ABSTRACT

This chapter presents insights from walking in both contexts as a way of coming to understand own place in two very different de-populated homelands. It considers the idea of organization in two ways and discusses the tangible organization of how one comes to hike and camp in the wilderness as a woman who goes alone. The chapter interrogates the rather less tangible organization of our own identity through hiking in places that are conceptualized as either colonized and/or colonizer. It considers how Scottish identity is organized through everyday discourses of having been colonized, and in particular the use of Englishness as a foil against which to define the self. Hiking in Scotland felt very different from hiking in Australia. There were no songlines but there were lifelines. The chapter wonders whether both organizing hiking gear and organizing one’s identity through hiking are perhaps ways of finding flow.