The Okavango

Botswana - Revisiting My Colonial Past Led to An Unexpected Future

My grandfather, Gerald Nettelton, worked as a District Commissioner in the beautiful  Okavango Delta in northern Botswana between 1916 and 1922. When I stumbled upon his diaries they made such compelling reading I ultimately left my job as a journalist on The Advertiser, in Adelaide, to follow in his footsteps.

Above: Grandpa, aged about 20, and his detested mule: Right:  I travelled in more comfort. Eivind and his Islander at Delta airstrip in the Okavango.

I planned to write an historical thriller set in the region. Instead, I wrote a romance.

     In a twist of fate, seventy years after grandpa had struggled through the mosquito and tsetse fly-ridden oasis on his stubborn mule to perform his governmental duties, I worked in the luxury safari lodges of Mombo and Jedibe, run by Okavango Wilderness Safaris.

     The day before I returned to Australia I met my future husband, a  handsome Norwegian bush pilot, by a camp fire at Jedibe Lodge. He had been in Botswana for nearly five years, was manager of Ngami Air and flew the tourists from “the dusty, domestic dirty donkey den” of Maun, (gateway to the Okavango) to the many small photographic and hunting concessions throughout the area. Botswana relies on high cost, low impact tourism, so the camps, which have concessions of thousands of square kilometres, take only a small number of guests - ten to sixteen on average -  ensuring private and generally spectacular game-viewing.

     After eight months of letter-writing - there was no email or telephone to facilitate our courtship - Eivind visited me in Adelaide where I was living with my family. Two weeks later he proposed and within weeks I was living with him in his thatched cottage in the middle of a Mopane forest by the Thamalakane River, 10kms out of Maun in northern Botswana.

Three Generations in the Okavango

     Below are some photographs, taken from grandpa’s diary, which he kept between 1916 and 1922, as well as from dad’s youth. (He was born in Francistown, Botswana, in 1932.) I worked in the Okavango in the early to mid 1990s. The pictures contrast the different lives we all led in the same area.

     Further on are pictures from Lesotho in the 1960s, my childhood, and life as a trailing spouse.

My Photos