My rookie era: I lived off the land for a week – by day five I was naked, my clothes dangling over the campfire

‘So I was alone but not lonely, for I had my princess’: Andrew Herrick in his Melbourne back yard. Photograph: Charlie Kinross/The Guardian

At 15 I proved the maxim: “Hire a teen while they still know everything.”

That summer of 1971, I judged the world and concluded that civilisation was meh, and surely doomed. So with the zeal of the truly clueless I resolved to try living off the land, and left behind my comfortable family home and smirking parents.