Some friends dropped by this week and they pressed my buttons when we got talking about the power of connecting story to place. I was fascinated watching their faces animate as they told me how stories worn thin by familiarity took on new depth and meaning when they visited locations where the action had taken place. 
 
And that was only a virtual trip on screen! 
 
I’ve been fascinated by the idea of pilgrimage ever since I began road-testing The Poets Trek on red dirt roads at the back of Bourke thirty years ago. We were exploring ways to expand tourism and seized on an idea I’d experimented with when teaching kids at Pera Bore School. It was simply reading, acting out and filming the poems and stories the famous author Henry Lawson had composed in 1893 ‘on location’ around the Western Plains. I was excited when I saw the way flat words on the page leapt to life as imagination took a hold in the landscape Henry had walked. 
 
The kid’s dubbed it ‘Uncle Paul’s Outback Adventure’!