Introduction

John Varty did not come to wildlife filmmaking through any of the conventional routes. After the untimely death of his father meant that he had to give up plans to become a professional cricket player in England, he and his brother David persuaded their mother to let them take over the family hunting farm Sparta and turn it into a tourist destination. Both brothers have written important accounts of the development of Sparta into Londolozi (Varty 2008, 2014). Varty then became involved in wildlife filmmaking as a result of helping write scripts for Rick Lomba’s films that looked at the problems of excessive land use by commercial cattle farming and of new game fences. Varty was given a film camera as some kind of recompense when Lomba could not pay him and so ended up with the means to record animal behaviour.

Guides and Londolozi

The earliest Londolozi films showed Varty using his camera to record knowledgeable guides at Londolozi. The first, Focus on Africa (1983), starred Ian Thomas as photographer and him and his tracker Phineas Mhlongo as knowers of the bush. A fair amount of this film amounts to what one could see as advice to people thinking of going on a photographic safari: Thomas suggests what lenses would be optimal for use in (stills) photography and the film then shows him in action, for example intrepidly in a river with camera, trying to film hippos or animals drinking.

But the film had another motive besides giving photographic advice and the origin of the film lay for Varty in his sense that he should try to portray bush lore or what made for successful guides. Ian Thomas recalls: