Angus Bowmer (1904–1979), founder of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, in his biography As I Remember Adam, describes his years growing up as a member of a musical family engaged in the country newspaper business in which his grandfather started 16 newspapers throughout the Pacific Northwest. His grandfather's process as Bowmer describes it was to move into an area with an old press and immediately through the newspaper start advocating for a new road or “some other project which would bring the community together in support of the common good.” Eventually, the newspaper's advocacy became a factor in new businesses starting up as people begin to develop an identity as a community. “The citizenry would take on a feeling of pride in the identity of their community. New folk would move in, houses would be built and there would emerge a new town.” The establishment of a new town was the signal to Bowmer's grandfather to pack up and move on to the next place.

Bowmer learned from his grandfather an approach in which cultural institutions, such as a newspaper, could be the creative force in a community. It was an approach he would use in 1935 to establish the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in the small town of Ashland in southern Oregon. The difference between Bowmer and his grandfather is that Bowmer stayed in Ashland and set a public engagement in motion that would create a theater enterprise that in 2021 would cover four acres of Ashland in three theaters with an annual audience of 400,000, employ 675 and have an annual budget of 30 million dollars. His efforts resulted in Ashland, a small community of approximately 21,000, to be the site of one of the largest regional theaters in the United States and the home of the most noted performing arts institution in Oregon. Bowmer's initiative is an example of what business researcher Henry Etzkowitz refers to as civic entrepreneurship in which there is alignment between humanistic, social and commercial entrepreneurship.

Introduction

This chapter explores why and how African wildlife documentary moved significantly from East to Southern Africa in the late 1970s and 1980s, at a time when southern Africa faced considerable political turmoil: the struggle for independence in South-West Africa/Namibia; the June 1976 upheavals in Soweto; the battle for independence in Mozambique and Angola.

Chapter 4 will examine the importance of the rise of private lodges and a guiding culture in more detail and Chapter 5 outlines, through a critical comparison of Southern African with British productions, and particularly those of the BBC’s NHU, what the distinctive strengths and achievements of Southern African wildlife productions were and are. These chapters thus summarize much of the material that will be covered in more detail in later chapters that take a more historical and chronological approach.

Drawing on the theoretical insights of Bourdieu, Latour and Peters, this chapter examines three major sets of factors, agents and infrastructures: the background of the filmmakers; the legal, economic and political factors enabling the development of a local industry; and the crucial agents and infrastructures that enabled Southern Africans to go beyond relying on outsiders who made films in Africa. These cultural, political, economic and technological factors made it possible for Southern Africa to move from being simply a site for colonial or imperial production to being a place where Southern Africans were, arguably, producing the most interesting work in the genre. Given the difficulties subordinated formerly colonial cultures have in achieving this kind of cultural status, the achievement and the conditions for it matter.

The Filmmakers

Who were the filmmakers producing the major documentaries and what brought them to Southern Africa during this period if they came from other countries? I asked Jen Bartlett why she and her husband Des, both Australian-born, but the first major filmmaking couple in East Africa who had worked with Armand Denis and inspired Alan and Joan Root, had ended up in the Namib and spent the last years of their career in Southern Africa. Her answer succinctly sets out the push and pull factors involved in their eventual settling in Namibia:

Two-and-a-half hours south of Astoria there is a headland formed by the upthrust of underwater volcanic basalt flows with views of the ocean and the Salmon River estuary called Cascade Head. The grassy headland is home to an endangered species of butterfly, the Oregon Silverspot, that only exists in four other locations in the world. The headland prairies are covered with native plant species—paintbrush, goldenrod, blue violet, streambank lupine and two rare wildflowers—the Hairy Checker Mallow and the Cascade Head Catchfly. Cascade Head is also home to elk, deer, coyote, snowshoe hare, bald eagle, great horned owl, red-tail hawk and the peregrine falcon (Figure 20).

Sitting looking out over the landscape, I contemplate that for thousands of years this was the home of the Nechesne a branch of the Tillamook tribe who built permanent log plank villages along the estuary and temporary summer shelters at fishing and berry picking sites. They were outstanding craftsmen who created sea worthy dugout canoes and designed detailed baskets that could be used for a variety of purposes including cooking. The promontory of Cascade Head was also a vigil site for Nechesne who on spirit quests climbed to the top to fast and dream.

Dreaming continues to be an integral part of Cascade Head through the back-to-nature movement that was an fundamental part of Oregon in the 1970s. Artists Frank and Jane Boyden participated in this movement by starting an Oregon Coast summer camp for children. Their initial goal was to teach children how to deeply observe the many faceted environment of the Oregon Coast. Ultimately, they established a community on one acre donated by rancher Mike Lowell where artists and scientists living and creating in a natural environment could be in conversation with each other. The couple's vision to establish what would become the Sitka Center for Art and Ecology overlapped with Mike Lowell's goal to protect the Cascade headland and integrate it with the Cascade Head Experimental Forest that had been established in 1935.

