THE BUTTERFLIES DIDN’T come this morning, and Leanne is distraught. I find her, with red-rimmed eyes, hugging a spindly tree. Leanne started walking this morning in good spirits, leaving from Lake Mombeong in Discovery Bay Coastal Park in south-western Victoria. With her are six fellow walkers, their guide, Jonathan Dyer, and me. The track, slashed into the dense coastal vegetation, follows the lake shore, passes through open meadows with mobs of kangaroos and penetrates into goblin forests of gnarly tea-trees. A wall of high dunes shields this section of the walk from the fury of the Southern Ocean.
It is day three of our eight-day walk with purpose. This is the Aussie Camino, a pilgrimage that begins in Portland, Victoria, and will eventually bring the group to Penola in South Australia. I’m pilgrim #2021222 and the Aussie Camino symbol, a white shell adorned with a stylised “Ave Maria” monogram, not unlike the ABC logo, is dangling off my backpack.
Leanne joined the pilgrimage, organised by the Melbourne-based company Getaway Trekking, for a reason. “My husband died two years ago,” she says. “He took his own life, so I’ve really struggled for the whole time.” She hopes the pilgrimage will help her make sense of what happened and cope better with her loss. The timing of the walk is significant
