UNTOLD: Who lives with camels in the Australian outback?
Article Nature and wildlife Content
UNTOLD: How Bruce Lawson learned to walk again
14 APR 2025
What do Bear Grylls, Nedd Brockmann and a short, bearded South African man have in common?
While it sounds like the start to a poorly executed punchline, the Aussie runner and UK survivalist - along with walking guide Bruce Lawson - are all experimenting with the same thing. The impossible. Testing limits and trialling spirits.
But while Nedd and Bear are household names in Australia, Bruce has quietly pursued greatness without the accompanying production crew. Just a military issued backpack, binoculars and a pair of wooden walking sticks.The unassuming guide has hiked from Cape Town to Cairo – dodging bombs in Sudan and taking on a group of bandits with machetes in Kenya. He’s walked himself dizzy clocking up 1,000 kilometres around his backyard in just 20 days, before polishing off 30,000 burpees during his 2021 COVID quarantine in Adelaide. He has tested his physicality time and time again, raising roughly $9 million for charity in the process. It’s a calling that has become a career, with Bruce now spending his days traversing the ridgelines of the Flinders Ranges as a guide on the Arkaba Walk. A tenacious spirit, Bruce has single-mindedly built his life around the one thing he was told he would never be able to do.
Walk.
Bruce's tattooed arm
Bruce Lawson: Myth or Man?
Driving down the path toward Arkaba’s Homestead, framed by the Flinders Ranges, we swap stories of what we know about Bruce Lawson. We ponder for a moment if he is even real - suspicious he could simply be a culmination of half-truths and tales swapped over a cold beer at the local pub. Every town has a person like that – someone who is more myth than man, made of nothing more than rumour. But then all five-foot six inches of Bruce breezes out the front doors of the luxury lodge, the shrouding mystery dissipating before our eyes. What remains is a man that holds himself with a quiet confidence and a sturdy frame. His firm calves and sinewy knees hint at his day job – guiding visitors along the Arkaba Walk while leading the sustainability efforts across the sprawling 60,000-hectare private wildlife conservancy.
There is a leather strap fashioned into a necklace slung around his neck, holding a wedding band. It peeks out from behind his cotton work shirt when he reaches out his hands to shake, offering a pair of tattooed arms. The outline of Africa is stencilled on one, while two embracing hands are lovingly sketched on the other. A copper bangle wraps its way around his wrist, somehow completing the picture. For a man who seemed so unfathomable that we argued if he were myth, he sure does wear his heart on his sleeve. Literally. The embracing hands tattooed to his skin are that of him and his wife, who together called a tent pitched in the Kruger National Park home for 15 years. The copper band adorning his wrist? It was crafted by a tribal chief in Kenya. The chief used one of the coils from around his wife’s neck – a sign of deep respect – fashioning matching bracelets for Bruce and his best mate. They now have a pact that the first one to die gets the others’ band. “I won’t be giving mine over easily!” Bruce insists. The stencil of Africa inked into his forearm has, upon closer inspection, a tiny date etched into the centre. Nov 1999 - a nod to his daughter, Sahara Oasis. But what maketh this man is not memorialised in ink and metal. It’s deeper.
Bruce listening for bird song
From wheelchair to walking
Sat in a director’s chair, framed by the infamous ridgelines of the world’s oldest outback mountain range, Bruce explains how “as a kid (he) was given a very, very small percentage of survival (or) ever being able to walk again”. “I was only given a 10 per cent chance of being able to walk again, and it was less than 5 per cent that they said I would walk normally, without aid,” he shares. It’s hard to comprehend when we spent the better part of the morning trying to chase him up a steep hill, as he leisurely meandered to its peak. Bruce was in a car accident as a young child, the vehicle rolling over his body, shattering his pelvis and both femurs in the process. “I was unconscious for [about] 24 days,” he adds. “When I regained consciousness…it was six months [that] I was pretty much in traction and with weights pulling from both ends.” It was an undoubtedly gruelling process, but Bruce’s dry sense of humour pulled him through the worst of it. “I thought I would have been a lot taller, but they obviously didn't put enough weight there,” he cracks. “(afterward) I was never allowed to walk, so I was always on crutches."
