Tom Wolff is co-founder of Revive The Northern Rivers, an organisation that raises money and awareness in support of the natural beauty of our region. Tom met with Sara Browne to talk about past and future adventures and the real and metaphorical rivers that lead to oceans.

I wanted to be a pilot from about aged five to nine. I had my whole bedroom covered in posters of planes. I went to the air show in Melbourne and I remember I got to go into the cockpit. That was 1999, two years before September 11. It might have been one of the last times people ever got to do that. We got to sit in the cockpit while they landed.

I don’t know where that interest in planes came from. I didn’t get to go on planes very often as a child, there were no pilots in the family. It didn’t eventuate, not even anywhere close. It faded out by the time I was 10.

I grew up in Lennox Head. My Mum grew up in Ballina. I was actually born in London and lived there about a month. We moved back to Sydney – where my Dad is from – and then we moved to Lennox when I was two.

Both my parents were pretty much connected to the ocean from when they were kids. I went through a phase where I didn’t like the beach, I was maybe six or seven years old. I decided I hated the beach for a couple of years and my parents were asking why. Then I started boogie boarding when I was about 10 and I got hooked at the Pass.

I remember a day there – that was the moment – I remember it clearly, from then on, I was addicted. I love the ocean, everything about it, but surfing was what roped me in. Diving and fishing and all the other stuff I love too. Surfing was really where it got me. I went for a surf this morning at 5:30.

I went through a whole bunch of ideas of what I wanted to do during school. I kept changing my mind. Even when I went to uni in Sydney, I still didn’t know what I really wanted to do. I studied international relations, economics and Spanish. A bit of a mix. My Mum said to me just study what you’re interested in and go from there, so that’s what I did.

It wasn’t hard to leave the North Coast. I wanted to get out of here. I think all of us did – all my school friends wanted to get out of here. I liked the idea of anonymity at the time. I was 18 and I didn’t want anyone to know who I was, just to be in the city. So, I was rearing to go.

I actually went away for a year when I finished school, did the gap year thing. I went everywhere – Asia for three months, Europe for three months and South America for three months. I also went back to England where I hadn’t been since I was born, expecting to have some sort of connection to the place but I had absolutely nothing.

So, I had the year away, went to uni but I actually didn’t finish the course. I was one semester from finishing and my parents came back from Tasmania, they’d been on a walk. They met a guy who was teaching at the TAFE in Hobart who was teaching a bushwalk guiding course. Mum told me about it and pretty much the next day I moved to Tasmania with six months left of uni, did the course, went back and finished the uni degree and then moved to Tassie for a couple of years.

I worked as a bushwalking guide on the Overland Track between Cradle Mountain and Lake Saint Clair. I did that walk maybe 25 or 30 times. At one point I was living on Bruny Island and also guiding there.

It all felt like it was meant to happen. Part of the course was learning about birds and plants and how to identify them, bird calls and all of that. I always wanted to know about it but never wanted to read a book and I didn’t know where to start.

That was my jumping off point for really getting interested in ecology and the environment and how it works, how diverse it is and how quickly it can change.

On the Overland Track, ecosystems can change every 20 minutes because you can go into a gully and it will be really different from up on the high bits. That was seasonal work so I’d come home in the winter. I did that for a couple of years then I went on a pretty big bicycle trip.

Northern California, 2017 (photo credit: Kory Kirby)

I rode from Alaska to Mexico on a pushbike by myself.

I always liked riding bikes but I wasn’t a cyclist. A friend of mine had done a few bicycle trips - one in the Andes in South America, one in Africa and one in Kurdistan up in the high country. He suggested I do the trip on a bike. I knew what I was doing to some degree because I’d worked in the outdoors. I got a good tent and a good bike. I camped mostly and used Warm Showers – which is like Couch Surfing for cyclists – and then just met people on the street. They’d say ‘what are you doing?’ and I’d tell them and they’d say ‘do you want to stay at our place?’. Sure.

Being a white male, the risk is quite low. Dodgy things happen but it’s a lot easier to say yes to those offers when you’re a male. You don’t have to be on your guard as much, especially when you’re by yourself. I was away for about 18 months, nine of the months I was cycling. I did about 10,000 ks. I was keeping track of the ks for about a week then I gave up.

