Who are your heroes or inspirational figures?
My heroes aren't perhaps the standard ones. Someone I always looked up to was Laurens Van Der Post. Laurens Van Der Post has been dismissed as a bit of a – well people say he's made up stuff and so on but for me as a boy I heard stories of this man who went out to live in the Kalahari and he wrote a book called, ‘The Lost World of The Kalahari', which was way ahead of its time - he was talking about bushmen and how they live their lives. He was very poetic and everyone understood he was a bit of a storyteller, but he portrayed these people as simply people and that was a wonderful thing. It helped me think that there were these people out there who would respond to me like an ordinary person and would help me. He's great, but he's tended to be forgotten about now but as a child I thought he was great. And I love the big explorer heroes – Cook, I love James Cook. I was more found of him then Scott or Shackleton, these sort of people who were leading military expositions trying ton conquer places. Cook I didn't see as a conqueror, I saw him as a genuine discover and he was a great humanitarian. He was a genuine man of enlightenment, but it's true that he got rather ratty towards the end of his time and he said one or two things he shouldn't of said about various people, but he had a lovely side to him that I hope ever one would have. He was exploring, as we all know, New Zealand and there was one time when the Maori came out and were challenging him, waving a spear – I haven't got the story exactly right, but certainly as a child I imagined this person with his tattoos, his hacker, sticking out his tongue, quite a scary figure and this man was scared of Cooks' ship and it was a very big thing with its sails and this little rowing boat came to the soar with this man threatening to spear him and he got out of the rowing boat and weighed through the water, showed he had no gun, put out his arms and the man wasn't sure what to do, to kill him or not and Cook hugged him in the traditional greeting and that was quite extraordinary – the other side of the world, the other side of the planet hugged this man in the traditional way showing that he was just like this man – no airs no graces. I thought that was great, probably haven't got the story exactly right, but that was the sort of man he was – he saw so called ‘exotic' people, people he did seem very ‘strange' some times in a lot of ways and even very primitive and very backward in ways but he seemed to see through all that and treat them simply as people and I think that is a wonderful thing.
