Time in nature is medicine

After travelling around Australia, I got kind of sick of the beaches and the sunshine. So I thought, "I'll go to Tasmania", even though I didn't know anything about it.

I came off the ferry in 1987, and I stayed at a youth hostel. There was an Australian bloke who was going to the Walls of Jerusalem the next day, and he said, "Do you want to come with me?". I'd never done any bush walking and I didn't have any gear, so I walked into the Paddy Pallin in Launceston, bought all my gear, went with him to the Walls of Jerusalem and stayed in Tasmania for the next six months bushwalking. 

I also met my wife in Tasmania. She was holidaying here from New South Wales, rafting on the Franklin River. We got to know each other, stayed in touch, and when I came back to Australia I married her. 

First we lived in New South Wales, but when our kids were very small, we decided we needed to move back to Tasmania, because it seemed like the perfect place to raise our kids. We’ve lived here 20 years now.

I started exploring the mountain with the kids, but then when they grew up and started living their own lives, that’s when I really started walking on the mountain. 

If you work in mental health, you know that research actually shows you that for a lot of people it is just as beneficial to connect with nature as it is to take certain medication for certain mental health conditions. 

For example, in lower-case depression, a walk on the beach or connecting with nature on the mountain does just as much as maybe taking a tablet a day for some people. That research has been done and that's proven without a doubt.

I have quite a demanding job dealing with people's mental health. So I need to look after my own mental health. And that's why I go up the mountain to connect with nature.

The way I think of it is, wherever you go on bushwalking on the mountain, you're going to rock hop because there's a lot of rocks there. So you need to concentrate on looking where you're going and then you're listening around and seeing what's happening.

All of this means that you don't have any brain capacity left to think about your worries, to think about what's going on outside of that, because you're concentrating on where you're going. And that disconnection of what is going on away from the mountain is just so good for me.