Between them, the 2024 cohort of adventure awardees have walked, cycled, rowed and climbed their way into the annals of Australian Geographic Society history. They have each undertaken journeys of discovery through remote lands, little-known cultures and unfamiliar ways of life that have deepened their understanding of the interconnectedness of people, the value of nature and the resilience of the human spirit.
These four individuals – Michael Dillon AM, Lucy Barnard, Tom Robinson, and Steph Devery – represent the true Aussie spirit of adventure. Through their extraordinary achievements, they remind us of the boundless potential of human endurance, the beauty of connection, and the life-affirming inspiration of pursuing the unknown.
Lifetime of Adventure
Michael Dillon AM
Michael ‘Mike’ Dillon is the leading adventure filmmaker and cinematographer of his generation.
Image credit: Kristoffer Paulsen
Words used to describe Tim Macartney-Snape in a documentary about his 1990 Sea to Summit Everest expedition could just as easily apply to Michael Dillon, the cinematographer who went with him: “On Earth’s flattest continent, he trains for Earth’s highest mountains. In sweltering heat, he steels himself for snow.” Many of the expeditions Mike has filmed are the stuff of legend. Among them is the 1984 first Australian summit of Everest by Macartney-Snape with Greg Mortimer, which celebrated its 40th anniversary last year. Less well known is Mike himself. This humble individual receives the 2024 Lifetime of Adventure award, the Society’s highest honour, for a career spanning seven decades, shooting in some of the most inhospitable places on the planet.
Mike was seven years old when Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay summited Everest on 29 May 1953. It was a monumental milestone that left a deep impression on the young boy growing up in Sydney. The two mountaineers became his heroes, especially after he saw the documentary The Conquest of Everest (1953) during his first-ever cinema experience. Every rock Mike climbed later as a Venturer Scout, and doing the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award, he imagined as Everest. Little did he know that within 20 years he’d be able to count Sir Edmund and Tenzing among his close friends.
Mike credits his adventurous spirit and survival skills to the Scouting movement. “I started with them at 13 and was very lucky to have a troop leader who really got the outdoor adventure side of Scouts going, starting rock-climbing courses,” he says. “We’d go exploring down Blue Mountains’ canyons and climb the Three Sisters and other places, which you can’t do today.”
His attainments as a Venturer Scout got him a head start in the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award scheme, beginning at the silver level, when it was introduced to Australia in 1959 by Warwick Deacock. This seasoned mountaineer and former British marine and SAS commando first met Mike when the scheme was trialled at his school, Sydney Grammar. Inspired by Warwick, Mike found himself graduating to bigger adventures high in the Snowy Mountains. Warwick would later play an even more pivotal role in his life.
Mike was the first Australian to earn the Duke of Edinburgh’s Gold Award. When Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip visited Sydney in 1963, Mike, accompanied by his family, was invited aboard the Royal Yacht Britannia to receive his award from the Duke. “I got my own personal ceremony. It was moored at Circular Quay, and we came on board for half an hour. We all got on very well. My dad was a naval officer like Prince Philip,” Mike recalls.
Mike’s passion for film was ignited by that Everest documentary he saw when he was a child. While he was at university, he found part-time work with a film company. Warwick meanwhile had established a trekking company in the Himalayas and, after graduating in 1969, Mike joined him there on a film shoot for the ABC.
“Warwick had a 16mm camera, but he got altitude sickness and was carried down on a stretcher by the Sherpas,” Mike says. “But being Warwick, he carried on filming. So the Sherpas put him down and said, ‘We’re happy to carry you, but not you and your camera.’ The camera was handed to me. So that was the first time I used a 16mm camera.”
Two years later, Mike bought a second-hand 16mm camera from the production company that made Skippy the Bush Kangaroo and headed back to Nepal to film another trekking expedition led by Warwick. “It was quite hard work in those days because cameras were extremely heavy and you needed a tripod as well, plus a black bag to change the film in,” Mike says. “I was carrying a lot more than everybody else but having to keep up and film as I went along.”
The resulting film, A Himalayan Journey, was sold to the BBC. It was one of the first movies to be made about trekking in the region. It gave Mike the confidence to write to Sir Edmund Hillary, who was planning a major expedition up the Ganges River and was looking for a filmmaker to go along.
Sir Edmund had become fascinated with jetboats, a New Zealand invention, and he and his wife Louise had been planning a journey up the great river when she and their daughter Belinda were tragically killed in a plane crash in Nepal in 1975. “It was something that Sir Edmund felt he had to do,” Mike says. “It was a healing process for him. He was so devastated by their loss that he needed something to concentrate on, a goal. He was a great planner and spent a lot of those years after the accident planning this expedition.”
Mike joined his hero in 1977 on the thrilling journey from the Ganges Delta and up through fast-moving rapids into the snows of the Himalayas where the river rises. It can be deadly in places, and at one point during their journey Mike almost lost his precious camera after hitting a sandbank. Sir Edmund suffered severe altitude sickness and had to be evacuated but the expedition continued, with Mike capturing the excitement and action all the way to the peak of Akash Parbat. The film From the Ocean to the Sky was released in 1979.
So began a friendship with Sir Edmund that would last for the next 25 years. Mike filmed Sir Ed’s humanitarian work in the region where he’d built more than 30 schools and hospitals and was loved and respected by the Nepalese people. Mike took part in many of those building projects. In 2002 he co-founded the Australian Himalayan Foundation with five mountaineering friends who recognised the Himalayan region, while beautiful, also suffered extreme poverty and hardship.
It’s an initiative Mike’s proud of. “It’s expanded so much,” he says. “There are some quite well-known villages right under Everest, but we knew that if you just went further down the valley or over to another valley, there were still a lot of [communities in] need. And not just in that region, but in other parts of Nepal and across the Himalayas too. We’re very proud to have started something which is still going strong and doing important work.”
Mike very much admires the personal qualities of the Australian team that summited Everest in 1984. “They were all very self-contained, kind of introverted, with no egos, almost casually going about this task,” he says, comparing them with some of their more flamboyant European contemporaries. “There was this amazing dynamic, and lots of patience too. They just went about it all very slowly. They had lots of issues with avalanches and lost gear and so on, but somehow managed to do it.”
He could be talking about himself. He filmed the ascent as an integral member of the crew, along with Greg Mortimer, Tim Macartney-Snape, Lincoln Hall and others. Mike’s ability to be part of the expedition team, move at their pace, endure their hardships, all while wielding heavy gear, nailing perfect shots and keeping discreetly out of the way, is what makes him the leading Australian adventure filmmaker and cinematographer of his generation.
He went on to conceive and film Tim Macartney-Snape’s 1990 Sea to Summit expedition, in which Tim climbed Everest again, this time from sea level. Mike has great admiration for people like Tim who display true grit without seeking attention. Another quiet achiever, Tim Cope, invited Mike to film sections of his long ride across Asia, for which Tim received the 2006 AG Adventurer of the Year. “It was such a simple expedition; just Tim, his wonderful dog Tigon and three horses travelling through the beautiful Carpathians,” Mike says. “I had to make sure I was ready to leave when he wanted to leave. I was walking all the time, while he was sometimes riding, so I had to carry my gear in a very efficient way so I could start filming immediately if something happened.”
COVID provided Mike the chance to work on a project that had been on the backburner for years – and it involved his old friend Warwick Deacock. “I knew some years earlier he’d gone to Heard Island with his mates in a failed attempt to climb Big Ben [Australia’s highest mountain at 2745m] but then went back and finally climbed it in 1965. I even helped them prepare their boat the second time down at Rushcutters Bay,” he says.
Using Warwick’s original footage, Mike’s more recent material of Big Ben and interviews with the team members on the climb, he created The Great White Whale, a rollicking, boys-own adventure story filled with thrills, spills and good humour. It’s won numerous awards and is touring the country to great acclaim. “It’s nothing to do with me, really,” Mike says. “It’s more the ingredients; these extraordinary characters singing songs and telling their story.”