My knees got really swollen in the first few days because I was doing big ks and my body wasn’t ready. I had a couple of near-death experiences on the bike, just with cars and a truck. Nothing hit me but they were very close.

The only thing that once made me want to stop was a woman. She was from Canada. We rode together for a couple of weeks. I met her in Oregon and then we met up again and rode through California. I kept going. She went back to Canada and I kept riding. I ended up in Southern Mexico. There’s a really good wave there and I got stuck there.

The reason I learnt Spanish was to go back to Mexico. I had a semester in Barcelona as part of my university degree and also a month in Mexico. I lived with a Mexican family in Wahaca. I wanted to go back there with decent Spanish. I lived in Puerto Escondido for a few months and then moved down to a small village. I spent two years saving so I didn’t have to work. When I came home during the guiding job I worked two jobs in Lennox, the bottle shop and in a café. I was on a mission.

The original idea was to go to Patagonia but once I actually started, I didn’t want to rush, just to be making miles to get somewhere. Then I got a surfboard on Vancouver Island and just rode to the next surf break. If it was good, I stayed there, if it was bad, I kept going. It started off as a bike trip then it became a surf trip with bicycle as my mode of transport. The mentality shifted a bit.

Surfing is a rush and there’s the adrenaline and then there’s the…..I write for surfing magazines but I’ve never tried to explain it. If you talk to surfers, we talk about it a lot but I don’t think anyone knows the answer.

It keeps me relatively fit and there’s huge positive impact on mental health. I don’t know if that’s surfing, I think it’s the ocean. A swim always makes your day better, I find. It’s being a part of that whole thing, it’s so enormous. Some days its scary and some days it’s a lake. Some days it teaches you a lesson when you get ahead of yourself. It’s like a teacher.

I don’t know what brought me back to the north coast. Everyone comes back. I love it. Some people would say it’s loved to death.

Housing has become more expensive and I look at a lot of people I know and think that if you want to be here, you find a way to be here. My partner Shaya and I went to Trinity together but we met in Tasmania so that’s kind of funny, everything goes full circle. A lot of my friends are going out with people that we went to school with, which we would have been horrified about when we were 18. Most of us left for the best part of ten years.

The last ten years have been all about me. If you want to give back, it’s really easy to come back to where you’re from. I got made redundant at work and moved back during Covid in March 2020. 

When I came back from the bicycle trip, I went into outdoor education with Outward Bound. Guiding is a bit of hospitality, in the gigs that I was in, so I was more interested in the education side of things. I really enjoyed being outside with kids, its such a fun thing to do. They’re funny humans.

During covid I was not working and my mind needed stimulation so I started researching the Richmond River and realised how unhealthy it is. That kind of became my project out of interest. That was the seed for Revive. I’d grown up sailing on the river and going out in the tinny with Dad. I think it was actually in a better state when I was a kid than it is now.

I stole the idea for Revive from someone else. Keep Tassie Wild is an organisation in Tasmania run by a guy called Josh Pringle. I interviewed him for an online magazine that I was writing for at the time. Basically, it’s his model of selling stuff and donating 50% of the profits to local environmental organisations and you raise awareness about stuff as you go. I asked him if I could take that idea and use it up here. He was really helpful and super supportive.

We started it with the stickers. Shaya’s the designer. I do most of the social media and the photography. The stickers were an absolute nightmare. It took us five goes to get the right sticker and I was ready to give up. We thought if we can’t even make stickers what are we doing?

Last year we did three or four nature walks in the Big Scrub – Booyong, Rocky Creek – a guy I went to school with, Jake, ran them, he’s incredibly knowledgeable about the rainforest. Then we started picking up momentum.

We did a talk about the Richmond River in October last year. I had an artist, a landowner, a scientist from SCU, talking about the health of the river. We started selling shirts and that was going well.

When the flood started, people started looking at us for information. Between the two of us, we know a lot of people. I had friends that were flying helicopters. When you know a lot of people, it’s easy to get information so we basically started distributing information. Then we started taking donations. We put up all of our stuff for sale and donated all profits from March which was about 15,000. It’s kind of gone on from there. It just keeps gaining momentum and people respond to it.

