PROFILE
OUTBACK
MIKE
Air Force pilot, survival expert, filmmaker, adventurer. It takes a lot of words to describe Michael Atkinson, and a lot of confidence to be him.
Words Megan Holbeck Photos Michael Atkinson (unless otherwise credited)
I
nterviewing someone is supposed to be a process of uncovering what makes a person different to (and more special than) you. But with Outback Mike (aka Mike Atkinson), the interview begins with discovering how similar we are, at least in our backgrounds. He’s only a year older than me, and also grew up in suburban Canberra’s mighty Weston Creek, with us both attending local government schools. We even had brief modelling interludes, my role in a 1980s Thai TV commercial (sporting a pink beret and lots of blue eye shadow) matching his fleeting appearances in Canberra ads and fashion parades. But, aside from being married with kids, that’s where the similarities end. The differences between Mike and I (and just about everyone else on Earth) are contained in the following life summary. He was a defence force pilot for fifteen years, doing everything from helicopter peace-keeping missions to breaking the sound barrier in fighter jets. Mike is a survival expert who has lived off the land for months at a time, with skills learnt directly from Indigenous folk across Australia. He’s also a filmmaker—Surviving the Outback was his award-winning first film, selected for the Banff Film Festival—and he’s partway through making his first feature. (He is cameraman, writer, director, producer, on-screen talent and everything else.) And he’s also an adventurer, one who has skied solo across Iceland, trained camels in Saudi Arabia and headed off across the Dannah Sands. Mike’s latest expeditions have been solo trips escaping historical survival scenarios: Sailing an improvised raft up the Kimberley coast then trekking out; and a 1,500km trip up the Great Barrier Reef in a home-made dugout canoe. I suspect Mike will soon be a big name in the TV/adventure field too. He finished his Great Barrier Reef trip in August 2021. When we meet fourteen months later, he’s working on his book’s second draft, and the long, painstaking process of turning footage into a film. This year will be big: He’s self-publishing his book to coincide with a planned year-long film tour, and planning to grow his YouTube channel massively.
50
WILD
My family has just got hooked on Alone, a winner-takes-all reality TV show where ten individuals compete to last the longest living off the land, solo, in remote wilderness. When I meet Mike, I immediately think he’d be a perfect contestant. Then I see a trailer for the next season, filmed in Tassie: In one shot there’s someone who looks suspiciously like Mike …
THE FOUNDATIONS But for all the amazing stuff he’s done and is doing (yes, my Alone suspicion has been confirmed!), most startling to me is Mike’s confidence. It’s not arrogance, just a supreme belief in his skills, competency and ability to manage risk and handle situations. The most obvious example of this is his twin directions in life—aviation and survival filming—and their origin: Watching the movie Top Gun and the TV series The Bush Tucker Man as a teenager. I put it to Mike that a lot of people wanted to be Top Gun’s Maverick, but not all of them trained as fighter pilots, and he’s a little perplexed. “I probably had an ill-founded self-confidence in my ability to achieve things. I don’t know where that came from. It’s kind of weird, because I always assumed that I could do whatever I wanted to do.” Mike and I are talking as we walk towards Brooklyn on the Great North Walk, a beautiful stretch dropping down to the Hawkesbury’s Jerusalem Bay. When we met at Cowan Station, one potential source of confidence was obvious. Mike’s a good-looking man, a mix of Zoolander doing a permanent ‘Blue Steel’ mixed with Rami Malek playing Freddy Mercury. And although it will make me sound pervy, a quick (and purely professional) perusal of his Instagram page reveals that he’s quite a fit human. Physical attributes only get you so far though, and I spend most of the walk trying to work out the nature/nurture confidence split. First stop is 1980s Canberra, a hotspot of mullets and desert boots. Mike was a confident, competent kid and things came easily to him, both academically and physically. He was (and still is) deeply uninterested in social structure and
