Circumcyclution

At sixty-one, Peter Freeman set out to do something few people would contemplate: cycle around Australia alone, unsupported, and at a pace approaching 200 kilometres a day.

Circumcyclution: Around Australia in Eighty Odd Days - Volume One begins that journey at Noosa Heads on Queensland's Sunshine Coast and follows Freeman north through tropical Queensland, across the vast spaces of northern Australia, and down the western side of the continent toward Geraldton.

The distances are immense, the days long, and the country constantly changing. There are busy highways and nearly empty roads, coastal towns and isolated settlements, tropical landscapes and arid expanses where food, water, accommodation, and the next opportunity for rest have to be considered carefully. Heat, wind, mechanical problems, road conditions, traffic, fatigue, and the accumulated effects of repeated long days in the saddle are constant companions.

Yet the journey is far more than an athletic undertaking. Freeman's route brings a succession of encounters with the people and places that exist beyond Australia's better-known tourist destinations. There are acts of unexpected kindness, curious conversations, encounters with wildlife, roadside oddities, moments of humour and frustration, and the peculiar intimacy with a landscape that comes from travelling through it under one's own power.

Freeman records the experience with the eye of both a traveller and an endurance athlete. Alongside the narrative are the practical realities of long-distance bicycle touring: navigation, equipment, food, weather, daily distances, climbing, speed, recovery, and the continual calculations involved in deciding how far to ride and where the day might end.

Volume One is the opening stage of a single continuous circumnavigation of Australia told across three volumes. It is a story of endurance and curiosity, of plans repeatedly reshaped by circumstances, and of discovering a continent kilometre by kilometre from the saddle of a bicycle.

For cyclists, travellers, endurance athletes, and armchair adventurers alike, this first volume begins an extraordinary journey around the edge of Australia-and into the unpredictable experiences that lie between one destination and the next.