Mike’s the real storyteller in all this. So many epic tales of courage and endurance wouldn’t be known if he hadn’t tagged along, with his cumbersome gear, quietly staying close to the action, never getting in the way, and always keeping up.
In 2022 Michael received the Grand Prize for lifetime achievement from the International Alliance for Mountain Film – the first filmmaker from the Southern Hemisphere ever to be granted this award. You can see the film and meet Michael in Melbourne on 6 February.
Spirit of Adventure
Steph Devery
Steph pedalled her way through 40 countries on a revealing journey of self-discovery.
Travelling as a solo female through multiple countries is no small feat – especially when faced with volatile political situations, language barriers and difficult terrain. This was the experience of two of our awardees. Steph Devery and Lucy Barnard travelled under their own steam, one cycling south through Europe, Asia and Africa, and the other walking north through the Americas. Steph is our 2024 Spirit of Adventure awardee.
In June 2021, Steph – an Aussie paramedic working in London – was feeling burnt out. She’d worked through the height of the COVID pandemic and, feeling exhausted and mentally drained, was ready for a change.
With almost no bikepacking – backpacking by bike –experience and only a rudimentary knowledge of how to change a flat tyre, she bought a gravel bicycle and embarked on a cycling odyssey across the globe. She’d intended to sign up for a bike mechanics course, or teach herself on YouTube, but she ran out of time. “It got to a point where I was just going to have to figure it out for myself,” Steph says. “The first month was tough, physically, because I had done exactly zero training to prepare for it. But if you’re just super kind to yourself, you’re going to get where you need to be fitness-wise in a month or two. I would do it the exact same way again, just go, and figure it out along the way.”
Steph planned to set off in Norway but border closures forced her to begin in Spain. “I had this moment where I had to decide, do I want to go for the adventure, or do I want to go for this perfect straight line from north to south? Of course I wanted to cycle from Norway, but it set the trip up to be this unplanned, nonsensical, beautiful journey directed purely on the love of adventure instead of completing a pre-planned goal. It was incredible where that attitude led me,” Steph says.
She camped on deserted beaches in Portugal and Greece, tackled lung-busting climbs across the Pyrenees and Alps and partook in the culinary delights of Italy and Turkey. She carried a stray dog 1500km in a basket attached to the handlebars to its forever home in the Balkans.
But the true adventure was only just beginning. Crossing the Mediterranean, Steph explored regions of the Middle East now considered inaccessible. She traversed the length of Jordan, Israel, Palestine and parts of Egypt before crossing one of her favourite countries of the expedition, Saudi Arabia.
“I didn’t quite know what to expect; tourism was still nascent, and I wasn’t sure how a solo woman on a bicycle would be received in such a conservative society,” she says. “It makes me laugh to think back now, knowing how unbelievably kind and welcoming the people were. I’ve never experienced that level of generosity before.”
She was constantly showered with small gifts and meals and welcomed into family homes. As a solo woman, she found it incredibly special to be granted access into the protected places where women and children lived.
In April 2023, she crossed the Red Sea by ferry heading for Sudan. “Cycling across the Sahara was an amazing challenge,” she says. “Temperatures would soar above 500C every day, so I would wake up hours before dawn, cycle until the heat became unbearable and then find shade anywhere I could, usually sweltering in a culvert under the road.”
She was evacuated by the military from Khartoum after civil war broke out in central Sudan, leaving behind everything but her passport. Two months later she began the final stretch in Tanzania. She had wild encounters as she rode a further 8000km across 12 countries. “It wasn’t scary living among big predatory animals because you are just another animal in the wild. You become quite primitive living outdoors for so long,” she says. “There were a few spicy moments for sure, like in Tanzania when I woke up to find my tent surrounded by a pride of lions. I’ve never appreciated a tiny piece of nylon tent fabric more in my life.”
She was embraced by tribes seldom visited by outsiders. She discovered the true meaning of humanity in the kindness of strangers along the way.
She recalls being treated as an honoured guest by village chiefs, escorted for kilometres of steep climbs by singing children and sharing meals cooked by loving families around a fire. She encountered extreme electrical storms in Uganda, food shortages in northern Malawi, scorching heat in the Kalahari Desert and the relentless, corrugated, sandy roads across Namibia.
