Australia story

During the 128 days he spent crossing the Australian continent in 2001, Jon Muir lived on small amounts of rice, flour, and muesli, supplemented by whatever he could shoot, catch, or forage. Along the 2500-kilometre walk, he ate termites, bull rush greens, wild duck, dried lizard, a piece of a dead cow at an indeterminate stage of decomposition ("a bit smelly, but I'll give it a go"), spit-roasted snake, and about 50 types of native bush fruits and vegetables, and drank water collected from a
camel's footprint.

Muir's is a story of extreme endurance and survival on a voluntary quest; he wanted to prove to himself that he could do it. The physical and emotional cost of the journey is captured in the hour-long documentary Alone across Australia (Shark Island Productions), which combines footage Muir shot of himself on the trek, and a few interviews and long shots re-created a year later.

Muir gives two immediate impressions of himself in this film. One, that he's a man supremely adapted physically to living on his own in the harsh expanses of the Australian interior. And two, that he has a remarkable magnanimity - an Aussie cheerfulness that allows him to weather extreme hardship. A strong, stocky man with disheveled hair and a face lined by wind and laughter, he's a master of understatement.

"I have an incredible sense of being very much alone," Muir says quietly to the camera, just as the lens shifts across the immensity of the landscape, showing him as a mere dot on a vast plain of heat-scorched red rock.

The journey captured in Alone across Australia was Muir's fourth attempt to become the first person to cross the continent unsupported, foregoing additional supplies along the way. He packed a subsistence amount of gear into a homemade handcart and set off across an environment made up of two salt lakes and three deserts. His only company was his springy, excitable Jack Russell terrier, Seraphine.

Though there have been many journeys into the heart of Australia, the continent is so vast and empty that hundreds of thousands of acres remain undiscovered. The outback is notoriously harsh and disrespectful of adventurers, driving countless men to lunacy or death. But despite the conditions, such an expedition suited Muir.

A member of the first Australian expedition to the North Pole, Muir has also trekked in Antarctica, climbed Aconcagua, set speed records while ascending peaks throughout the French Alps, and made the only solo, non-Sherpa-assisted ascent of
Mount Everest from the south. In 2004 he undertook a month-long unsupported seakayaking journey up Australia's northeast coast.

The area covered on Muir's trek from south (Port Augusta) to north (Burketown) crosses just one paved road and is home to fewer than 100 people, many operating remote cattle stations. Muir and his producing partner, Ian Darling, went back to
interview some of the people he met on the trip, and they were all amazed at the concept of walking alone across such a harsh and empty landscape. They were further stunned that he wouldn't take so much as a cold drink from any of them.

Muir's devotion to hardship takes on a "top this" absurdity as he travels north. He breaks the stock of his gun trying to club a wild pig for dinner, fights off a pack of aggressive dingoes by firelight, and loses his sleeping bag and has to trek back a full
day to get a spare he has left behind. Muir's sense of proportion becomes completely skewed. At one point he tells the camera that he'll leave the cart behind and make the rest of the journey with a backpack because there are "only 650 kilometres left
to go". Throughout the film, almost excruciatingly, a cutaway shot of a map shows his progress inching northward.

The surprising thing about Alone across Australia is that Muir takes viewers so deep into the line of his own emotions that the whole undertaking becomes less absurd and more understandable. He believes humans have become too removed from the
elements of the earth, and he wants to see, feel, and touch the same things his
ancestors did. "We've lost sight of what it is to be human," he says. "When I filmed Alone across Australia, I was the closest I ever got to our long history. And our long history stretches back several hundred thousand years. For most of that time, we've
survived by travelling simply and purely across the landscape, and treading lightly." About halfway across the continent, the film reveals that Muir has spent some time studying the subsistence skills of the Aborigines, who lived and travelled this way for about 50,000 years and established the longest-lasting unbroken civilization in history. It's clear that Muir wouldn't have survived without these skills as a hunter and forager, and that puts a fresh twist on his accomplishment. He has sublimated
himself into the environment, experiencing an ancient way of life that was common in Australia just a few hundred years ago.

"I was there to challenge myself in a way I never had before," Muir says about the trip's motivation. "And to melt into the Australian landscape."