How do you search for someone who doesn’t want to be found? Expanse: Nowhere Man on the search for Robert Bogucki

When so many of us feel lost, just how far would you go to feel found?

Season five of the ABC‘s award-winning Expanse podcast explores the need to be lost, and found, and the saga of Robert Bogucki in Expanse: Nowhere Man across three decades, two continents and a cast of colourful characters as host Erin Parke investigates why someone with everything to live for would gamble with death in one of Australia’s deadliest landscapes?

Erin Parke – image supplied

In 1999 a young American dumped his bicycle and walked out into the Great Sandy Desert in remote northern Australia, triggering one of the biggest searches Australia had ever seen. He was an Alaskan firefighter, and police were shocked to discover he had gone into the wilderness alone, and on purpose. Why would you do such a thing? And how do you search for someone who doesn’t want to be found?

In 2022, Erin Parke, a national regional affairs reporter based in Broome in Western Australia, became obsessed with that man, Robert Bogucki, and the associated international media circus around finding him.

She said:

“Before I was a news reporter I was a barmaid in Broome, and the Robert Bogucki story was the kind of yarn that locals would laugh about over a beer.

I never expected that years later I’d develop a full-blown obsession and travel across the world to meet the mythical desert survivor himself.

There are a lot of parallels with what played out with Christopher McCandless, from Into the Wild, except this guy survived, and came back from the brink of death.

So there’s a lot that’s surprised me about this story- the superstition, the scandals, and the fierce public debate over whether it’s selfish or inspired to confront death in the wilderness the way Robert Bogucki did.

I think a lot of us like the idea of ‘getting away from it all’ and doing a digital disconnect, but not many of us would be willing to put our lives on the line to do so.

It prompted everyone involved to think about life, death and who we are when everything easy is stripped away.”

That expanse has taken Erin from the baking heat of the Great Sandy Desert to the frozen heart of Alaska. The Great Sandy Desert is hiding other secrets too of death and survival. Why are so many young men disappearing in this vast expanse?

In Expanse: Nowhere Man, Erin asks why some people are pushed to lose themselves in the wilderness on a search for meaning.

Episodes of the new series are available now: https://ab.co/Expanse