BIOGRAPHY – Travel – Aboriginal –

The desire for great change by “going on a journey and becoming a man” is the undertow of writer Benjamin Simon O’Neill’s immersive memoir Searching for Pearls, which charts his adventures in Australia as a young man seeking to find his limits and discover his own truth. Beginning with his initial stuttering foray from New Zealand to Brisbane, ‘Searching for Pearls’ dives deep when O’Neill seeks out a job as a jackaroo on a remote cattle station, working in heat and dust alongside “men with the bark on” (as he notes artist Frederic Remington would have called them). O’Neill’s desire to grow the callouses of manhood and experience keep him travelling across Australia, finding strong connection with Indigenous peoples, becoming a pearl diver and through the appreciation of vast and rare Australian landscapes like Queensland’s Carnarvon Gorge.

• O’Neill, Benjamin Simon
• Adventure and adventurers — Australia — Biography
• Self-actualization (Psychology) — Biography
• Mind, body, spirit
• Australia — description and travel
• pp. 388 #280225