Erin Clark's Journey to Stories Unseen

by Erin Clark, Co-Founder, Stories Unseen

From Ag Shows to App Stores: A Story Less Ordinary

A career path shaped by curiosity, cringe and questionable costume choices

From Victoria to Perth, Western Australia: When people ask how I came to co-found Stories Unseen, it’s tempting to say: “By accident, with a side of stubbornness. ”If you’d told my 12-year-old self — awkwardly dressed as a knight at the local agricultural show — that one day I’d be running a travel tech company, I probably would’ve fallen off my pony.

I grew up in Heathcote, Central Victoria — a wine-growing region famous for its shiraz, small-town gossip, and questionable festival events. Some of my earliest memories involve cringing through questionable festival parade costumes, clinging to semi-feral ponies that cost the princely sum of a slab, and line dancing badly — my small-town training for startup life. I was a pretty classic small-town kid: enthusiastic, earnest, and slightly mortified half the time.

No one in my family had been to university. Most people I knew stayed close to home. But I always had an itch for something different — a “big job” with a power suit, a city skyline, and no emus in the paddock next door.

What I really loved, though, was words. Reading them. Writing them. Rearranging them until they finally made sense. That love eventually landed me a scholarship to study journalism.

Later, curiosity pulled me into IT project management and an MBA. (Because why stop at one slightly chaotic career plan when you can stack three?)

Along the way, I said yes to anything remotely adventurous: teaching English in remote Indonesia, running a student media conference interstate, even hosting a small segment on Prambors FM in Makassar. Each experience cracked the world open a little wider — and showed me I didn’t have to fit a mould to make my own life.

After uni, like many ambitious twenty-somethings, I sprinted straight into hustle culture. Big days. Bigger stress. Planes at dawn. Deadlines at midnight. It looked impressive on LinkedIn — until my health collapsed. After months of ignoring warning signs, I was diagnosed with an autoimmune disease.

It forced a reckoning: What was I really chasing? I didn’t want to just survive work anymore. I wanted work that fit my life — not the other way around.

That’s when I stumbled into startups. Every venture became an "earn or learn" project: if it made money, brilliant. If not, it was still tuition — just a little messier and much more memorable.

Somewhere in that mix, Stories Unseen was born.

In early 2022, my husband and I were living full-time in Perth’s CBD. Post-pandemic, the city felt empty — the life we loved had thinned out. We realised one of our favourite things to do when travelling was to take walking tours. When we couldn’t find anything local that fit the bill? We built it ourselves.

Stories Unseen started with a cheeky pub crawl tour (as you do), but quickly grew. Today, we offer self-guided walking and driving tours across Western Australia and South Australia — reconnecting locals and visitors with hidden stories and places.

Building Stories Unseen has taught me more than any MBA:

• How to truly nail progress over perfectionism (idea to app store in 20 days!)

• How to create momentum out of nothing but stubbornness, late-night snacks, and patient friends who refuse to let you quit.

• How to celebrate every little win

Life has come full circle in ways I never expected. After chasing city skylines for years, I now split my time between Perth and a little hobby farm in Western Australia’s Wheatbelt — growing ideas, businesses, and occasionally a few bush tucker plants that refuse to cooperate.

I tell anyone even thinking about starting something: Just start. You don't have to have it all figured out. You don’t need permission. Curiosity will get you much further than perfection ever could.

If my story says anything, it’s this: You can start out as a bonnet-wearing, line-dancing, horse loving slightly mortified kid from small-town Victoria — and still build a life that’s braver, better, and weirder than you ever imagined.

It might not look like the polished dream you had in high school.

It might turn out to be even better.   

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