ABSTRACT
In 2015, we interviewed Luke Mills, a schoolteacher who had developed a 230-kilometre walking trail through national parks and farmland in south-eastern Australia. It is themed on St Mary MacKillop, linking two towns in which she had been active during the nineteenth century, and the walk has been branded as the “Aussie Camino”. Luke explained to us how the idea had originated:
I share a large office, as you do in schools. There was a bloke who sat around the corner from me and I said ‘Have you seen this video’? He said ‘I can’t believe you’re asking me that, I saw it last night’. It was The Way with Martin Sheen and Emilio Estevez and I said ‘Oh, I just love that’. He said ‘Yeah, so do I’. We both sort of lamented the fact that we had children who are teenagers and that our trips to Santiago [Spain] were going to be a long time away . . . some people that we had known had been to Santiago and told us what a wonderful thing it was and had done the journey . . . it’s 800 kilometres over the Pyrenees and through Northern Spain and they had told us stories, But it hadn’t really been made real. When we saw this film – oh fascinating, this is good. Then we both sort of sagged our shoulders and said ‘We’re never going to get there’. In a short period, just over a period of one or two conversations, we said, ‘Well let’s do something here . . . in Australia’. We tried to draw some parallels between what they do in Spain and here. Santiago, Sant Iago . . . Saint James. We thought, well we’ve got our own saint. Why don’t we do something about her?
Books and films can play an important role as a source of inspiration to travel and imaginings about travel, as well as where and how people travel (Laing and Frost 2012). More recent work illustrates the way that the media frames our travel imaginings through different contexts, including crime fiction and television shows (Reijnders 2011), films about the Australian Outback (Frost 2010), films about the American West (Frost and Laing 2015) and books and films about exploration and adventure travel (Laing and Frost 2014). The influence of the media on imaginings of long-distance walking is another potentially fruitful area of research, given its popularity both as a plot device in books and films and as a leisure activity more generally.