For the third time Campfire in the Heart has welcomed Year 11 students from Coomera Anglican College, visiting Alice Springs and Uluru as part of their ‘desert retreat’, led by Faith and Spirituality teacher Dominic Fay.

The retreat is an optional trip for students who feel a calling to deepen their sense of self and their spiritual lives. Each year the experience grows in popularity amongst students. This time the Anglican Archbishop of Brisbane, Jeremy Greaves, was inspired to join the pilgrimage.

Time was spent in guided reflections, encounters of awe and wonder in nature, and communal life shared together in the stunning surrounds of the Australian outback.

Vast skies, red earth, night walks amongst echidnas, and a deep, unsettling silence

written by Archbishop Jeremy Greaves

“It had been nearly 20 years since I last visited central Australia, and as I arrived in Alice Springs with a group of Year 11 Coomera Anglican College students for their “Desert Retreat”, I found myself wondering…”Would the desert feel the same?” and “Would it still speak in the way I remembered?”

In some ways it did, of course — the vast skies, the red earth, the deep, unsettling silence. But in other ways it was entirely different because I am not the same person I was 20 years ago. And perhaps that is one of the great truths the desert reveals — it does not change nearly as much as we do.

The early Christian desert fathers and mothers understood something profound about places like this. They did not go into the desert to escape the world, but to encounter it more truthfully — to encounter themselves and God without distraction or illusion. The desert strips things back. It has a way of exposing what is essential and letting the rest fall away. It can feel confronting at first, even uncomfortable, but it is also deeply clarifying.

Over the week we were together we sought to make that ancient wisdom a lived experience. Our time in Alice Springs and at Uluru was shaped by a simple invitation to the students and to the rest of us along for the journey — to practise paying attention.

It sounds straightforward, but it is anything but easy. We are so accustomed to noise, to movement, to constant stimulation that stillness can feel like a challenge. Yet it is precisely in that stillness that something begins to shift…”

Read the full story at Anglican Focus, the news site of the Anglican Church of Southern Queensland

Eastern Arrernte artist Marie Ryder with Harry, Jadon, Naomi, Eden, Peter Materne (spouse of staff member, Natasha), Amy, Haylee Reid (staff member) and other Coomera Anglican College students at Campfire in the Heart retreat centre in Mparntwe (Alice Springs) in April 2026