African autobiography

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Tags: books, EMSAH, winter-2009

Annette with Ikata the gorilla

If crossing the Sahara Desert in a Kombi van, dodging civil war and interacting with great apes sounds like an adventure and a half, you may want to read Annette Henderson’s memoir.

Published by Random House in May, Wild Spirit formed part of Annette’s Master of Philosophy (Creative Writing) degree which she received at a UQ graduation ceremony last year, capping off a dream that had been decades in the making.

The book was inspired by the time Annette and her husband Win spent in Gabon, West Africa, while attempting to cross the continent from north to south 30 years ago.

“Many people over the decades have told me: ‘you really must write this book’,” she says.

“Completing the memoir and having it published means a great deal to me. It’s like closing the circle that began in 1975 – an outcome I never could have envisaged.”

Annette and Win arrived in Gabon during the Angolan war and, unable to travel to South Africa as planned, found themselves working at an iron ore exploration camp 600km from the coast.

“The first night we were in Gabon we were robbed. One $20 traveller’s cheque was all we had left,” Annette says.

“So we knew no one, we had almost no money and we couldn’t go anywhere because of the war further south – we were totally stuck.”

By chance, the couple met the New Zealand director of the mining project, who offered them employment and accommodation for a year.

Annette’s work was demanding and varied, relying on her knowledge of French to co-ordinate via radio the movements of dugout canoes that transported people and supplies up and down the river.

Click on the image to read an exclusive excerpt from Wild Spirit

Among her more unusual tasks was to issue shotgun shells to the Gabonese hunters who were employed to feed the workers and their families, and calculate how much they were to be paid.

“At the end of the day when they brought in their kill, I had to weigh it on a set of rusty old scales that sat on a log, and note down in a book the weight that they’d brought in for that day because they were paid by the kilogram,” she says.

During their time in the forest, Annette, Win and a colleague became surrogate parents to Josie, an injured orphaned baby gorilla, but it was an encounter with Ikata, an eight-year-old male blackback who had been raised in captivity, that changed Annette’s life.

“We were visiting a research station where orphaned gorillas and chimpanzees were being rehabilitated to the wild. I was coming up the pathway as he was coming down and I thought ‘I’ll have to indicate to him that I’m very peaceful in my intent’, so I stretched out my arms towards him palms upwards and he just kept walking towards me,” she says.

“When he got within reach he just enfolded me with a gentle embrace and he put his face beside my cheek and I rubbed the top of his head. It was just the most wonderful moment.”

From the outset, Annette sought practical ways of protecting the gorillas in their natural habitat.

“The first thing I did when I was offered the opportunity to have a work role was to say ‘I don’t think we should pay for gorilla meat and I think the hunters should be told that right away.’ Our project director agreed, so we didn’t pay for gorilla meat again.”

Having read about the pioneering work with great apes by primatologists such as Jane Goodall, Annette ultimately decided to pursue tertiary studies in anthropology upon returning to Brisbane.

After several years working in London, she completed her Bachelor of Arts with first-class honours in anthropology at UQ in 1983, and used her skills to contribute to Indigenous land and cultural projects in the Northern Territory.

She then took up university teaching in Brisbane before spending a memorable five months in Indonesia – teaching social science in the local language, which she learned in just four months before taking up the position.

Annette’s life took another unexpected turn when she began what would be a 17-year career as a senior administrator within UQ’s School of English, Media Studies and Art History (EMSAH).

Over the years, the gorilla photos in Annette’s office intrigued former EMSAH colleague and award-winning author Amanda Lohrey, who encouraged her to return to study in 2006 under an APA scholarship and finish the book she’d always wanted to write.

With the assistance of supervisors Dr Stuart Glover and award-winning poet Dr Bronwyn Lea, Annette produced the manuscript of Wild Spirit and a 10,000 word critical essay, “Great Apes, Humans and Epiphanies: Profound Interspecies Encounters”, for her Masters.

Interest in the memoir took off last year after Annette was interviewed on ABC Radio, and within hours she was contacted by major Australian publishers and literary agents eager to read the story in full.

Annette is now focused on ways she can help protect great apes around the world. She is a zoo parent of the lowland gorillas at Taronga Zoo and has adopted an orphaned orangutan in Borneo through the Australian Orangutan Project in addition to sponsoring German mountain gorilla research.

“I’m looking for other ways to become immediately involved,” she says.

“I plan to spend the rest of my life writing and continuing my involvement with conservation.”

Wild Spirit by Annette Henderson is published by William Heinemann Australia, RPP $34.95

By Cameron Pegg

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