David and Emma Pocock find 'what it means to belong' In Our Nature

Soon that hand rests on a tree as Pocock gazes skyward and takes a second to appreciate where he stands inside the Tarkine rainforest in Tasmania's northwest.

Right here, a world away from the fields upon which he made a name for himself as a rugby star, is a sanctuary for Pocock.

That's why the camera in his hand is so important - because it's hard to care for something you haven't seen, and he wants Australians to know what we have.

Because there can so often be little room for nuance and "getting to the weeds" of where he and wife Emma have been.

"We're trying to show people some of the beauty, and things I think are special. You can write all you want, but sometimes it's the photos that draw people in," Pocock says.

Their initial plans for a little 20-page magazine began a little over two years ago in a bid to help those confused about the former ACT Brumby's sabbatical from the 15-man code.

"Then 400 pages later," Pocock laughs, they ended up with In Our Nature - a collection of essays, photos and poetry.

Some are from the Pococks, some are from people they've spent time with, or whose work has shaped the way they think about issues and times we grapple with.

There are stories about people on the frontiers of conservation - fighting to save habitat and species headed for extinction, from communities finding ways to make a livelihood without compromising the wild places they live alongside.

There is work from some of the world's best wildlife photographers and stories of their own farming and conservation attempts. Which brings Pocock to the Tarkine.

"Often some of the things I talk about are maybe foreign to Australians in terms of rhino conservation and those sorts of things," Pocock says.

This is, after all, Poey. One of the world's finest rugby players, one whose stellar career could have been so much more if not curtailed by injury at every turn.

Yet it is here he wants to make his greatest impact. The Tarkine is home to 64 threatened or endangered species, and for so many of them is a refuge from uncertainty.

"In my experience going down there and just seeing how incredible that part of the world is, and knowing at the moment the state government in Tasmania plans to fell a lot of that for wood chips," Pocock says.

"It's happening everywhere, and until people know about it and start to demand we actually start to look after these beautiful places we do have, nothing is going to change.

"Industry is going to keep dictating how we make our policy. I would desperately love to see places like Takayna set aside and managed well. They are national treasures.

"There's nothing more than Australian than a forest that has been around for millions of years and has tens of thousands of years of Aboriginal history.

"At the moment we're clear felling it and firebombing it, which, in the current state of things with the climate breakdown and all the rest, seems pretty ridiculous."

Which is why In Our Nature means so much more to them than an a collection of pictures and stories. Instead it is a tonic for the pressure so many place on the non-human world.

Pocock says that alone is cause for serious change, "if we want a world that is thriving and for future generations to be able to enjoy this incredible country".

"It can feel pretty grim, the time we're living in, with the climate crisis and the extinction crisis," Emma says.

"There's just a lot of modern doom and gloom. We've been lucky enough to visit some places and some people who are doing some really incredible things."

Like Lisa Haywood, a woman in Zimbabwe working to change laws to protect the pangolin, "an animal most people don't know much about yet the most widely trafficked in the world".

Or Dr James Hollis, a Washington-based Jungian psychoanalyst whose work has been "a huge part" of Pocock's life. Perhaps even more so than the nights he hurled himself into the opposition with blood streaming down his face.

"For me, this was about rugby, belonging, and conservation," Pocock says.

"It's about the opportunities rugby has given me and what I have learnt, and how that translates into the other things I'm interested in outside rugby, how that all plays out and what it means to belong to a place.

"We are often really disconnected from the places we live. A lot of the problems and the consequences of things we have been doing for a while now stem from that lack of belonging, that lack of treating the earth like it really is our home.

"It started growing up on a farm. That's home, you get to know that land pretty well. You spend a lot of time on it and you totally depend on it.

"You are at the mercy of the seasons, by the end of winter you're just hanging out for the summer rainfall. Often there is not enough, or sometimes too much.

"You feel a real connection to the place you live in. On top of that, I have always been interested and fascinated by birds and animals.

"As a kid I really immersed myself in that, that has continued here in Australia."

That is what the Pococks have tried to do for others with In Our Nature.

"We've tried to make sure it has a good balance of grappling with the problems we're facing and also working toward new ways of living," Emma says.

"We're working on a project that sits at the intersection of agriculture, conservation and community development. We're trying to work on a model that allows the rural pool and wildlife to coexist.

"At the moment a lot of land gets degraded because small-scale farmers in places like Zimbabwe don't have the tools or resources to manage their livestock well.

"Rangelands get degraded and it means they end up having conflict with wildlife. Wildlife are squeezed into smaller areas.

"Our big picture dream is to develop a model that allows people and animals to coexist in ways that actually produce incomes for those farmers but also creates space for wildlife."

Perhaps then those moments of solitude Pocock spends with his camera will mean so much more to so many.