The Backyard Adventurer

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Beau Miles: And remove some of the lies that you might have probably put to those things. Don’t take all of the things that will make it easy, just leave them at home. And you know what? You’re gonna have an adventure because of it.

And so students every year would make a paddle out of whatever wood they could get a hold of that they couldn’t buy. They’d have to get it from their granddad’s shed or their grandmother’s cupboard or on the side of the road or wherever. Go and see a hardware and see what pallets are at the front. And so our students did this for years, and I thought, “Well, I could make a film about just making a paddle or I could make a paddle that has a particular story and then I go on paddle with it.” So, I decided to just use junk wood that I could find between the train station and work that I used to commute to, and so I did that. Yeah, I just made it out of old wood that I could find between my 2.2 kilometer walk between the train station and my office and away I went. It was great, I loved it, and it’s actually one of my, I think, the most underrated film on my channel I really like. Beau Miles: Yeah, yeah, and look, we’ve got a good police force here and I know that… Yeah, there was chances out that every chance in the world that that day I was gonna get pinged. I didn’t expect to get pinged so early to be honest but… Yeah, and you just talk your way through it, and even if they let you go, great, and if not, you gotta modify your journey and I don’t mind that either. Beau Miles: That’s right, yeah, yeah. I chose the shovel because it was very agricultural and I thought, “Oh, well, I kinda look like I’m part of the landscape if I’m lumping a shovel around. If I had anything else with me, then I look like a proper weirdo.” Q: In your book, you discuss the power behind going to new places and how the source of that power comes down to invisible meanings that we conjure. How do those invisible meanings play into your personal philosophy on pursuing adventure?Beau Miles: Yeah, I love beans too, and I still do. People ask me that all the time, and… One of the big critiques of my film of eating my body weight in beans, which was 190 tins if I remember, was that I didn’t cook them properly like you did. You had the proper beans that you cooked up yourself, that you made a lovely sauce for or brine or something, and away you go, whereas I just bought store-bought tin beans and mixed them up and I ate as many as I could. I did that for a reason because of the simplicity of it and the fact that I could weigh things and measure things and all that, rather than having to do it on the fly.

Avid runner. Award-winning filmmaker. Self-described oddball. All-around adventurer. Beau Miles is many things, but he’s no stranger to gallivanting around the globe. Recently, however, after years of running, kayaking, hitchhiking, and exploring around the world, Beau has settled down in his native Australia and is now devoting his time to finding adventures closer to home. Sound boring? It’s anything but. If a conversation is by definition a dialogue between two or more entities, then I live on a small property with hundreds of chatty, introverted things. I must look bonkers to peeping toms, but I'd feel even more bonkers going about my solo days in silence. Skulking about the place as if an apple tree isn't worth having a chat with. Beau Miles: Oh, I was just opportunistic, mate. I’d drink water out of cow troughs or whatever water I could find on the side of the road. And the big one, which people are disgusted by, these old coke bottles and Pepsi cans or whatever, whatever was a half-drunk bottle of Coke or something, I’d drink the rest. For some weird way, I trusted carbonic acid as being so evil that I thought, “It’s not gonna have any pathogens in it, I’ll just drink someone’s leftover coke.” That was one, it was calories, and two, I figured out, well, maybe no baddies are living in this water, and it seemed to work. Create an outdoor chalkboard for your kiddos to draw on! Did you know that there is great physical benefit for children to draw on a vertical surface? I love how to turns your fence into an integral part of the outdoor living room. My guest would say that you don’t actually have to wait until your next big trip nor go far afield to mix things up, and that adventure can be found right where you are, in your ordinary routines, the everyday landscape of your life, and even DIY projects, if you decide to approach them in a different way.

Customer reviews

A: It takes a natural curiosity to want to shift from classical, storybook adventuring to doing odd things close to home with few resources and a strange script. More to the point, it takes discipline, because going to exotic, faraway, newish places tends to be easy, subscriptive, and innately attractive, so you have to put in the hard work to make the shift. How much space do we have available for these adventures? No matter what the size, it would be great to have activities to help your kids explore and imagine and discover new ideas and skills. This appraisal strikes me as not only more relatable, but more accurate and powerful than often grandiose perceptions of adventurers. Because large or small, Beau’s escapades reject the idea that adventure is separate from, above or somehow an escape from everyday life or identity. He instead embraces adventure as an expression of who we are - and, by extension, the places that have shaped us.

Like many, many people I came across Beau Miles during COVID-19, through his Trials of Miles video. Like many, many people I fell easily in love with his affable, no-nonsense, slightly unhinged way of looking at things and putting expectations on their head. What can we create to encourage play and physical development for my kids? It is so great to see our kids play and and at the same time develop their gross motor and fine motor skills, their cognitive thinking and planning skills, and even their executive function skills. All they need is a space to do it in! Where he does break away from retelling his videos, talking about his upbringing, his flirtation with a life in an unnamed special military regiment (I'm assuming SASR) and his internet dating exploits which led to his current marriage, I was rapt. He has such a fun, easy-going and yet incredibly deep way of looking at things and explaining them. A: Everything. If you’re not genuinely curious about a thing, it isn’t worth doing as you’re kidding yourself. Audiences know if the storyteller is there for the right reasons — authenticity is key.A: I’ve had the luxury of large-scale, non-local adventures as a counterpoint to local and small ones. So, while I’d love to say that local and small can tap into my sense of identity and the world in much the same way as faraway places and experiences, I’m not sure. What is important with all of these experiences is a sense of physicality, a different point of view — even up a tree next to my house — and a sense of depth in terms of how I want to tell the story of the so-called adventure.