Claire Dunn embraced her inner caveman and answered the call of the wild to find her Nirvana.
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Claire Dunn embraced her inner caveman and answered the call of the wild to find her Nirvana.
Disillusioned and burnt out by life as a city ‘greenocrat’, Dunn quit her job, her partner and comfortable life to embark on a year-long wilderness survival skills program.
This is who emerged.
“I’m a lot more flexible and a lot more resilient now,” Dunn, who grew up in Woodville, said.
“I was feeling claustrophobic, almost smothered in a way, and I had to strip myself of everything I thought the experience was going to be.”
After completing the program, Dunn began working on her memoir aptly titled My Year Without Matches.
“This experience changed my life in so many different ways. I had to become familiar with parts of myself that I just didn’t know about,” Dunn, 35, said.
“I certainly saw how driven and ambitious I was; how I always had to have something to show for my day.
“So it was a lot about breaking down that conditioning and accepting me as I am and what labels I had attached to me. I let go of a lot of old patterns.”
During her stay in the wilderness of New South Wales – halfway between Coffs Harbour and Grafton – Dunn’s curriculum included hunting and trapping, tanning hides, bush food, basketry, animal tracking, rope and pottery making.
Then there were the wilds of Dunn’s emotional landscape that threatened to unravel her.
“Early on, as swollen insect bites joined together to resemble some venereal disease, I contemplated leaving. But there was no going back,” Dunn wrote in her book. “We had made a contract, the forest and I. I was to spend a year as its apprentice, stripped bare of modern comforts, at the mercy of the elements, learning the art of wilderness survival.”
Three years on, the now freelance journalist has become a passionate observer of personal transformations.
“We miss out on so much in our busyness and we miss out on much deeper relationships with ourselves,” she said.
“I think it’s a life half-lived when we are just rushing from one thing to another.”
Claire Dunn will talk about her book with former Sydney Morning Herald managing editor Elisabeth Sterel at Organic Feast on Wednesday, July 23, at 10.30am, as part of the Maitland Library “Look Who’s Talking” Program. Email myyearwithoutmatches@gmail.com to RSVP or visit the Maitland Library website.