If You Fall In You’ll Dissolve: Beau Miles’ Quest To Paddle The Sickest Rivers

BAD RIVER – The Cooks River: Australia’s sickest urban river is located in the glamorous and famously pretty city of Sydney. This makes sense, given it’s also Australia’s largest, hard-surfaced, drainified, leaky-sewered, city.

In his little red kayak, Beau Miles traces all 23 kilometers of the Cooks River, inspired to do so after paddling his boyhood river over four days in the name of backyard adventuring. Finding it not only challenging, but shocking in terms of its ill health, Miles since shifted from wanting to see the wildest and most pristine places on earth, to the most degraded and sick. This is a journey of ill-health, sadness and hope; putting a test to the local saying, ‘if you fall in, you’ll dissolve’.