NZ riders Brian and Layton riding Climies Track on Tasmania’s West Coast. Photo (and isn’t it a great one): Dan Burnaby

Imagine traversing across some of Australia’s wildest landscapes, covering distances visible from space each day under your own steam and carrying everything that you need with you. Imagine seeing the sun rise in Hobart and watching it set as you descend into Ouse at the base of Tasmania’s central plateau, 230km later. Imagine sleeping there under a picnic table, waking up before dawn, crossing the Central Plateau, walking your bike through an alpine bog and descending a fall line walking track to race to the Mole Creek Pub for dinner. That’s bikepacking the first two days of the Tassie Gift.

If you’re not familiar with the niche world of bikepacking, the term comes from the American for bushwalking, ‘backpacking’ and adds a bike. That’s the simple idea, add minimal lightweight camping equipment to a bike and go exploring. It’s been done for more than a hundred years in Australia.

Over the last decade the availability of bikepacking specific equipment, access to navigation tools and easily available information has seen bikepacking increase in popularity as a way to explore the wilderness and, for some, as a way to test their endurance.

For prominent bikepacker Emma Flukes, it seems to be big portions of both of those motivations. Flukes, a data scientist based in Hobart, linked together her favourite places to ride in Tasmania and called the imposing route that resulted the Tassie Gift. She invites riders to set off from Hobart at 6am on the first Friday in November in a ‘grand depart’ or riders can attempt the route at any time individually. There are no entry fees, no prizes and no one’s getting famous.

When I asked Emma about her approach to risk, and what it feels like to be outside the quantifiable she said:

“Rarely do you encounter a perfectly replicated set of conditions - countless independent and overlapping variables are always in play. That’s where experience and extrapolation step in.

I’ve moved a bike through the slowest of slow terrain (tens of metres an hour), with the associated physical, mental, and cumulative fatigue - this anchors one extreme. And I’ve accumulated data points against a huge range of terrain and environmental settings that allow me to assign virtually any set of conditions to some place in this point cloud. Mechanical mishaps are largely controllable, but the real uncertainty comes from when your body or brain unexpectedly falter.

What keeps me engaged is the constant problem-solving and recalibration on the move. It’s like solving a Rubik’s Cube whose faces change colour every time you look at it. I think it’s this endless puzzle with no one single solution that really drives me.”

— Emma Flukes

The Tassie Gift course figure eights across Tasmania. It starts from Hobart, heads east up through the central plateau across to the wild west coast. From that wilderness it launches back up to the plateau, intersecting the inbound route on the way to the north east, before turning south for the run back to Hobart. Over the 1800km of Gift, about the distance as the crow flies between Hobart and Brisbane, riders ascend more than 32,000 vertical metres - three and a half times the height of Mt Everest or fourteen Mt Kosciozkos. More than 1000km of the course is dirt roads, tracks, creeks, rocky spurs and precipitous loose descents. Taken as a whole, it’s a formidable undertaking described by Emma as ‘a scenic trip to hell’.

The rules require riders to attempt the course solo and self supported. Riders supply themselves with everything they need along the course from sources available to everyone. There are no support vehicles, no food drops, and no teams. Accommodation is where you find it, roadside ditches, shipping containers, under picnic tables and if you’re lucky pubs and historic hotels.

In 2023 thirty riders gathered by the start line at the Hobart Brewery. The 2023 field was mostly blokes, but the number of women involved in bikepacking is increasing. These events level the playing field between men and women, with women frequently taking out overall wins and setting course records. Bikepacking calls for more than just physical strength.

The setup of each rider’s bike reveals what its rider expects to see on the course, a response to the many variables, hazards and consequences they assess as likely to hold them back or see them unable to finish. At the start steel hardtail mountain bikes with bags lashed to rigid forks sidle up next to drop bar gravel bikes and carbon fibre cross country whips with minimal gear.

A well thought out bikepacking setup with a competent rider is an incredible machine - a long range human powered vehicle that can sustain human powered transit in unfamiliar terrain for hundreds of kilometres before needing resupply. You could think of a tuned bikepacking setup as a kind of force multiplying exoskeleton mech suit that you can build yourself at home and maintain with basic tools.

