aboriginal Rock Art Gallery, about six kilometres away from base camp. It’s hard to describe the overwhelming feeling of standing in front of a wall of stencilled hands, many of the them children’s, and knowing that they date back thousands of years. These distant ochre messages from the past – with the constantly repeated themes of boomerangs, emus, kangaroos, and body parts, along with the patterns of carved vulvas – seem as fresh as the day they were made. Personally I would have loved to have had more written knowledge at the site on the Bidjara and Karingbal cultures, the main occupiers of the gorge prior to colonization. This site and also the one at Cathedral Cave, are of international archaeological and anthropological importance, with examples of stencilling techniques considered to be the most sophisticated kind in the world.

Our next stop was Ward’s Canyon, the most sheltered location in the gorge. Stepping from the bright sunlight into the dark, cool damp of the canyon I could see orchids and ferns growing around the rocks. I’d been told that the canyon was home to the extremely rare King’s Fern – one the largest and oldest ferns in the world, with fronds that grow up to five metres long and two metres wide, but it wasn’t until I’d got right to the top that their full magnificence was revealed – the cool, damp environment perfect for their survival. In fact so cool and damp is the canyon that it acted as a natural refrigerator, and is named after the Ward brothers, two fur trappers, who used it to store their bounty in the late 1800’s, when the Indigenous population were finally losing the battle to keep hold of their country.

A King Fern in Ward’s Canyon, and above, stones in the canyon’s trickling creek.

Our lunch stop was in another place of wonder – the Amphitheatre, a gigantic natural hole carved by water pressure over millions of years into the rock, which is only accessible by a series of steep ladders. The vegetation in the amphitheatre is up against it – torn literally from its roots by the irregular but massive floods that sweep through it (and through the entire gorge, taking out entire trees and parts of the river bank with them). It was impossible not to test out the natural acoustics…I was just glad there was no one else there to hear.

The Amphitheatre in the Gorge – impossible not to test the acoustics…

I spent the next few days in a state of bliss – doing the shorter walks along the river near the campsite, (on one of them I was kept company by a huge grey boomer), and the walks that started a short drive from the camp. Cold at night, it was warm and sunny during the day, and our few days there had the patina of perfection.

There was a wide variety of visitors – from groups of international backpackers, elderly couples (many of them birdwatchers), and families of all kinds, many with tiny children, who, even if they are not up to the more strenuous walks could easily enjoy the river walks near the camp, and the campsite itself. But despite the amount of us there, once we were on the tracks it wasn’t long before we were on our own again, and those moments were euphoric. It was easy to understand why the entire gorge was a sacred place to the Aborigines. With the combination of the art from centuries before, the bird noise, the flora and fauna, and the massive riverbed and cliffs, it’s hard to imagine a more impressive testimony to the power of nature.

Do yourselves a favour and put Carnarvon Gorge on the bucket list. You won’t regret it.

Getting there

Carnarvon Gorge is located 593km northwest of Brisbane, or 240km from Roma. You can travel there on a five-day Outback Explorer tour with Sunrover, drive (a 4WD is not necessary since once you get to the camp, you’ll be walking), or fly to Brisbane or Roma and hire a car, caravan or motor home. It took us 12 hours from Bangalow, in northern New South Wales to the camping ground.

Staying there

Visitors can camp at the National Park site, which is at the mouth of the gorge, but only open during Queensland school holidays; see https://www.nprsr.qld.gov.au/ or stay at the more up market Carnarvon Gorge Wilderness Lodge a few kilometres away; see https://www.carnarvon-gorge.com/ or at the larger Takarakka camping lodge with its mix of cabins, safari-style tents, caravan spaces and camping; see https://www.takaru.com.au/takaru/splashpage.cfm

More information

March – October are the peak season, and the best months for walking. Apart from a small store at Takarakka, there are no shops so stock up well on provisions, although Takarakka and the Carnarvon Gorge Wilderness Lodge both have cafes. The National Parks don’t recommend visits to the gorge in high summer, the Carnarvon Gorge Wilderness Lodge is closed during the off-season, and Takarakka is open all year round, although visitors during those times are warned to be careful of the heat, and also of the rains, which can bring flash flooding. Whatever the time of year take warm and cool clothing.

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