Barbara Schwarzmann is sixty-one and lives in a house built in 1936 in a village of five houses in the Bavarian Forest, a mile and a half from a border that no longer exists. It has wood stoves and no central heating, so every autumn begins with the same arithmetic: how many cubic metres, at what price, stacked where, and will it last until March.
She has never once run out and never once bought too much.
Before the walking
She has started and sold five companies. She studied accounting four nights a week at evening school while running one of them. For eight years she had her own interior design shop, buying second-hand furniture, restoring it and setting it against contemporary pieces — and she was one of the first people in that part of Germany bold enough to ask real money for it. Today it has a name and everybody does it. Back then she was explaining it to customers.
She sold that shop. When the buyer later asked whether she wanted it back, she said no.
“When the business is running, it gets a bit boring. Because then the developing thing is done.”
The walking
She has walked long distances on three continents, including Munich to Venice on foot. In Australia she has walked the Gibb River Road, the Larapinta Trail, and about a third of the Canning Stock Route across three attempts.
The method is unglamorous and she is impatient with anybody who wants it to be otherwise. Up at half past three. Thirty kilometres, or twenty if the ground is bad. Nothing in her ears, because the navigation app owns the battery. One outfit. Feet looked after before anything else.
She walks because at a steady pace her mind produces solutions. She has solved nothing of importance sitting down.
Bush Barbi
On a tag-along convoy in the Northern Territory in 2025 she was handed a UHF microphone and told that everybody in the group reports in. She had thought of the name two days earlier and put it away, embarrassed to have thought of it.
Then she pressed the button and said it out loud on an open channel, so that twenty-two strangers would make it exist.
It stuck before the convoy reached the roadhouse. It is her track name now, and whenever anybody asks, that is what she tells them — and she always lets them think the Australians gave it to her.
Now
She is between dogs. The last one was called Schorsch. She would like a Queenslander, one of the old high-set timber houses of tropical Queensland, and she has furnished one in her head across most of a desert.
The trolley is in the shed. Not put away for good — stored, the way you store a thing between jobs.
Dear Desert is her first book.