I would love for it to be my job but it doesn’t make any money for us. I didn’t do it to make money. My day job is doing administration with the Byron Writer’s Festival. They were really good to me, they gave me time during the floods and the next phase. We were getting a lot of attention on Instagram. We were getting 150 to 200 messages a day. I was doing 17 hours of screentime a day in the first two weeks. People would say – I need a truck, who has a truck? – someone would reply I’ve got a truck I’m on the Gold Coast – so we were like a conduit of sorts.

It’s hard to remember how it all happened. We had all this attention so we started taking donations. We put the bank details on the website. People from overseas contacted us asking how to donate to an Australian bank account so then we set it up to pay on credit card. Then it got to the point where I was waking up in the morning getting stressed out about how much money we had coming in. Luckily, the Healthy Minds Club in Ballina auspiced the money for us. We raised 150 grand.

Tom and partner Shaya Lambrechtsen, founders of Revive The Northern Rivers

I think people were donating because we were posting what we were buying. So, we’d go to Bunnings and spend 10 grand and put it on Instagram and said ‘this is what we bought with the money that you gave us.’ We wanted it to be transparent. I had a mate a flying out of Rotorwing in South Lismore to Coraki, Bungawalbin, cut off areas, doing food drops but also medicine. We posted that we needed insulin and one guy got 500 vials of insulin, drove from Sydney to our house, dropped it off and then turned around and drove back to Sydney. There was so much of that going on, it was amazing. We did what we could. Money is power in that situation, what do you need? Let’s go buy it.

We worked with Koori Mail too. The government was too slow. The needs changed over time. You needed to be agile, make decisions on the fly. It’s not going to be perfect and you’re not going to get everything right but its better than nothing.

People knew who we were then. Then we just went back to doing environmental stuff. We actually have some money that one of the donors gave us so we’re currently using that to do some flood mitigation planting, riparian planting. We’re going to do some in Teven and maybe Lismore.

I was one of the founding members of the Richmond River Keeper which is an organisation that has a catchment wide approach to basically fix the river. I’d like to be dedicating all of my time and energy to the environment instead of after work and weekends.

After ten years of thinking about myself it’s now more about what I can do to give back to where I grew up. Also, its about turning around the guilt of being a white person on Bundjalung country – here’s what my ancestors have done, I don’t feel good about it so what am I going to do about it? Not all of it is bad but there’s a lot of it that is bad. We all need to think about it more. I don’t want to be negative about it all the time either.

One of the reasons we set up Revive is to give some of the good news. When you run an organisation like that, you become a magnet for good stuff. People want to tell you about the trees they’ve planted or the project that’s happening. You become a vessel. What I’d like that to become is a butterfly effect. Every time I see one of those stickers on a car I think cool, that person cares about the environment. I’m assuming they do otherwise they wouldn’t have spent five dollars on a sticker. You never know what people will go and do from that seed. Like us creating Revive from Josh in Tassie, it’s a snowball.

My parents and grandparents have given me the opportunity to be able to do this.

The reason that I’ve been able to get to this point and create something is because of all the privilege that I’ve had in my life, which not everyone has had. I think that’s really important to recognise. It’s easy to think yeah, I did all this and well done me but I got there because of not just financial privilege but my parents encouraging me to do what I wanted to do. They were pretty good at recognising what might interest me. They had foresight a little bit. I’ve got two younger sisters. They always encouraged us to finish stuff.

They gave me a pretty good and interesting outlook on life. Dad has been a lawyer in Lismore for nearly 30 years. He’s always loved Lismore. I didn’t used to like Lismore when I was a kid. They talked me into going to Trinity which I’m really glad they did because I met a lot of lovely people.

Then I started to understand Lismore as a place because I went there every day for six years. Mum is mostly now an art writer. They’ve always been into indigenous art. I’ve been exposed to really interesting indigenous art from quite a young age.

You don’t realise til you’re older, these things that you’re exposed to, start to have an effect on you. You think about your place in the world and what you’ve been gifted that other people haven’t been. I was pretty lucky to have that and also to grow up by the ocean.