CLAIRE DUNN IS NATURE’S APPRENTICE

SUBJECT

Claire Dunn

OCCUPATION

Facilitator and writer

INTERVIEWER

Sylvia Rowley

PHOTOGRAPHER

Gregory Lorenzutti

LOCATION

Melbourne, Australia

DATE

December, 2019

Claire Dunn leads the way, barefoot, down a winding track behind her house to the banks of Birrurung, or the Yarra river. As we sit on the dry grass in the late afternoon of a 40-degree day, the cicadas chirp and there’s a sense of ease despite the intense heat. The only giveaway that we are in Australia’s second largest city is the distant hum of traffic. As I talk with Claire in this little patch of nature, I start to sense how, as humans, we can also find our way back to the wilder parts within ourselves. The chatter of my domesticated mind begins to fade to a distant hum.

Claire is a guide to the wilds inside and out, and her passion is nature-based human development. Since quitting her job campaigning for the Wilderness Society over a decade ago, she has travelled her own mystical path. She left the confines of the offices, shopping centres and other concrete boxes of modernity to discover something deeper, more instinctive. She spent a year in the bush, which she recounts in her memoir My Year Without Matches, and now runs re-wilding events and guides Vision Quests. Since settling back into city life, she’s been writing a second memoir about re-wilding the urban soul.

Why does all this matter right now? One of Claire’s mentors, wilderness guide and psychologist Bill Plotkins, puts it well. He says that reconnecting with nature and our own wildness “not only re-enlivens us as individuals, but also erodes the outworn Western worldview of a meaningless, disenchanted universe upon which life-assailing business-as-usual depends.” For Claire, delving into direct connection with nature helps us to know ourselves more deeply, so that we can grow up and show up for each other—and for the more-than-human-world—at what is arguably one of the most crucial times for the health and longevity of the planet.

SYLVIA ROWLEY: We’re by the river in your garden in Melbourne’s northern suburbs. Do you want to acknowledge the land that we’re on? And also talk a bit about the wildness that’s here?

CLAIRE DUNN: Sure. Well I just feel incredibly grateful to be living here. To be renting here. And it was one of those strange things where I feel like the land found me rather than me finding the land. Which happens to me with places. But I’m very aware of the long history of human caretaker-ship on this land, by the Wurundjeri people. I’ve spent a lot of time on this riverbank and I’ve often imagined or wondered what was happening on this land. What gatherings and songs and stories were being shared here. So it is a patch of wild-ish nature in the city that I live on. And it deeply feeds me, inspires, grounds, informs my work, my days and doings.

I’ve been thinking about the layers of experience that are present in places. So if I go for a walk along the river