Over the past 35 years I have sought to deepen belonging and connection to place — in collaboration with an alive world and in community — through writing, walking, dancing, designing, planting and teaching. In this exploration I acknowledge the teaching and guidance of the Country I have always lived within. My life has flowed alongside the water systems of Birrarung (Yarra River) and Neerim/Narm Narm (Port Phillip Bay), the great Songline of Wurundjeri lands that opens into the vast circle bay that laps upon Bunurong Country.

I honour my family, friends, teachers and students as ongoing participants in this exploration. I recognise the deep influence of my activist parents, whose passion and commitment remain an inspiration, the children whom I co-parent, whose joy and energy are food and medicine, and the many friends, known and unknown, whose dedication to birthing another world nests my efforts into a beautiful tree of meaning. And I acknowledge the mysterious and beautiful agency of an alive world in guiding these efforts.

My PhD in Creative Writing explored the embodied experience of the alive world, otherwise known as the archetypal or imaginal realm. This research ranged across neuroscience, somatics, poetics, psychology, Western philosophy, Indigenous knowledge systems and shamanistic metaphysics.

I have studied internationally with Jungian psychologists Arnold and Amy Mindell, writers David Abram and Bill Plotkin, animist scholar Josh Schrei, and I am a longtime student of deep ecology, bioregionalism, and permaculture. I am profoundly grateful to have learned from Indigenous elders over the past 25 years, including Dulumunmun (Uncle Max Harrison) and Uncle Ian Hunter. I acknowledge Martin Prechtel, Ursula le Guin and Alan Garner as my greatest influences.

My memoir The Comfort of Water: A River Pilgrimage, published by Transit Lounge, is an account of my 21-day journey from the sea to the source of the Yarra River, following the length of a Wurundjeri Songline. This book has been on the curriculum in universities around Australia, and was shortlisted by the State Library for the 2012 Year of Reading Award. My writing has also been featured in a variety of publications, including a chapter in the book series Kinship: Belonging in a World of Relations, edited by Robin Wall Kimmerer and others.

I have a Masters in Education (Social Ecology) with undergraduate studies in Architecture and Landscape Architecture. I’ve worked as an urban designer, permaculture teacher, bushland revegetator and as the founding placemaker at Village Well, one of Australia’s leading placemaking firms. Work in the community arts sector has included initiating the Collingwood Children’s Farm winter solstice bonfire, founding the CERES Harvest Festival, and twenty years devoted to interweaving Wurundjeri and activist stories into the Return of the Sacred Kingfisher Festival.

Currently I live in community on the banks of the Birrarung in the mountain village of Warburton. In this place I continue my learning as a pilgrim, walking the forest and river paths, and negotiating with the birds for a share of the food forest I plant and tend.

Walkshop with Maya Ward

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