Australia

The Kimberley in remote northern Western Australia can be hard to comprehend. Stretching from tropical beaches and coral atolls, and into deep rugged mountain, river and gorge country, it occupies an area bigger than Germany, yet is home to just 50,000 people. The drama of the land echoes a geological story that is 1800 million years in the making – the collision of a separate landmass and the Pilbara and Yalgearn region that helped form the core of what we know today as the Australian Continent.

The region is often spoken of as a largely undisturbed wilderness, but this belies the fact that it has also been home to one of the oldest continuous cultures on the planet for at least 40,000 years. A journey into the Kimberley is a journey into deep culture, geology, and the natural world.

The ‘Snowy’ is an iconic river that flows 352 kilometres from the slopes of the Australian Alps to Bass Strait on the plains of East Gippsland. The river, like the landscape, is varied, ranging from snowmelt streams through to deep gorges, waterfalls, rapids, and long meandering stretches. Water dragons, wallabies, platypus, and brumbies are a common sight as the river winds its way through alpine, rain-shadow, and eventually temperate forest country.

To paddle the snowy is to paddle into another time. It is a story of the land, but also its first people. Most of the Snowy River in Victoria today is primarily in the country of the Gunnaikurnai people of Gippsland. 280 sites of cultural significance have been found in the Snowy River valley dating back to at least 20,000 years. The story of these people, and the adversity they have faced during colonialism is an important part of the story of this sacred part of Australia.

The region is also rich in European settler history, most notably the iconic high country horseback way of life.

The wilderness of adjoining ranges such as the Cobberas provide opportunities to link river experiences with trekking and horse-back journeys.

The island state of Tasmania is a tapestry of some of Australia’s most unique and awe inspiring natural landscapes. Jutting out into the untamed waters of the Indian, Southern, and Pacific oceans, it is a land of glacier-carved mountains and towering temperate rainforests framed by one of the world’s most dramatic and unpopulated coastlines. The unique combination of Tasmania’s ocean currents, and its cool southern climate has given rise to unique biodiversity – particularly in the coastal waters where %80 of Tasmania’s marine plant and animal life if found nowhere else on earth. Today around %40 of Tasmania is protected in either national parks, reserves, and world heritage areas.

Inseparable from the land itself is the extraordinary and sometimes tragic human story of Tasmania. Sometime around 40,000 years ago during the ice age, indigenous Australians walked southwards across the land bridge from the mainland to become the most southerly dwelling humans on the planet. Their descendants lived through the rise and fall of the ocean, and ultimately adapted to the end of the last ice age that saw one third of the Australian continent become seabed, and Tasmania encircled by sea.

The 19th century brought dramatic change to Tasmania when the British dispossessed the indigenous Tasmanians in a violent campaign that is infamously known as the black War. Indigenous Tasmanians today are proudly reclaiming their history, culture, and connection to the land.

A journey in Tasmania is to witness a portal into the ancient human and natural world, and to reckon with the importance of preserving natural and traditional knowledge into the future.

Hiking, sea-kayaking and sailing are our preferred methods of journeying through Tasmania.