As Steph arrived at journey’s end on 14 January 2024, she expressed overwhelming pride in her achievement.
“I had the most incredible final day surrounded by incredible new friends,” she says. “They all came with me to the southwestern tip of Africa, the Cape of Good Hope. I had this very special moment. They let me go the last kilometre alone – ‘This is your journey,’ [they said] – and all I could think was, ‘Wow, I’ve actually bloody made it! This is what I’ve dreamed of for five years and here I am.’”
Adventurer of the Year
Lucy Barnard
We honour Lucy’s incredible achievement with the 2024 Adventurer of the Year award.
Lucy Barnard’s epic foot traverse across the world is the stuff of legend. She aims to be the first woman to walk the length of the Americas, south to north, solo (see The Longest Walk, AG 182). She began in 2017 at Ushuaia in Argentina. Her journey will ultimately span 30,000km across two continents and 13 countries. Her goal is to reach Utqiagvik (Point Barrow) in Alaska, the northernmost point of the United States.
Lucy’s professional background in adventure risk management helped her to successfully navigate dramatic landscapes, extreme weather events, natural disasters and other unpredictable situations, plus the specific threats of being a solo female traveller.
In Argentina, she hiked across Patagonia during the region’s worst winter in 20 years. Using snow to cover her tent at night, she coped with temperatures below –20°C. In Chile, she used a hiking trailer to carry more than 60L of water 1600km through the Atacama Desert, the driest non-polar desert in the world. She crossed a 500-year-old Incan trail through the remotest parts of Peru, where languages change from one mountain to the next.
When crossing the infamous Darién Gap in Colombia, Lucy sought permission from indigenous groups with sovereignty over the area, then she coordinated diplomatic support from the Panamanian government – receiving police escorts in high-risk areas. “When a situation arises, I’m not making decisions based on panic, or being purely reactive. I’m methodical and consider the full scope of the situation, plus other risks that might be layered on top that could make it worse,” she says. “I stay flexible knowing new elements may come to light, and I make sure I’m not fixed on one path. Most importantly I respect the communities I’m passing, listen to their advice, and am always willing to turn around and find another way.”
Wombat, Lucy’s blue heeler, has been keeping her company – and helps deter unwanted attention. He also breaks down language barriers and helps Lucy connect with locals.
“Security was the practical reason I wanted to find a dog but I think, subconsciously, I wanted a friend and Wombat’s presence was instantly transformative,” she says.
Lucy reached the Caribbean Sea on 3 March 2023, becoming the first woman to walk the length of South America – a total of 11,100km across five countries.
Since then, she’s passed through Central America, risked the cartels of northern Mexico and is now in the USA, managing snow-cloaked alpine wilderness and the threat of large predators, including mountain lions, bears, wolves and coyotes.
Travelling on foot allows for more intimate interactions. Lucy has been welcomed into private homes, embraced by families, shared meals with strangers, had her wounds treated and learned about very different ways of living. These cultural encounters have enriched her journey and at times provided much-needed emotional and physical support.
She’s a gifted storyteller, using social media platforms to share her story. Her honesty and authenticity have resonated with people everywhere, especially women, encouraging them to go beyond their comfort zone and find their own adventure.
As for Wombat: his endurance, gritty character and unwavering dedication and value to Lucy and her quest make him worthy of special recognition, and he receives our first ever Canine Adventurer of the Year award.
Don’t miss the chance to meet Lucy at our Australian Geographic roadshow event at the Hayden Orpheum Picture Palace in Cremorne, Sydney, on 30 January 2025.
Young Adventurer of the Year
Tom Robinson
Meet the youngest person to row solo across the Pacific Ocean.
As Tom Robinson headed out to sea from Vanuatu on 1 October 2023, 15 months after leaving Peru to row solo across the Pacific Ocean to Australia, he had every reason to believe most of the hard yakka was behind him. But at 5pm on Thursday 5 October, as Tom sat inside the cabin of his wooden rowing boat contemplating dinner after a hard day on the oars, a freak wave washed over the top of the little boat, flooded in through the open hatch and capsized it.
