Review: Expanse: Nowhere Man
The best way for me to come out of an emotional funk is to go camping. Growing up, being in the outdoors was as routine as blinking. Even though I went through my fair share of grumbling about it, I always come back to it. A good book, a comfortable seat, and the whisper of a breeze through the leaves is my best way to reset.
This is true for many people, with degrees of variation. For some, it’s a porch swing, and for others it’s backpacking through the wilderness. What happens, though, when the personal journey of connecting to nature and survival, becomes so much more than an individual experience?
In 1999 American Robert Bogucki set his personal belongings down on the side of the road and set off into the Great Sandy Desert of the Australian wilderness. Cutting through the northwestern portion of Australia, this isn’t the Australia that many people think of. It’s not the metropolis of Sydney, or even the sub-tropical scrub full of kangaroos that captures more of the foreign imagination. This is the harshest part of Australia, and one of the harshest places in the world.
Robert setting off into the desert triggered an international search and rescue, that ultimately brought him home – but at a cost that was more than monetary. Sure, many people were upset with this American seemingly disrespecting people’s time and money to go off on a spiritual journey, but what’s more was the depth of impact to the people who have always been there and have always been forgotten.
Expanse: Nowhere Man is a podcast by Erin Parke. This story sits on the ABC Australia’s Expanse feed. The ads on Mushroom Case Daily (now The Case of…) had me hooked, and I was hungry for each episode of this incredible podcast.
What starts off as a bit of a mystery, turns into a much deeper story that connects the tendrils of humanity with the very roots of the Earth. What is land, to the people who inhabit it? What happens when old ways and the rush of colonial modernity collide? This is not a story unique to Australia, but Australia’s chapter is its own. As every public resource, and more, were spent looking for the foreign Robert – to this day Aboriginal people go missing in the desert, or beyond, with less of a crash, and barely a whisper.
What this podcast does through the story of Robert Bogucki and Aboriginal elder Merridoo Walbidi is more than it set out to do. In these six episodes there are unrealized questions nestled in a gorgeous, gripping narration. This is the story of a journalist digging without a guide, to find cushioned between the questions of “Why” about Robert’s life and choices, another, more impactful contrasting “Why” of the Aboriginal community that, despite their own history with foreigners– stepped in to help this man almost three decades ago. Every piece of this story, each about 30 minutes or so, brings you texture of time, narrative, with layers of human grief and connection.
We can’t change the past. We can’t change that Robert came back when others didn’t. We can’t change that the same things happened to indigenous communities across continents and time.
What we can do is realize that the land we stand on has a history beyond what we have been told, and beyond what we can know. While it seems so simple to walk into nature to find oneself, the question of survival isn’t just personal. It’s human. The story stretches out through millennia – not just back, but forwards. What we can change is how we react, how we interact, and how we make strides towards the thing deeper than we can know.
Listen to Expanse: Nowehere Man below.
Presented byErin Parke
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