My father-in-law was a well-known naturalist in South Australia. When I first met him it was a family custom to ‘go out bush’ every Saturday, for the whole day. So, Audrey would pack a thermos, sandwiches, some sausages and biscuits and off we’d go. This was an odd tradition to me having come from a city family that never went ‘out bush’.
Renmark sits on the edge of the desert on a bend in the Murray River, before it winds its way down south towards Adelaide and Lake Alexandrina. Little did I know when I fell in love in Adelaide with Dudley’s daughter that I was to get a real education about the bush, country life and ‘going off the beaten track’. I wrote about Dudley in the book Tackling Risk, A Field Guide to Risk and Learning (https://www.humandymensions.com/product/tackling-risk/). (pp. 149-152).
The beaten track is a well-worn track made by many of those before you. If you are in the bush on such a dirt track, it is generally detected by two worn divots in the soil made by a wagon, car or by some kind of traffic over many years. The language used ‘off the beaten track’ is a well-known metaphor across the world for deviating from a known path. For those who are adventurous, creative and not fearful of risk, ‘going off the beaten track’ is a good thing. Those who go off the beaten track know all about exploration, discovery and learning.
You can read about going off the beaten track here:
- https://www.thebrokebackpacker.com/off-the-beaten-path-travel/
- https://avi-loeb.medium.com/the-benefits-and-costs-of-deviating-from-the-beaten-track-eac0e9601359
- https://wandernorthgeorgia.com/just-off-the-beaten-path-a-philosophy-for-wandering/
- https://justgoexploring.com/destinations/off-the-beaten-path-travel-destinations/
For some, the philosophy of wandering is a good thing, it certainly was for Dudley.
A few philosophers have written about ‘going off the beaten track’ with some interesting experiences and observations. For example:
- Heidegger, M., (1950) Off the Beaten Track. (https://archive.org/details/offbeatentrack0000heid)
- Feynman, R., (2005) Perfectly Reasonable Deviations (From the Beaten Track)
- Peck, S. (1978) The Road Less Travelled. A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values and Spiritual Growth.
Whenever, we went ‘off the beaten track’ with Dudley, he called it ‘scrub rolling’. All you had to do was know your directions and where you had come from. In the bush its pretty easy to gain directions using the sun or a compass. When we were with Dudley, I had no idea of his knowledge and experience as a Naturalist till much later. You don’t know what you don’t know.
But Dudley, was never lost, he just didn’t know where he was going and her certainly knew where he had come from. Most of his guidance was about the feel of the bush, which he knew well for 50 years. Dudley lived to 94 years of age.
For a city boy, all of this was foreign and worked entirely on trust. I didn’t have to know what Dudley knew, I just had to trust that he knew what he was doing, in the middle of no-where. There’s a lovely Plaque commemorating Dudley by the river at Renmark.
Drift in Safety
The idea of drift is popular in safety, as if somehow people drift away from something aimlessly into dangerous places. It is something popularised by Dekker but goes back much earlier to Rasmussen. The idea is that people somehow drift away from a place where they were once safe and now are floating into risky territory. The metaphor appeals to safety because it reinforces its other myths about perfection and systems. But there is no drift when it comes to fallible systems and human persons. What do we drift away from? What a perfect system? Of perfect fallibility?
In this myth, we have the figurative language of ‘drifting to failure’, a metaphor safety loves because it helps conjure up feelings of superiority because safety knows the way. The myth is authenticated by the metaphor aimlessness where people act like ‘driftwood’ that washes on shore. It reminds me of the parable of the lost and found.
When you pick up on this myth (https://www.ohsrep.org.au/workers_subconsciously_drift_towards_unsafe_techniques_sn_737) you see all kinds of projections of ‘subconscious’ decision making. This from an industry that shows no interest in understanding the human or collective unconscious.
All of this is myth, concocted by Safety to enhance safety superiority (https://safetyrisk.net/the-seduction-of-drift-in-safety/). The language of ‘drift’ is enables by the projections and attribution of Safety, but it’s not real. It’s just a metaphor that Safety enjoys not a description of how people live life and understand being.
If we accept that humans and systems are fallible, it is just as easily envisioned that incidents and events are emergent properties of where we already are, there is no ‘drift’. Maybe those who wander off the beaten track are more resilient, more adaptable and more risk intelligent than those who are stuck in systems, regulation and the fixation of measuring safety performance.
It just depends what you concoct from the metaphors you like and the metaphors you reject to suit your worldview. In safety, these are anchored to behaviourism and deontology. This is what The Ethics of Risk is all about (https://www.humandymensions.com/product/the-ethics-of-risk/).
If you love a deontological ethic, then drift looks great. What a wonderful metaphor to concoct blame and then then spread the propaganda/slogans of ‘blame fixes nothing’. You couldn’t make this stiff up.
If however, you are interested in the road less travelled, in wandering off the beaten track, then maybe SPoR is for you. If you write here: admin@spor.com.au we can help you get started to move away from ‘drift’ and into wandering ‘off the beaten track’.
Prof. Robert Long
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