Sophie Matterson (Head Girl, 2006)
Outback Odessey
Six years ago, as the world went into lockdown, Sophie Matterson set off to walk 5000 km across Australia, west to east, with five camels. It transformed her life in many ways, not least of which was meeting her partner Jimmy midway through her journey in the tiny South Australian town of Copely: population 83 (now 82).
Today, Sophie and Jimmy live on a property outside Kilcoy, north-west of Brisbane, raising thousands of cattle and one baby boy, Harry, born in 2025.
The decision to have children was an enormous shift for an adventurer with a chronic case of itchy feet, but Sophie credits her epic walk across the continent with bringing her to a place, and a person, that made it feel like the natural next step.
Sophie and Jimmy’s tale is the most unlikely of love stories. She literally wandered out of the wilderness and into his life in the midst of a pandemic in the middle of nowhere.
`He was running a bakery in the Outback, and I walked in for a coffee and a pie after being three months in the desert,’ Sophie remembers of the 2020 meeting. At the time, she was halfway through her trek, walking from Shark Bay in WA, to Byron Bay in NSW with camels mustered from the wild.
`If you take life in bite size pieces and just put one foot in front of the other a lot can be achieved.'
The first part of her journey had been anything but easy.
In April 2020, when Sophie set off from Shark Bay, on the edge of the Indian Ocean, the West Australian Government had just slammed shut its borders as the country plunged into lockdown. After years of planning, this was a potential disaster. But, as she was essentially locked in WA anyway, Sophie had little option but to start walking and hope that by the time she reached the South Australian border, she would be able to cross. It was a confronting and gruelling journey.
As if reflecting the strange retreat of Covid, the drought-stricken landscape offered up precious little sustenance for her camels and, for Sophie, the isolation was extreme, even by outback standards.
`I often walked for weeks without seeing a soul. There weren’t even any vehicles on the road,' she says.
Some nights, the hardship reduced her to tears over what she had done to her Bactrian camels—Jude, Delilah, Mac, Clayton and Charlie—and what she had done to herself. Crossing the Great Victoria Desert, she hit a potential breaking point that became a turning point.
`I think in life, I’d always had someone that could pick me up, or who I’d been able to rely on to get me through. It struck me in this moment that there wasn’t anyone else out there that was going to help me. It’s only me that can pick myself up off the floor and get myself going again. That was a really empowering realisation.’
The only solution was to keep putting one foot in front of the other and haul herself out of the depths of despair.
`Looking back, that is now a highlight—I can look on that and feel I survived it. Loneliness turned from a hardship to one of the most special parts of the adventure. If I had done the trip in a regular year, there still would have been a lot of the traffic that comes into the Outback in wintertime to explore. It was special I got to do this trek in the year of Covid.
`The isolation was a joy.’
Not too long after walking out of the Great Victoria Desert, Sophie walked into Jimmy’s SA bakery.
Isolation became a joy, rather than hardship
Sophie had planned to break her trek in South Australia's Flinders Ranges, where she would to agist her camels and wait out the height of summer.
Meeting Jimmy at this waypoint was an early sign this was to become a journey of two halves in much more than just a logistical sense. While the first part was defined by loneliness and hardship, the second would be marked by love and abundance.
After flying home to Queensland for the summer, Sophie returned in early 2021 to a vastly changed landscape. Seasonal rains had transformed the outback into a lush carpet.
`I had gone from these bleak dry barren plains and barren sand dunes to being coated in wildflowers and greenery and waterholes and bird life and flocks of budgies soaring overhead. To see that transformation of the landscape was amazing.’
Something else was blossoming too.
`When I recommenced my trip, Jimmy started visiting me every time I pulled up for a break. He would bring food supplies for me and hay for my camels. I walked 4,750km with my camels and Jimmy ended up driving 11,000km back and forth from his hometown to come and see me.’
As Sophie walked the final kilometres of her journey to the Pacific Ocean at Byron Bay, Jimmy was there, directing traffic around five camels who, much like Sophie, were a little spooked by the sights, sounds and speed of `civilisation’.
Fortunately, she had been somewhat prepared for the hubbub. Borders were reopened and lockdowns lifted during the second leg of Sophie’s crossing, but international travel was still off the cards, sending tourists flooding into the outback.
It set the stage for the strangest of encounters on the Strzelecki Track. One day a tour bus pulled up near Sophie and among the passengers who spilled out were Ruth and John Forrest, the parents of Liz Forrest, who had been BGGS Head Girl alongside Sophie in 2006.
`It was great to see them. It was bizarre to see them,’ she remembers.
Sophie had expected the crossing to be a `time-out’ from her busy career in film and television. Instead, it shifted the course of her life.
At journey’s end, instead of returning to her old life, she began a new one, returning with Jimmy to the Flinders Ranges in South Australia and helping in the bakery while she wrote her book, The Crossing: a memoir of love, adventure and finding your own path.
In 2024 Sophie’s father asked the couple to take over the family’s beef cattle farm near Kilcoy. `So we moved back and learned how to be farmers. The rest is history,’ she says.
The pull of adventure—to escape routine, travel light and sleep under the stars—is still strong, but the couple now need to factor in a tiny plus one.
`Becoming a mother was a huge decision in my life. I always worried that for someone like me with my itchy feet it would slow me down,’ Sophie admits.
It was a dilemma she once discussed with Australia’s original icon of wanderlust, Robyn Davidson, who travelled from Alice Springs to the Indian Ocean with four camels and a dog in the late 1970s. Her book Tracks inspired generations of adventurers and a 2013 film of the same name.
She and Sophie went camping together shortly after Sophie’s crossing, and the subject of motherhood came up.
`We sat around the fire discussing what a big life choice it was. Robyn had decided to not have children. Ultimately, I believe you can be happy whichever path you choose. Jimmy and I were in a strong relationship. We were used to working together as a team and I think that is often what parenting is. Yes, it slowed me down a little, but nowhere near as much as I thought. Now it is a joy to take Harry on adventures with us.’
`It’s now looking at what we can achieve in the near future. We are thinking maybe a Kayak trip. I always like animals-based adventures, but they require a lot of preparation. I’d like to do something with Bactrian camels eventually.’
While Sophie regularly delivers talks about her journey of discovery, she admits she often needs to slow down and listen to her own advice: `You never know where life is going to take you, and it doesn’t matter if you can’t see the full picture at the time. Anything can be achieved with the three Ps - Patience, Perseverance and Perspective.
`If you take life in bite size pieces and just put one foot in front of the other a lot can be achieved.’
Sophie with Harry on the farm outside Kilcoy
Sophie in her final year at BGGS, with fellow Head Girl Liz Forrest
Speech Day 2006