Bruce stretches his legs out almost on instinct, crossing his ankles as he talks about the aftermath of the accident. It was this adversity at a young age that birthed a very specific attitude, the same attitude found in Olympians and endurance athletes. “One of my pet hates is the word can’t,” Bruce shares. “People say ‘I can’t’ but there’s no such thing as I can’t, there’s ‘I won’t’. “For me to go from that (being disabled) to where I am and what I have done now, there is no such thing as can’t.” He says age and experience have allowed him to reflect – connecting the dots between his start in life and his attitude towards it.
The muscles weren’t working for me to walk, and I wasn’t strong enough to stand up. Bruce Lawson
Traversing the peaks of Arkaba Station
“It’s always been there, that ‘never die, don’t give up’ attitude,” he says. “Man, there were lots of times in my life where I was like ‘just give this up’. “This is hurting, just stop and walk away. But I won’t, so that don’t give up, never die, push through attitude comes from that - because if I hadn’t had (that attitude) in those formative years, I wouldn’t be here today.” As a kid, Bruce developed a need to prove he was, in fact, able – despite society and medicine telling him otherwise. “You know, at school, I was told I mustn’t play rugby. So, what did I do? I played rugby,” he explains. “It’s that why, why can’t I do it? If you tell me I can’t do something, I am going to say ‘why?’ “Anybody and everybody can do something. Nothing is impossible. A lot of stuff is improbable, but it’s not impossible.” Everyday Bruce lives the impossible – his staggering step count only proves it. Walking has become almost meditative for the bushman, becoming a way in which he frames his relationship with the world. “When you’re driving, you’re an observer [but] when you’re walking, you’re a participant,” he shares.
You become part of nature when you’re walking…I have this life, I want to participate, and I don’t want to look at it from the outside. Bruce Lawson
The call of the wild
Following Bruce through a dried-up riverbed, the only sound for miles is the crunching of crisp eucalyptus leaves underfoot. That is, until Bruce calls back to a bird chirping in the distance, as though he had been in a two-way conversation this entire time. An avid bird watcher, he credits birds as his ‘eyes in the skies’. Warning him of predators, their song keeping him company in the isolation of the bush. Navigating our way through the prehistoric topography of Arkaba Station, it’s clear why this natural haven drew Bruce from the wilds of Africa to the outback of Australia. He’s such a part of this place, the wild, that he camouflages with it. He’s all tanned tones, grey beard and soft cargo greens. Even his walking sticks look part of the scene, just two glorified wooden poles. Here stands a man who can hear the call of the wild, a man who has found his way back to our beginnings. “In leading people through these wild landscapes, as much as we are rewilding Arkaba, we’re also rewilding the human spirit,” Bruce says. As Sustainability Manager for the property, Bruce spends his days protecting native wildlife from introduced species and rewilding the property after it was destocked back in 2014. People, he says, are a vital part of the conservation cycle. “If people don’t come here, we don’t have the money for conservation, so it’s very much hand in hand,” he explains. “It’s vitally important that people get in touch with the wilderness that you have inside. If we can do that, and we can connect any and every one of our guests to one single little facet of that wilderness within, then conservation will survive.”
Bruce says that the concept of ‘wilderness within’ is part philosophical, part theological. “Whether you come from the scientific ilk of evolution, or whether you’re religious…God went into the wilderness for 40 days to find himself; Aboriginal people go walk about to find themselves,” he shares. “What do we do? We come to these nice places like this, where you have a very short South African person like me who takes you out and reintroduces you to the wilderness area. (Visitors) might not know it, but that is what you’re doing when you come to Arkaba.”
Bruce and his trusty binoculars
Leaving a legacy
The act of walking – putting one foot in front of the other – is part of a larger, albeit far more confronting, philosophy for Bruce. “The only thing we’re really sure of when we’re born, is that we’re gonna die,” he says matter-of-factly. “How we do that, that’s the journey”. Bruce is spending his time between birth and death doing one, seemingly simple thing.
Defying.
Defying the odds. Defying biology. Defying attitudes. Even, some days, defying the nine-to-five. His hypothesis of life – that there is no such thing as can’t – seemed impossible, but he proved it through physical and mental trial. His journey is a living legacy – but what has he learned from it? “Never give up,” he shrugs.“Anything is achievable because it's when people give up that things stop.” “Conservation, for one thing…the reason I conserved what I had so territorially and so passionately, was so that Sahara could have that. She must continue that to her kids. We must continue that to their kids.” “I think, if that is my legacy and that can be carried forward…then I think as a species, as an organism on Earth, we actually do have a chance.” Feeling the itch to find the wilderness within you? You’ll remember your days on the Arkaba Walk for the rest of your life.
