The Nation, Johannesburg - January 13, 2010

The Sun-Herald, Sydney - September 6, 2009

The Nation, Johannesburg - January 13, 2010

A young English lawyer comes to South Africa to work on the buy-out of a local shipping company by her boss and lover. She is caught between a handsome pirate from Mozambique and her respectable, corporate employer who has no conscience at all.
It’s a gripping novel, keeping the reader in suspense until the very last page. It goes from maritime piracy, based on the Island of Dreams off the coast of Mozambique, to nego-tiations between criminals, kidnapping, a scorching heist of elephant ivory, and gun battles in the air and on the sea.
It is populated with men who survived the old SADF, service in Afghanistan, and the thrill of gangster operations. Park has made sure that every detail is credible, from the maritime to the onboard workings of the Oryx helicopter and the Rooivalk, hotels in Melrose Arch and the Waterfront, Alexandra Township and the Kruger National Park.
The author sits on the fence as regards elephant culling, but is scrupulous in presenting both sides of the issue. - ROB HOFMEYR

The Sun Herald, September 9, 2009

Tony Park set up a tent in the African bush and settled in to listen and learn about piracy, big cars and the plight of elephants, writes LEESHA McKENNY.

T he opening chapters of Tony Park's action-packed novel Ivory set an expensive price tag for any silver-screen adaptation.

Ker-ching! That's the sound of a high-tech gun battle on a cargo ship stuck in the middle of the Indian Ocean. Ker-ching! There's your mammoth special effects and stunt budget for getting it boarded by a band of pirates. Ker-ching! That's what you hear running all this hardware aground off the coast of Africa. If there's some spare change, don't worry. There will be a need to hire a cheetah soon enough.
"I had in my mind's eye this idea of this massive car carrier being beached and all these four-wheel-drives being driven off through the surf as pirates steal 100 vehicles," Park says.

Not just any pirates, either - a motley crew of ruggedly handsome former special forces pirates, who between them seem to have seen action at every major conflict since the Rum Rebellion.

"After I'd written it I was thinking, 'I've gone too far; I've stretched credibility too far to have pirates stealing a shipload of cars,' " he concedes from the relative calm of a Pyrmont waterside cafe.

"[But] I was in my tent in South Africa [and] I turned on the BBC's World Service and there was a story about the Somalian pirates hijacking a ship full of tanks for the Kenyan army. I thought if pirates could steal a ship full of battle tanks, my pirates could steal a ship full of cars."

Fair point. As Park puts it, when it comes to writing mass-market fiction, you want to make sure your realism stays in the service of a good yarn. And he should know. Ivory is his sixth novel that uses Africa as a backdrop. Now that it has been published, Park is about to give up his day job in public relations in Artarmon to live in a tent for six months in the South African bush.

Park and his wife have been dividing their time equally between Australia and Africa for several years now. The lifestyle shift allowed him to try his hand at fiction for the first time with Far Horizon, published in 2004.
"I didn't set out to write books in South Africa, but it was because my wife, Nicola, and I were spending increasing amounts of time there, and that I had time away from work, that I had the opportunity," he says. "The stumbling blocks to writing a book for anyone are time and inspiration."

Asked whether the same would have happened if he had fallen in love with, say, South America or Maine, Park shrugs. "Everything [in Africa] seems to be bigger," he says. "The natural beauty I find more vivid and more beautiful than anywhere else in the world, while at the same time the crime and the corruption and the political mismanagement - which are everywhere around the world - are that much bigger on the continent as well."

This is one reason why he writes in-country, with his greatest inspiration literally outside the tent flap. "As a writer it gives you something different to write about every time," he says.

As the title suggests, this time Park opted to make his backdrop the contentious issue of killing elephants, and what should happen to ivory taken from slaughtered animals. He says more than 13,000 elephants were culled in the Kruger National Park between the 1960s and 1994, when the government changed in South Africa.

But a population blow-out remains a problem as the park can hold only about 8000 elephants. Ironically, elephants are one of the biggest threats to the delicate ecosystem set up to protect them. Park says relocating the animals is considered too expensive and contraception options are still
being developed.

"I've used this as a subplot in the book because it is a contentious issue ... that provokes a lot of interest and a lot of emotion," he says. "In fiction I think you can't make everything up and I think the trick is to reflect current issues and events accurately."

But if a cull of elephants went ahead, an opportunistic pirate could find his land legs long enough to intercept it and pull off the ivory heist of the century. This is where Park's novel steps in.

The plot of Ivory twists around a love triangle. Jane Humphries, an uptight English lawyer who has a fear of flying, is introduced to life on the wild side through an affair with her married boss, ruthless shipping magnate George Penfold. Then she lands in the lap of the attractive, considerate and perhaps a little misunderstood pirate Alex Tremain, who wants just enough money to reopen his parents' hotel - and he suspects Jane might hold the key to making this happen.

"He's a very fictional pirate but he self-justifies all the time," Park says.
"He thinks there are degrees of badness: it's OK to hijack a ship if you don't kill anyone; it's OK to just take what you need. And I think he does try and do the right thing on a couple of occasions in the book because it's a salve for his conscience."

Ivory is also a salve for the conscience of some of Park's fans. Several of the names in the book were drawn from auctions at two charity events to raise money for African wildlife. "People pay huge amounts of money to have their names in the book. We're talking thousands and thousands [of dollars]," he says. "I tell them there are certain risks involved. They might not like what they get up to."

Park says nothing in the book other than character names are based on
anyone he knows - although it's hard not to see parallels with his military service background. He is a major in the Australian Army Reserve and served six months in Afghanistan in 2002 as the public affairs officer for the Australian ground forces.

"If I think that having served in the army helps me write about soldiers and guns, having zero knowledge of the navy and maritime world makes it so much harder," he says.

Park says he did plenty of fact-checking and research to ensure his high-
seas action was plausible and accurate.

Which brings us back to that hijacking. This is where the author finds three ship captains, sidles up to them and asks: "If one wanted to hijack your ship, what do you think would be the best way to do that?"

"They really get into it," Park says. The answers he got gave Ivory more than enough material to make even the most ambitious hijacking possible.

"Piracy has become a huge issue in the last few years," he says. "These ships are like floating goldmines, with security systems but with no guns on board and no police within cooee, so they do present a very real and attractive target."