I signed up for the outback’s Squid Game. Now I look like a gaudy octopus

Far from the comforts of home, I found something more consoling.

August 13, 2026 — 11:53am

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A veteran of the country’s north-west once told me, “You come out of the Kimberley to recover.” He was right. Everything in that gargantuan rockery is anathema to a modern human’s comfort, the place is a Thoreauvian sequence of Squid Game. I have so many welts, bites, stings, abrasions and bruises covering me that I look like a trespasser brought down by birdshot before being flogged. The pharmaceuticals are useless; swellings flicker and flare floridly across my hide like the bioluminescence on certain gaudy octopus that pulse and shimmer when goaded by a shark or an Attenborough.

To walk the wild Kimberley is to make innumerable staccato decisions – where to step, which piece of stone might tip you headfirst into a sandstone crevasse garnished with spinifex? Which route will lead into a tangle of vine and elephant grass? Which into head-high spinifex and a barrage of eager green ants? Even camel hate spinifex, each plant a supernova........

© The Age