(dramatic orchestral music)
- Imagine you're out in Africa.
It's night-time,
you're sleeping in the back of an open vehicle,
and it's so hot that you have no clothes on
and you're still sweating.
All you can hear is the distant call of a hyena,
and an impala snorting close by,
and you're half asleep
but then your car just begins to wobble.
You're not quite sure what's going on,
you tilt your head up,
and you look down towards your feet,
and all you can make out is your clothes bag,
sort of on the box next to where your feet are,
and just all of a sudden it disappears.
So, quite startled,
and you sit up and grab a torch
and you shine out into the darkness
and all you can see is a young male lion
running off into the bush,
carrying all your clothes.
(audience laughs)
I grew up in the bush,
and now as a wildlife filmmaker I can continue
to spend most of my time out in the wild.
We choose not to have a camp.
We like to move with animals,
and it keeps us close to where they are.
We sleep where they are.
It keeps us in touch with what is going on,
and the filming vehicles that we've got
are modified for filming.
We like to be able to see and smell
and hear everything around us.
We wanna be as unencumbered as possible,
so we cut off the cab, we take the doors off,
and fold the windscreen down,
and the vehicles are just completely open.
This little bag incident that happened,
happened last year to us while I was in Savute
filming Savage Kingdom,
and it was the young male lion from the Marsh Pride
that thought it would be quite funny to sneak in there,
grab my clothes bag and run off with it.
It was quite a busy night, you know, as you do,
you jump into the drivers seat,
and you start chasing after the guy,
and of course you're completely naked
because now all your clothes are gone,
and we chased him around for about 20 minutes
before we managed to get all my clothes back.
I've actually,
I've still got my bag.
I still take it to the bush.
I still use it.
Quite like this bag,
despite the sort of holes that he left in it.
I come from a long line of Botswana bush people.
My Great Grandfather was one of the first up there.
He was knocking around all over the place.
He was a hunter.
He got mauled by a lion at one point
and involved in quite a few other misadventures, I believe.
My Grandfather who is that man up there,
he followed my Great Grandfather into Botswana,
and was given the Okavango as a hunting concession,
to shoot crocodiles, specifically.
He was quite an intrepid guy; a bit of an adventurer.
Spent a lot of time on his own,
and he used to take little tin boats
and carve his way into the Delta,
and basically shoot as many crocs as he could find.
He would go up there with groups of guys
that would do all the skinning,
and prepare the skins and salt them,
and get them ready to be taken back to South Africa
to be exported off to Europe.
But, he lived a wild life
and really explored a vast part of the Delta
in the mid-50s and early 60s.
He was responsible for killing
probably about 20 thousand crocs
during his time as a hunter,
before he himself was killed by a Black Mamba.
On one of his hunting trips,
he got bitten and died.
And now of course,
it's completely safe to swim in the Okavango,
which is not altogether true,
but what it did is gave away to
another generation of bush people.
My parents then moved up into the Okavango.
They took over one of his old hunting camps
and kind of broke the mold a little bit,
and instead of hunting they decided to build the first
photographic tourism camp in the Delta,
and that was in 1967.
A few years later, my sister and I were born,
and we were born literally into the bush and into the wild.
The story goes that my mother had me in Maun,
a small village quite close to,
well, at the base of the Okavango,
and she figured that it would be safer to take me
out into the bush than to leave me in the village.
So, at four days old she picked me up
and did this long boat journey
up to the camp where we were living,
and as she arrived at the lodge,
or at the campsite,
she was getting out of the boat and on to the land
and she didn't want to pass me on to somebody else.
This is her baby; protect it.
And, climbing out she slipped
and dropped me straight into the river.
So I was baptized into the Delta at a very young age.
The life, the next four or five years,
we grew up,
my sister and I grew up on this island
out in the middle of the Delta.
My folks used to go into town maybe once a month at most
to go and get a few supplies, get a bit of fuel,
and they,
we lived a sort of rural life.
We lived in small reed huts.
