Pragmatic optimism: How seniors can make the most of life

The adventurer, presenter, film maker, speaker, environmentalist, business owner, husband and father of two sons is acutely aware of how human behaviour can affect our planet, and how small changes can make profound effects.

"I think famously, Anita Roddick said, 'If you think being small can't make a difference, try going to bed with a mosquito in the room', and I think she's absolutely right," he said.

Tim, aged 58, of Unley - a suburb just south of Adelaide's CBD - has done a lot of work internationally in environmental awareness, but also in applying lessons learnt to talk to corporate organisations and educators about purposeful leadership, problem solving, teamwork, change management, goal setting and sustainability.

In 2007 he famously attempted to recreate Sir Douglas Mawson's 1913 expedition in Antarctica, and in 2013 with a team of others successfully recreated Sir Ernest Shackleton's Southern Ocean crossing in a replica of the explorer's lifeboat, the James Caird.

Born in Manchester, England, Tim grew up in Malaysia, which is where he developed a love and appreciation for the environment.

"My parents would just say, 'off you go, see you later.' Snakes, monkeys, wild dogs, tree climbing, you name it; lots of jungle, and I developed a love of it and I developed being comfortable in my own company. It built a resourcefulness through overcoming problems, which you inevitably encounter when you're a kid out there doing things," he said.

But he also noticed the country's oil palm and rubber plantations. Sitting in the back of a car while driving through the endless oil palms, he'd ask his parents, 'Where's all the nature in amongst all this?'

"I suppose I had formative experiences in nature as a kid, but also was really made aware of just how big humanity's footprint was, and that hasn't gone away, it's only got more pronounced as I've gone to more and more remote places and I still see humanities footprint even there."

For seniors, his concept of 'pragmatic optimism' captivated an audience of about 180 - a great proportion of which were in their 70s and 80s - at a COTA SA event last year for International Day of Older Persons. The uplift in mood once he left the stage was palpable.

It's a methodology for approaching anything in life, whereby you start with defining exactly what your desired outcome or goal is, then working backwards by planning what steps you could take to help you achieve it. As you face challenges and stumbling blocks, you remind yourself of the end goal first and then modify the plan - 'what steps can I take to help me achieve it?'

It was an idea he relied upon as he recreated the historic Antarctic journeys of explorers Sir Douglas Mawson and Sir Ernest Shackleton, using very similar equipment and supports as they had at the time.

"I think all expeditions teach you very useful skills for any kind of project, and life is just a project really, isn't it?," he said.

"It's about trying to manage it to get the outcomes, and it's about breaking down the enormity of challenges into manageable pieces, taking the first step, controlling what you can, celebrating success along the way, understanding that the plan you had at the beginning is probably going to change almost immediately.

"A friend of mine in the military said - to paraphrase him - 'All military strategy survives until contact with the enemy.' You have a plan and that plan changes almost immediately, so you need to be flexible. Being flexible is all about understanding what you're trying to get achieved, and how you get there may need to change all the time. You're constantly querying whether there's a better way of getting the same outcome achieved, and you work back from the outcome you seek to achieve, of what you think it will take to achieve it."

For people where physical ability, energy levels and stage in life are real things they need to manage, he had this to suggest.

"Pick a thing and work out in your own mind what you think it would take to achieve it, and then do the math and just see whether you feel you've got the energy for that particular fight or that particular endeavour. If you don't, maybe think, 'Okay, well I need to get someone else in to help me with this,' or 'I need to maybe cut the cloth differently and think about something slightly different'."

"There are many, many things you can do. I don't think we really retire necessarily; you might retire from doing something that you did when you were younger, when you had more energy or whatever (your situation); you just change to doing something that better suits the stage of life you're in, and I think that's a nice way to look at things.

"I tend to do that with the expeditions. I tend to use all of those skills and then apply them to everyday life."

In 2023, he helped the Macquarie Island Marine Park, south of Tasmania, grow from 162,000 to 475,000 square kilometres.

While the land was World Heritage-listed, the surrounding water and its flora and fauna were not. A company had six per cent of Australia's exclusive economic zone as a fishing zone, while the remaining 94 per cent was unprotected.

The reason for getting this protection in place was because all the animals that live in the area get their sustenance from the ocean.

"The only things that are on land are really birds or seals or penguins, and they might go ashore to nest or mate, but all of their sustenance comes from the sea. They don't eat grass, they eat stuff from the ocean, so if you want to protect them you need the ocean protected, and that's what it was all about."

This serves two purposes; it means the fishing industry can still remain active, while the environment is also protected. Getting that to happen required a lot of strategic partnerships and putting forward a case that appealed and made sense to the people affected.

He worked with Pew Research, Australian Marine Conservation Society, a group of environmental NGOs collaboratively called Save Our Marine Life, and federal water and environment minister Tanya Plibersek.

"We put a really strong case forward. We dealt with the fishers and said, "Look, if we can show you the science around the fact that if we protect most of the ocean down there, the bits you get to fish are a relatively small bit," and in fact they... got one per cent more than what they already had. We got the other 93, which I think is a pretty good outcome," Tim said.

"You're going to get good yields in the bits you get to fish, and yet the rest will be protected from perpetuity, which is also a good news story.

And how did he going about being successful with this? "Partner with the right people, understand what it is you're going for, go in understanding what you need to know and how you're going to pitch your argument, and do it with conviction."

A local project his wife Elizabeth Blumer and he working on is the Forktree Project, which is a registered charity aiming to return a 133-acre former pastoral property overlooking St Vincent Gulf in the coastal town of Carrickalinga - about 73 kilometres south of Adelaide - back to nature.

According to its website, this involves re-establishing tens of thousands of native trees and shrubs on the property, which will in turn bring back native animals, insects and birds as well as sequester tens of thousands of tonnes of carbon. To put it in perspective, the average Australian's carbon footprint each year is roughly 25 tonnes.

There is a tiny house on wheels that can be stayed in.

"You go to bed looking at the sun setting into the sea, and then you try not to look too carefully at all the work you've got to do, otherwise you don't enjoy that moment."

Community groups are welcome to go along for working bees and assist with different activities. For example, at the moment they're building more tables in the nursery, which only requires the skill level of being able to hold a hammer.

There's also nursery work, such as taking tiny saplings out of seed trays and putting them in individual pots. There, you can sit down with music playing and have plenty of opportunity to drink coffee and chat and eat cake.

"There's lots and lots of things that people can do, and we can make it relevant to their level of interest and or physical or whatever ability."

For more information, visit theforktreeproject.com