On The Road To Find Out

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’!

​I watched that humble dry-run develop into a robust road trip that gave roots and wings to lines of poetry written a century earlier. Journalists, musicians, dramatists, lawyers, farmers, artists, engineers, truckies, poets and photographers became animated by the journey. Young and old, tradies and professors were not only drawn into the old lyrics, but were inspired to write, sing, paint, recite stuff from their own experience. 

It was an astonishing learning curve. 
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So, it triggered my dreaming about a “Grand Design” for a pilgrimage. Why not Botany Bay to Alice Springs? Right now, I’ve got a small team of enthusiasts who are joining the dots that will compose the route for an app that will lead pilgrims on a journey into Australia’s forgotten faith-story. I envisage school groups, grey nomads, bus tours or mates out for a road trip joining a narrative adventure following the footprints left by Jesus here under the Southern Cross.
 
The end goal is the multi-million-dollar 20m steel cross built on Memory Mountain in response to a vision given a local Aboriginal elder. (https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-10-22/haasts-bluff-cross-monument-central-australia-ken-duncan/101528352)
 
I’m planning to have some sections of the pilgrimage ready for 2026.  It’d be great to hear any thoughts you have on the idea!
 
(Chapter 11 in my book Tell Me Another explains more of my thinking on the power of pilgrimage.)