You know, we slept on the floor under mosquito nets,
and you know, bath time was in the river,
because there were no crocs at the time,
and in a tin bath next to the fire.
It was very sort of rudimentary and a great existence.
My folks used to go out and catch fish,
and try and subsist to a large degree.
My mother had a little vegetable garden
that she used to be at constant war with the wildlife.
You know, fight off the porcupines
that were trying to eat her tomatoes,
or whatever she was trying to grow.
But essentially,
we sort of lived off the land.
My dad got a POT licence that he used to have
that he could go and shoot a few animals,
that he could then feed his staff
or have food in the camp with.
But that really wasn't my dad's style.
He didn't really like the hunting side of things,
and instead he used to take this little yellow
land rover that we had,
and we'd go out,
track the lions and find the lions,
and then we'd sit on them and follow them for hours,
and eventually they would kill something.
A buffalo, or an impala, or a kudu or something,
and then he'd use that little land rover
and push all the lions off the kill,
help out and cut the leg off,
or a shoulder or a piece of meat,
and then he would take that home,
and that's really how we got most of our food and our meat.
You could imagine as a little toddler how exciting that was.
That was a grand adventure.
Looking back at how I grew up,
to really sort of,
it looks a little bit like the Mowgli
and the sort of Jungle Book story.
It was a wild life.
We grew up surrounded by predators.
We had lions, hyenas, leopards,
always around us,
and a lot of other animals that can kill you.
Elephants, hippos, crocs,
and even snakes like the ones that killed my Grandfather.
Growing up wild like that sort of gives you
a sense of vulnerability;
you're not top dog.
You're living in a world full of predators,
and it makes you very aware and very vigilant,
and you're always very focused
on what is going on around you
and very perceptive towards the bush,
and I think that's where my love for the wildlife
and my sort of passion,
and my understanding of the predator world really started,
began, where it all stemmed from.
Very soon after,
I left school.
I joined two great people,
which most of you probably know.
Dereck and Beverly Joubert,
they're explorers-in-residence for National Geographic,
and they lived in the bush
and they lived where I wanted to be,
and I started an apprenticeship with them.
Up until this point,
the bush and the wild animals was really just my life.
It was normal, I was very familiar with it.
I sort of just moved through life, you know,
not really appreciating the upbringing I'd had,
and Dereck and Beverly kind of shifted that direction
and made me,
they sort of contextualized the value of my upbringing
and the sort of understanding
that I'd naturally accumulated by being out there.
They allowed me to look at nature in a very different way
and in a much more philosophical way
and really delve deeper into
appreciating these animals in the natural world.
I was working with them for about
10, 12 years,
it was the end of that time I met my wife,
who was at the time having her own sort of mid-life crisis.
She was giving up her life as a lawyer in the big city
and decided to move out into the middle of the bush with me.
So, the two of us we had a new direction
and a new purpose,
and we were determined that we were going to live
and stay out in the bush,
and as it happens,
not long after we did that
we had some children,
and we weren't going to let that stop us.
So we moved everybody out into the bush
and we decided to live out there.
We both really believe that
it's a gift to grow up wild,
grow up in the bush,
and we wanted to,
we had an opportunity to give that to our children.
So, we're hell-bent on staying out there.
We could slowly teach them about tracking,
about the signs of the wild.
We could teach them about
how the bigger animals, the scarier animals,
are often the more gentle animals.
We wanted them to grow up strong
and have this intrinsic sense of nature and animals
sort of embed into them at a very very young age.
Let them develop their own intrinsic understanding
and compassion towards the wildlife.
And luckily,
those tin baths didn't evolve much in 25 years though.
Very useful.
It's amazing how
we so often follow the path of our parents.
This picture was taken in 1979; that's my sister and myself
getting a few lessons in life
right out in the middle of the Okavango,
and this picture was taken just over a year ago.
Andy took the picture.
We're out there with our family,
living the wild life.
Being out there in the bush,
just in a totally different location.