When Imogen Batt-Doyle follows the jagged red dirt trails through the Australian outback, she feels she is walking on the spines of great ancestral beings. Batt-Doyle, a Victorian outdoor educator who leads tours through remote landscapes, savours the feeling of being right-sized by nature. "Because you're so small in this vast expanse, that doesn't mean you're insignificant," Batt-Doyle told AAP while sitting in a car park in Far North Queensland, using a rare window of mobile reception.
"So rather than seeing the insignificance of myself ...
it's actually that I can see the greatness of what I'm connected to. "There's a beautiful sense of realising you're part of something so much bigger." It was during a hike along the Larapinta trail, which snakes 220km from Alice Springs to Mount Sonder in the Northern Territory, that Batt-Doyle began to find the words for this experience.
"As I was walking, that's when stanzas started conceptualising in my head ...
then it just fell out of me," she recalled. It took three years for Batt-Doyle's poem Larapinta (Red Dirt Dreaming) to fully form as she led hiking groups and watched sunrises over Mount Sonder, also known by its Aboriginal name Rwetyepme. The poem last week took out the fourth Cloncurry poetry prize, topping hundreds of other entries on the theme of "standing on the shoulders of giants".
The $10,000 prize was created by Cloncurry Shire Council to show there's more to the outback than mining and heavy industry. It is among th.