Three month Kimberley solo: Sarah Marquis

Sarah Marquis first visited Australia as a backpacker in her twenties. Without a word of English, she stepped off the plane in Cairns and immediately felt a deep connection with the Australian landscape.

Since that day, Sarah has returned to Australia many times, learning more and more about the country and its inhabitants with each visit. In 2002, she embarked upon a 17-month journey that took her from Alice Springs eastward to the Great Dividing Range, then south to South Australia, across to Western Australia before eventually returning to Alice Springs via the Canning stock route. All told, she walked some 14,000 kilometres over the course of that journey, roughly circumnavigating Australia’s harsh interior.

Twenty-three years after her first taste of Australia, Sarah set out on what she describes as her most gruelling expedition yet: a three-month quest to live off the land in the Kimberley region of  Western Australia, covering around 800 kilometres in the process.

“It was an old dream,” Sarah says. “After learning so much about this country, I’ve developed this deep respect for the traditional owners. I always wondered about the way they survived off the land for 60,000 years.

“The more time I spend in the bush, the more I realise how harsh and unforgiving it can be, while still giving so much. On one hand it provides for those who have the knowledge, but one mistake and it will get you.”

For the most part, Sarah employed her expanding knowledge of bush tucker in order to find and prepare roots and grubs, or risking crocodile attack to catch catfish and black bream whenever the chance presented itself. But undertaking her mission in a drought meant that Sarah wasn’t able to rely on foraging to the degree she would have liked. Instead, she supplemented her diet with a ration of 100 grams of flour each day.

“I’ve never been so hungry. I was starving,” Sarah recounts. “I was walking 12 hours a day and sometimes I had nothing other than the flour to keep me going. Out there, there’s no such thing as flat land. The Kimberley goes from bushfire season to rainy season and back again, and you can see how the land has been affected by this over thousands of years.”

The knowledge Sarah had gained from her time spent with traditional owners, in combination with many years of studying survival techniques, put her in good stead for most of her journey.  Yet, according to the Swiss adventurer, a cursory understanding of something pales in significance to actual experiences.

“The knowledge that many Aboriginal people have is not about the trick of how something’s done. It’s about the respect of the land – the deep understanding that comes with that. In Australia, more than any other place I’ve been to, everything is closely interlinked and form part of a system that changes every 500 kilometres or so.

“If you see a diamond firetail finch in the bush, then you know that you’re near water. Those birds only fly about five kilometres in a day, and they need to drink twice a day. The next challenge is to figure out what direction the water’s in.”

After her water bucket was damaged by a saltwater crocodile just a few days into her journey, Sarah knew she had to be extremely vigilant in keeping an eye out for the huge predators. Nevertheless, her need to find water meant she was regularly putting herself in danger for a drink or to fish. She still recalls the natural pools and streams of the Kimberley containing some of the best drinking water she’d ever encountered.

“I’d never seen so much beautiful water – it actually tastes sweet. The water is so good in those areas because the streambeds are sandy and pristine. But I still took my MSR pump with a ceramic filter. It’s the best option I’ve come across for filtering water. I’ve used it in China and I’ve used it in water with dead kangaroos in it and I’ve not been sick once. I also like the fact that it plugs straight in to the MSR Dromedary water bag.”

Throughout the expedition Sarah faced real danger in the form of crocodiles, starvation, dehydration and the ever-present risk of bushfires. And while she came out relatively unscathed, losing a significant amount of weight early in her journey meant her pack was unreasonably heavy for her size. As a result, Sarah spent a large portion of the trip managing an injured shoulder.

Returning home, Sarah found herself habitually checking her refrigerator – her experience had been almost traumatic in the things that it taught her about food and health, particularly those things that we take for granted, such as abundance and artificial cooling.

“I know what it is to be starving,” she says. “I now deeply understand how far I can push myself and what I need to keep going. This had led me to understand that we’re all the same. No matter what your background is, we all have the same basic needs.

“That made me wonder about how we could save the planet. We need to think and be conscious of what we’re doing, even about things as simple as the food we eat. The fire is burning now, so now is the time for us to rethink our everyday lives so we impact less on the planet, which will in turn have health benefits for us.”

Sarah Marquis recently launched the French-language version of her book Instinct, which is based on her experiences in the Kimberley. Her previous book, Wild by Nature is available in English and documents Sarah’s long-distance journey from Siberia to Australia.

This story was recently published in Wild 156. For more stories like it, as well as track notes, gear reviews and more, subscribe today and receive your copy.