Successful Tassie Gifters choose bikes and equipment light enough to be ridden through Tasmania’s imposing topography and be singlehandedly pushed, dragged or dropped through obstructions and obstacles, over fences, into creeks and through tangles of trunks and branches. A lightweight setup is important, but it all needs to be robust enough to last through hundreds of kilometers without access to food, let alone a bike shop. That means carefully considering personal capabilities, the course, conditions, and the gear you don’t need as much as what you do.

Only about half of those who start the Tassie Gift will finish. Riders most commonly pull out citing mechanical failure, injury or a sudden catastrophic evaporation of motivation. In 2022 my attempt ended due to a compressed nerve condition known as thoracic outlet syndrome. Having had a taste of the Gift, I was always going to be back to finish that business and the failure taught me much of what I needed to succeed in 2023.

That’s me and NZ rider Layton having a laugh up Kunanyu / Mt Wellington. Photo: Dan Burnaby

Know your Goal

“Why am I here?” “Why am I even doing this?”

All bikepackers ask themselves these questions at some point, and if you’re a bushwalker or a fan of the survival TV series Alone then these questions probably sound familiar. If you’re an event manager, project manager, exhibition installer, art handler or someone working in their passion intensely for long periods for a deadline you might have a sense of this soul dissolving inner dialogue too.

If you find yourself pushing your bike up an endless gorse infested spur in the dark, being spiked everywhere from the chest down, travelling at 1kph with 100km to go before you can sleep for four hours in your bivvy sack inside a shipping container, you need a solid answer to these questions.

In all endeavours, in all human activity, there are many possible paths extrapolating out before us and one of them is the path to pulling out, stopping altogether in a moment of exertion and deprivation induced evaporation of purpose. If we’re going to get there we need to know where it is we’re heading and why.

We need a goal. And for bikepackers it must be a goal that shines through the dark fog of mental exhaustion to light up what’s left of our exhausted primal brains. For me on the Tassie Gift in 2023 that goal was to finish. Not to finish fast, not to tour and have a great time. I wasn’t trying to get internet famous by filming drone shots and nostril cam footage from a gopro on my handlebars. No. My goal was to finish.

Clarity of purpose baked into a goal is meaning you can memorise. We make thousands of routine and responsive decisions. A goal simplifies deliberation. Which of the available options gets us towards the goal best, or at all?

So when I rolled into Corinna on Tasmania’s west coast after a scorching day and 400km without a real meal I looked to the last ferry across the Pieman river for the day, and then turned my ravenous gaze to the restaurant and cabins up the hill.

Do I cross the river now, make a bit more distance and sleep somewhere on the other side, or do I have a steak and a frothy recovery drink, sleep in a cabin, dry my bivvy and ride on after a decent, perhaps decadent, sleep?

The steak was delicious. I’m not racing, I’m finishing. That meal and sleep set me up for the remainder of the route. Rest is sometimes what gets you there.

In an organisation or in any interesting endeavour there are thousands of decisions and variables to take care of each day. In organisational planning a goal helps us create objectives, narrow, measurable sub goals that progress us towards the big goal. When we’re engaging with and managing risk, knowledge and understanding of the goal is foundational and enabling. We can use our understanding of a goal to identify and deal with what may stop us from achieving it. We can identify the most probable and critical variables that could stop us and deal with them. Having a clear goal will help see us through a crisis too, when the unexpected happens we can adapt towards the goal.

Goals are the future state we want to achieve, they shape decisions and cause action. If we have capability and capacity at our disposal then goals function like wishes for the future that we can really have. Except we have to work for them. Let’s be careful what we wish for and set goals carefully.

Goals shaping action up Climies Track on Tasmania’s west coast.

Engage with risk

Once we have a goal, whether it’s finishing a bikepacking race, putting on an international exhibition or conducting a diplomatic event securely, we accept that there is the possibility that it might not happen and that it will take some coordination and action to achieve.

The future is uncertain, change is the only constant and cliches are common because there's some truth there. Part of our adoration and awe for great achievements is that they were achieved despite the chance of failure. When we set out with a goal to achieve we also have with us the possibility of failure, and isn’t that a beautiful part of doing anything at all?

