Lizzie Pook has travelled the world, but Western Australia inspired her most

Journalist Lizzie Pook has travelled the world, but there’s one surprising place she says blew her away more than anywhere else.

I didn’t set foot on a plane until I was in my late teens. Growing up in the south of England, family holidays were spent in crumbling Welsh farmhouses or trudging the wind-blasted shores of Norfolk.

I always yearned for far-off places, though, and would cut up holiday brochures and plaster every inch of my bedroom with pictures of white-sand beaches and mountains.

But when our dad died shortly before we were due to start university, my twin sister and I, reeling from the grief, decided to embark on an adventure. We flew as far as we could, to Australia, hired the only car we could afford and made it our mission to drive through the outback from Sydney to Darwin.

To say it was a slog is an understatement – we drove for over 12 hours each day, passing abandoned UFO research stations, dodging kamikaze kangaroos and even witnessing an attempted murder in a backpackers’ hostel in the Red Centre.

The experience was life-changing. I had lost a lot of confidence after my dad died, but with every mile on the clock and every inch of my skin warmed by the sun, I found that I was being pieced back together.

After uni, I took out a loan and ate beans on toast for a year so I could train as a journalist, doing work experience in any office that would have me, from fitness websites to “erotic” women’s magazines. It paid off and I ended up working in the magazine industry for years, covering all sorts of weird and wonderful stories, from naked protest groups in Paris to India’s first feminist motorcycle gang.

But it was only when I finally went freelance in 2015 that I found the flexibility to properly combine my two great loves: writing and travel.

Lizzie Pook in the Kimberley.

My first paid travel commission involved canoeing croc-infested waters in Botswana’s Okavango Delta. It was both exhilarating and terrifying, and as the huge predators slipped into the water and hippos grunted and blustered around us, I knew I’d found my happy place.

I spent the next few years travelling to some of the farthest-flung parts of the planet and writing about them for publications back home.

I’ve been lucky enough to see things I never would have dreamt of: Humpback whales breaching in inky Icelandic fjords; tigers feasting on their kills in Indian jungles; grizzly bears fishing the mist-cloaked waters of British Columbia, Canada.

One of my career highlights was watching a mother snow leopard and her cubs frolic on a mountainside in the foothills of the Himalayas.

Lizzie with guides in the Ladakh region of the Himalayas.

But my most memorable trip was probably when I joined an expedition ship on a journey to Greenland’s uninhabited east coast. We saw polar bears, arctic foxes and shaggy muskoxen; we charted fjords that hadn’t been visited since they were used by Inuit hunters hundreds of years ago.

That trip taught me the true meaning of isolation – we saw no other people or boats for 10 days and were totally out of the reach of radio and satellite signal.

I’ve learnt plenty of valuable lessons. Being a woman in a male-dominated industry takes a certain amount of resilience and the ability to adapt to different situations and personalities. I know my strengths, my weaknesses and what I’m capable of (turns out that’s holding my nerve when running into a stalking lioness while on foot in Kenya).

Lizzie Pook’s novel was inspired by the story of settlers arriving to WA’s Shark Bay region.

But mostly I feel privileged, especially with what the pandemic has done to the travel industry. I’ll never take my experiences for granted.

What I’m most thankful for is the trip that provided the spark of inspiration for my debut novel, Moonlight and the Pearler’s Daughter.

During a visit to Fremantle, I stumbled across a tiny exhibition in the Maritime Museum. Tucked away in a corner was the story of a family of British settlers who sailed across to Shark Bay, WA, in the 19th century to set up in the pearling industry.

Lizzie in Greenland.

On the same trip, I found an old signed copy of Port of Pearls by Hugh Edwards in a second-hand bookshop, about the early days of Broome and how it became the epicentre of the pearl shell boom.

I became obsessed with this dangerous industry, and tales of sharks, storms, shipwrecks and adventure. So I set off on my own research journey which, over the next few years, would take me to Broome, beyond to the Dampier Peninsula and all around the Kimberley, interviewing experts, walking the landscapes with Indigenous guides and trawling the archives of museums and historical societies.

The resulting book is a sort of feminist adventure story that draws on this research as well as my own experiences with grief and my love of the natural environment. Without the chance to travel, I never could have written it and for that I’ll be forever grateful.

This article originally appeared in Escape and was reproduced with permission