Life in a tent

Author Tony Parks is always on the hunt for a new story, writes Natalie Bosman

For five months of every year, Tony Parks and his wife Nicola pack up their lives in Sydney and do the nomad thing.

Armed with nothing but their tent and a Land Rover, they navigate Africa, exploring as many exotic destinations as possible that will thereafter find their way into the pages of Parks’s books.

In love with the lifestyle, the best-selling author of Safari wouldn’t have it any other way. “I have an old Landy that is 23 years old,” he laughs, “and for the four or five months that we’re here, 90% of our time is spent in a tent. It’s a great way to travel and explore a culture – there is a never-ending supply of information and ideas when you’re travelling.”

Although Parks says he always wanted to write books, he has had numerous other jobs in the past, including working as a newspaper reporter and a government press secretary. “I fell into journalism as a kind of stepping stone,” he admits, “but the fact that I used to be a journalist comes in handy. It helps me to look, absorb and write as I go along.”

Currently, Parks lives a quite romantic divided life. He is a PR consultant when he is back home in Australia, and a fulltime writer while bundu-bashing in Zimbabwe, Zambia or any one of the many countries Parks has explored.

“The travelling gives me time to think,” he explains. “I try to get inspiration from my environment, the people and places – you can’t help but be inspired by Africa, as it’s larger than life. The good things are more intense and exciting, and the bad things are more tragic than almost anything in the world.”

But while Parks might well plan the settings of his books according to his vast travels, the plot remains a mystery – even to him. “If I don’t know what happens next, then hopefully my readers won’t know,” he says. “It adds to the unpredictability of it all and it keeps me entertained too. Writing is almost as fun as reading.”

Similarly, his characters remain fictional enigmas with a life of their own, loosely based on friends he knows or has met along the way and experiences he has “researched by osmosis”.

“The characters exist in my head, in a parallel universe. I know them, but they’re not real. And they evolve too – they have to surprise me.”

When I subtly hint that Parks and his character Shane Castle, a hardcore ex-SAS officer, share common ground in their military background (Parks is a major in the Australian Army Reserve), he drama-tically sets me straight.

“I mean, I’m a PR officer,” he laughs humbly. “Of course, your life experiences do come through in every book, so it helps to have had some military exposure, to give my characters credibility.”

Besides a gripping storyline and its incredibly well-researched exposé of the grey areas surrounding poaching, Safari is perhaps such an enjoyable read because Parks’s passion for his subject matter comes through so blatantly.

Although Parks could be considered “ an outsider” because he grew up in Australia, he captures the essence of Africa in his writing better than most locals could hope to.

“You always take for granted what’s in your own backyard, so sometimes it doesn’t hurt to see things as an outsider.

“I wish sometimes that I had grown up in the Kruger Park, so that I could have seen it as a five-year-old, but then again, at 43, it’s as exciting to me as a South African five-year-old might see it,” Parks says.