Sometimes there is a balance or even tension between the goal, failure and action. The National Gallery of Australia displays works of art valued at $6.8 billion with enormous cultural significance. These works are available to visitors for free, every day of the year except Christmas day. That is part of the gift that cultural institutions give to us. Sure, as taxpayers we collectively pay but it takes more than dollars to make and maintain these precious places. At the National Gallery each day thousands of visitors walk through the doors to see phenomenal works up close. Providing that access securely involves navigating the tension between security and access.

To display works of art at all there is an acceptance of the possibility that the works could be stolen or damaged, depriving us and future generations of them. But the art wasn’t made to be stored in the dark, it wants to be seen and engaged with. We have to work out how to protect art and provide unencumbered access for visitors who want a wonderful experience.

I’ve worked with the National Gallery of Australia to carefully assess security threats and vulnerabilities, to develop a suite of controls and a security plan that supports the National Gallery’s goal of inspiring Australians through access to art that is also protected. Every day the National Gallery team monitor the security environment and scale controls to respond to changes. This keeps our National Collection secure and available to us now and next time you’d like a scene change on your lunchbreak or a day to immerse your mind in the creations of other humans.

The example of an art gallery demonstrates that we need to manage the possibility of failure in a way that does not get in the way of the goal we’re trying to achieve. If we descend into risk management speak for a moment, the controls we’re putting in place to control risks should enable us to achieve our goal, not unnecessarily impede us.

The National Gallery of Australia showcases a $6.8 billion National Collection to visitors.

If you’ve ever seen a new bushwalker on their first overnight walk you might have witnessed the basis for the saying ‘you pack your fears’. We’ve all been there. When we’re new to something there is a vast unknown that we can let ourselves be afraid of. One way to deal with this fear as a bushwalker or bikepacker is to buy and pack a piece of gear to solve the problem or discomfort that we’re afraid of. We add equipment to our bags to make us safer, more comfortable or because everyone else takes it. Then we might find that we’ve packed 25kg of fear based gear and we have to lug that up a mountain. That’s probably not the experience we were daydreaming of at the start, it wasn’t our goal. We didn’t achieve it.

This behaviour occurs in organisations too, when we seek to solve problems or protect against possible failure by adding things. Whether that’s adding protective equipment, procedures, rules, legislation, CCTV or guards. The default solution reached for is often to add something. But adding more guards doesn’t automatically provide more security, and adding more procedures doesn’t necessarily make an activity safer. But they do add to the administrative burden of staff and shrink budgets, contrary to the organisation’s goal.

Let’s consider first aid. There are long stretches of uninhabited wilderness in Tasmania. An injury while bikepacking out there is a possibility. The reflex might be to add a fully stocked remote first aid kit with a defibrillator, leg splint, eye wash and CPR mask. But think about that, all that additional weight means we’ll be slower, we’ll be out in the wilderness for longer and we’ll be more exhausted, making us more likely to be injured. A context aware bikepacking first aid kit will focus on probable injuries and illness and consider the other equipment that we’re already carrying. It provides what we need to patch up or contain illness to self extract to civilization and it fits in a small zip lock bag.

The thousands of variables and extended nature of bikepacking mean riders are engaging with both immediate operational and strategic risks. Photo: Dan Burnaby

Risk Management

I’ve avoided using risk management jargon, because I feel that it obscures the real intention and utility of risk management. Risk management exists to control or reduce the effects of uncertainty on goals. In other words, it exists to support organisations to achieve their goals by anticipating and controlling the things that might stop them. We’re all probably familiar with how risk management can sometimes be seen as a compliance process that functions only to satisfy a requirement rather than deliver enabling action. We’ve likely all read risk appetite statements that are low across the board alongside a strategic plan that aspires to great and novel things. It doesn’t have to be that way. All organisations have to do risk management, why not make it a positive goal enabler?

I love engaging with risk to deliver on goals and Culture Collab is here to facilitate risk workshops for cultural institutions in business planning processes, to conduct safety, security and strategic risk assessments and to craft risk appetite statements. We make risk enabling.

For the bikepackers that have made it this far, I hope sharing this experiential blend of personal and professional knowledge adds to your next ride.

Adam Samuelson