Me with Mt Feathertop behind, 2016
About
Chris Rishworth
Bikepacker, wildlife photographer and van dweller.
The van life didn’t start with the van.
At 19 I bought a car for $625 near Boston and drove it all the way to Canmore in the Canadian Rockies, where I stayed on and worked as a kitchen hand. Cheap wheels, long empty roads and working wherever I land: that’s been the pattern ever since.
These days home is a small van in the Australian bush. I travel by van and by loaded fat bike, and I film and photograph whatever I find: the roads, the camps and an awful lot of birds.
On the bike
I started bicycle touring at nine, on a BMX, with my brother, who was 14. As an adult I’ve been touring Australia by bike for well over a decade, early on towing a trailer with solar panels for power, then on a Koga touring bike, and now on a black fat bike with a belt drive and full bags. Those early touring films on Bikepacking365 have been watched hundreds of thousands of times.
Bikepacking
Behind the camera
Wildlife is the other half of it. I shoot birds on a Sony A1 with a long lens, and there are nearly 4,000 of my photos on Flickr going back to 2011. Living in the bush helps: a wallaby and a currawong turn up at the van asking for food, and a mob of magpies wakes me every morning demanding breakfast.
Wild AustraliaA few things you might not know
- I represented Australia in cross-country (Nordic) skiing: at the 1989 World Junior Championships in Vang, Norway, and at the 1990 Canadian National Championships in Ottawa, where I placed 19th.
- I won the Young NSW cherry-pip spitting competition with a 14-metre spit, then won again in Manjimup, WA.
- In 1989 I was a computer operator on VAX machines running Unix, back when a computer was a whole building.
Work together
Tourism regions, parks, outdoor brands and fellow creators: if you’d like to work together on a film, photos or a ride, I’d love to hear from you.