In a rough tin shack perched on perfect white sand, Warwick Thornton reclines on a daybed holding a chicken.
It’s not a bad way to spend the day, really.
The acclaimed Indigenous filmmaker’s life had become too much. Too full. Too full-on. So he had to escape.
“It came from just living life a little bit too hard and realising that I needed to break some crazy cycles I got stuck into,” he said this week.
That isolation was on a remote beach on the Dampier Peninsula in far north Western Australia.
It was pre-coronavirus, and Thornton would end up spending almost two months there in a home with no electricity and only the land to provide sustenance.
He hunted and foraged, cooked, practised yoga, played the guitar and tended to his chickens.
“If you need to start looking after yourself, and you need to start getting stronger, land, for Aboriginal people,