By leaving the hatch open, Tom says he made a “fatal” error: “If the hatch had been closed, then the boat would’ve self-righted, and it’s often closed when it’s rough,” he says. “But to me, it didn’t seem at all rough enough to warrant closing the hatch, so I had it open to let air into the cabin.”
Luckily for Tom, it didn’t prove fatal – but the 24-year-old rower would spend the next 14 hours clinging to the upturned hull of his little boat, naked, cold and wet, as it was buffeted by wind and smacked by waves. A P&O cruise ship, complete with 2000 passengers, diverted from its course to pluck him to safety the next morning, causing a media sensation and seeing Tom dubbed the “naked rower”.
Tom’s expedition began in Callao, Peru in July 2022. He wanted to fulfil a childhood dream to be the youngest person to row across the Pacific Ocean.
He did so in Maiwar, a wooden clinker-built 7m-long rowing boat he designed and built himself. Although young, Tom is a qualified wooden-boat builder who once rowed 130km solo from Brisbane to the Gold Coast while still a schoolboy in a 4m dinghy.
Tom’s experiences on the first leg of the epic Pacific voyage undoubtedly equipped him with the mental strength and survival skills to endure what was to come. “I was at sea for 160 days. I originally planned to make landfall in the Marquesas, but I was blown off course. And so, almost overnight, the journey changed from a 100-day first leg into what became a 160-day leg. Penrhyn Island was next after the Marquesas. And so it turned into a big, long, arduous, painful, hard journey. But it was pretty spectacular too sometimes,” he says. “I packed food for 150 days just in case, because I thought that there was a very slim chance that this could happen, and it did. I caught a lot of fish too. I left South America with about 350L of water, and I also had a desalination pump that turns saltwater into fresh. I was rationing two litres a day, which was really challenging. By the end of the journey, it was so hot that I just couldn’t manage on just two litres a day, so I had to pump for about half an hour each day to get more fresh water to drink.”
Tom occasionally encountered other vessels on the high seas, including the jumbo squid fishing fleet off Ecuador and a tuna trawler. They lowered a speedboat, and two Ecuadorian fishermen rushed over to the Maiwar, but they didn’t speak English and Tom’s Spanish wasn’t too good either. “But I rubbed my belly to say I was hungry, so they came back with all this food. There was tuna, but the rest of the food wasn’t great. I got strawberry jam, I got Powerade, I got cigarettes, I got all these things I didn’t need. That was really funny,” he says.
Apart from those rare human encounters, Tom was alone for five months. “I find solitude leads to real contentment. I don’t miss anything at home, or even civilisation itself. I find I’m completely at peace when I am alone at sea,” he says.
He eventually made landfall on remote Penrhyn Island (Tongareva) in the Cook Islands on 9 December 2022, completing a 5000 nautical miles non-stop traverse of the most remote stretch of the Pacific Ocean. In doing so he became the youngest person to row solo across the Pacific Ocean, as verified by the Guinness World Records.
For nine months after that first landfall, Tom threaded his way through various island nations of the South Pacific, connecting with people and cultures whose lives are dependent on healthy, productive seas. “There’s a simplicity in the way that the Pacific Islander people I met live, that’s so beautiful,” he says.
Tom was just 50 days from home when the Maiwar capsized. Does he feel he missed out on completing the journey? “To be honest, finishing off that last 50 days wasn’t that important to me,” he says. “It’s not about the record in the end, it’s about the experience along the way. The whole journey was far more exciting and adventurous, enjoyable and terrible than I could have ever imagined, and I had a lot more of an adventure than I ever expected to.”
Maiwar washed up on a remote island in Papua New Guinea in early 2024. Tom travelled there to see if she was salvageable. She wasn’t, but at least he knew her final fate.
Tom joins past young adventurers of the year, including Society advisory committee member Chris Bray, Jessica Watson, Tim Cope and aviator Ryan Campbell.
