Chasing Dreamtime

the long version

Chasing Dreamtime is the incredible true-life story of a young traveler's journey through memory and myth. In 1975, after college and a brief, disastrous marriage, Neva Sullaway attempts to escape her anguish as well as the post-Vietnam confusion of her generation by sailing alone around the world, but her plans are abruptly scuttled. A string of unlikely events occurs and sends her boat-hopping across the vast South Pacific. While sailing among the exquisitely beautiful Pacific atolls, Sullaway is arrested for a visa violation, hunted by sharks, stricken with tropical fever and held at knifepoint. Even after being entangled in a drug-smuggling scheme and facing death several times, Sullaway continues her journey, taking a brief respite from sailing the seas to pedal a "pushbike" 2,000 kilometers along Australia's northeastern coastline. There the odyssey takes its sharpest turn as she ventures onto a fishing trawler in the remotest outback regions. While poised at the brink of her physical and emotional limits in the stark Never-Never, Sullaway catches a glimpse of the elusive Aboriginal concept of Dreamtime and her darkest demons unfold into wings of flight. For Sullaway and the reader alike, reality can never be the same again.