Life trajectory, why the decision?
Why was that decision made?
How was that made? You know, I think it's a really good question.
I mean, there's a few parts to it.
The one is that my great-grandfather had bought the land in 1926 after drinking too much gin.
And he heard about these bankrupt capital farms that were available for sale adjacent to the Krueger National Park.
And he was a lion hunter and he was an adventurer and he said, well, we're going to buy.
And so he first came down here in the June of 1926 and he set up the camp, you know, just sort of rugged canvas under the trees and they would hunt lions.
That's how my grandfather then grew up.
And then that's how my father and uncle grew up coming down in the winter months, waking up at dawn, listening for lions to roar and then going out to hunt lions.
And I should say with lion hunting, there's only two outcomes.
Either a lion dies or a person dies.
So that gives you a little bit of a sense for the mentality of it.
But through those early days of hunting, already a deep passion had started to take root in my father for the land.
And in my uncle, they felt connected to it.
It was a place of adventure.
It was already a place that was infused in meaning.
So when their father died and they were teenagers and the family advisors said, OK, we'll get rid of it.
I think it's a bit of a combination of the brilliance, the arrogance and the stupidity of youth that just allowed them to stand up and say, well, we're going to keep it and we'll make it work.
I don't think that there was forethought in the decision.
They just knew they were grieving.
They had lost their father.
It was their father's sacred place.
He loved to go there. And they knew that if they somewhere inside of that grieving process, they knew that if they let go of the land, they would lose the memory of their father in some way.
And so they held onto it and they decided, well, we'll go and make it work.
There's so many different branches of this tree that I can go down.
It's I'm having trouble with a paradox of choice here.
Let me try to prompt a story that will maybe speak to the get on with it, make it work, attitude of both of your parents.
Could you please tell the story?
I'm going to give you a fragment here.
So a little gingerbread crumb and see if you remember what I'm referring to.
Plain ride, bird. Does this mean anything?
OK. I think you're referring to the white knuckle chart of company.
Yeah, that's the one. So basically what happened is my parents, they launched the Safari business.
And it slowly started to become successful.
But they started to run into a problem as my sister and I were getting older because schools started to become an issue.
So there was obviously no way to take us to school living out here.
So they decided that what they would do is they would learn to fly.
And then they would ferry us in to the nearest town.
And we would sort of attend early preschool of whatever it's called, like Monday through Wednesday.
And then Wednesday we would fly back to the reserve.
And we would be here through the weekend.
And we were basically getting three days of schooling.
That seemed like enough to them at the time.
So they took up flying. And my memories of it are when they would pick us up on a Wednesday afternoon, to be honest, they weren't great pilots.
So they were in a bit of a state.
You know, the first 50 hours of being a pilot, there's a lot of stress about getting it in the air and then safely getting it back on the ground.
So they would, we would arrive and they would say, we're in flying mode right now.
And flying mode meant we could not ask any questions.
We had to shut up. Kids, you kids shut up.
We're in flying mode. And then they had this other sort of drill that they worked up with each other, which was called
