Yachtie continue highway odyssey | Canterbury News | Local News in Canterbury

Former Christchurch sailing champion Bret de Thier competed all over the world in regattas, but his most challenging odyssey was on the road with a camera last year ? a 22,000km drive around Australia.

The result, launched in Christchurch this week, is a 192-page pictorial book Highway One Australia ? a sequel to a successful similar book de Thier did on New Zealand's highway one in 1999.

The head of the design section at Auckland University's Elam School of Fine Art, de Thier spent three months on the road, starting and finishing on Sydney's 10 lane motorways but spending weeks on dusty outback tracks. The trip "across the top" from Cairns to Darwin, on which his wife Rosanna accompanied him, was the most interesting, said de Thier, who won eight national Olympic class sailing titles and went to three Olympic games.

"The roads were rough and fording rivers and seeing crocodiles in the wild was quite fascinating," he said. "I got right round with not so much as a puncture or stone chip, so I was extraordinarily lucky," he said.

His wife may not share the sentiment ? she encountered both a snake and a large frog in one outback toilet.

"In some places in north Queensland highway one is really just a couple of tyre tracks in the dust, which makes me wonder if a good rain shower came through the road would completely disappear and you wouldn't know where you were," he said.

When they were driving across the top of Australia they found the landscape almost had a mystical feel to it, he said.

"Even after a day's driving we didn't even bother to turn the stereo on. "We had a good stereo and good tapes but it was almost as though to put on music would be an intrusion on this ancient landscape, and we were quite transfixed by it."

Even though one stretch of the Nullarbor was nearly 150km dead straight, de Thier said he wasn't bored at any stage. He used a Hasselblad XPan panoramic camera backed up by two 25-year-old Nikons. One of his biggest problems was photographing in temperatures that reached 46deg, although he had a fridge for his film in his 4WD Kia.

"Parts of northern Australia were so damn hot I had to be quick about taking photographs, because the camera had a black body and would heat up very quickly and could damage the film."

He may have been a long way from the sea most of the time, but the book has been floated by yachties: nLast year's yachtsman of the year Neville Crichton lent him the vehicle for his trip. John Bertrand, the 1983 Aussie America's Cup winner, has offered to speak at any Australian launch for the book. A member of Bertrand's famous crew, photo-journalist Will Baillieu, wrote the foreword.

Olympic yachtie John Douglas scanned the transparencies. "All these yachties involved with a road book ? I haven't figured out what it all means!" said de Thier.