Barbara Schwarzmann walks long distances on her own. In 2025 and 2026 she made three attempts at the Canning Stock Route in Western Australia — 1,850 kilometres, fifty-one wells, and the most remote vehicle track on earth.
She has not finished it yet. What she did instead was bury ninety days of her own food along it at twenty-kilometre intervals, walk six hundred and sixty kilometres of the Kimberley with a pram, catch rain in a cup on top of a sand dune for two days, and get carried out of the Great Sandy Desert with a fever by rangers who arrived with steak.
Dear Desert is the book about all of it.
Twenty centimetres is the difference between the floor of a wheel rut and the axle of her first trolley. It ended two years of planning in a single morning.
The principle, and what happened to it
She designed the whole expedition on one rule: nobody should ever have to come for me. Anything anybody gives you is a present, and a present is lovely, and a present is not a thing you can build a supply chain on.
Then she walked into the one country on earth where every single vehicle that passes you slows down, winds a window down, and asks whether you are right for water.
The Walks
The Canning Stock Route, the Gibb River Road and the Larapinta — the distances, the equipment, and the ninety holes in the ground.
Read more →Gallery
Photographs from the track — the caches, the well markers, the trolley, the Kimberley.
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