In this final section I turn to a consideration of how recent poets have dealt with the challenges and opportunities afforded by line endings. As I wrote in the introduction, I won’t be concerned with rhyme here, as I don’t feel that contemporary rhyming poems—however distinguished many of them may be—really extend our knowledge of how rhyme can work. Instead, I’ll look at a few examples of what strike me as interesting examples of enjambment and of the sestina. Without having to adhere to conventions governing the number of syllables and of stresses in a line, poets are free to put line endings wherever they want, and thus rather than being predetermined (because the poet has completed a line of iambic pentameter, for instance), line endings are solely the result of a poet’s choice. I would argue that because of this fact, line endings in free verse are more highly marked from the outset than line endings in formal verse. Some poets writing in free verse give the impression of not caring much about lineation, but many use lineation and, especially, enjambment as a way to guide the reader through the poem and to emphasize particular words and phrases.

My first example of enjambment is Lucille Clifton’s “study the masters.” Before I deal with this poem, however, I want to look at W.H. Auden’s “Musée des Beaux Arts,” which is its intertext. Auden’s poem juxtaposes the grand stories that are the ostensible subject of paintings by the great Renaissance painters called the Old Masters with, as he puts it, their “human position” (3). By this, he means the relationship of “the miraculous birth” (6) that is the occasion for the painting to what the picture also shows: children (7-8), dogs (12), a horse (12-13); all living lives independently of the grand narrative that is the painting’s ostensible subject. In the second stanza, Auden becomes specific and names “Breughel’s Icarus” (14), which is located in the Musée des Beaux Arts in Brussels. Auden draws our attention to “the ploughman” (15) who appears in the foreground of the painting and to “the expensive delicate ship” (19) sailing by what is, as Auden notes, “Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky” (20).

One of the most interesting discussions of enjambment is Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s “A Poem is Being Written” from Tendencies. Writing of what she appealingly calls “the heroics of enjambment,” Sedgwick tells us that as a child she “visualized enjambment very clearly as not only … the poetic gesture of straddling lines together syntactically, but also a pushing apart of lines.” Critics pointing to instances of enjambment in the poems they’re discussing tend to focus either on the straddling together or the pushing apart; in what follows, I’ll try to keep both in mind. Paradoxically, if perhaps unsurprisingly, in running over the end of the line, enjambments draw attention to the very line endings they seem to disregard: they are simultaneously a breach and an observance, as Hamlet might say. An enjambment typically gives us a complete phrase, providing, for example, the noun modified by the adjective at the end of the line, but in so doing, it also acknowledges the power of the line as the basic unit of poetry. As Dominick Knowles and Mathilda Cullen put it in their recent collection: “enjambment scratches the line’s itch to / end – without ending –.” I pointed out in the introduction that a poem is a visual object, recognizable as verse by the blank spaces to the right of the printed words. Enjambment does not disturb this picture. Enjambments often change the nature of our experience of reading a poem, but they only exist because of the line. As Knowles and Cullen suggest, an enjambment is at once an ending and not an ending.

I wrote in the introduction that at each line ending, the poem renegotiates its relation to the world. This renegotiation is most perceptible with enjambment. An end-stopped line leads to something new, although of course this newness is qualified by our knowledge of how poetry operates and, often, by the fact that we know the line will rhyme with an earlier rhyme or, in the case of a sestina, will copy an earlier teleuton. With an enjambed line, we know something—the line to come will supply the direct or indirect object of a verb, for example—but not everything.

Oregon State and Lane County Fairs

The Oregon Country Fair is often described as a new cultural event of the late twentieth century. Yet as historian Lila Perl notes, “In their oldest and simplest form, fairs were a means of bringing people together to trade, by bartering or by buying and selling. Commerce and communication sprang from the primitive fairs of prehistory.” Fairs have been a way of life in the United States since King George II advocated in 1745 that the town of Trenton, New Jersey, hold one to promote its agricultural products. In fact, beginning in 1860, the big event in the life of those living in Oregon was the State Fair sponsored by the Oregon State Agricultural Society and held in Salem, the capital city. The art-rich Oregon Country Fair is a reflection not only of this centuries-old fair tradition but integrates a specific aesthetic twist and focus on sustainability that has been integral to the cultural history of Eugene.

In the late nineteenth century, families traveled by wagon and train to the Oregon State Fair for the opportunity to spend a week camping outside the State Fair's grounds and visiting with distant friends and relatives. “Fair-goers carried with them everything they would need for the entire week of camping. Flour, sugar, rice, coffee, with dried fruit for pies and home-made jams and jellies, home-based bread, fried and roasted chickens, baked ham, cakes and always the big coffee pot and the syrup keg.” Participation at early State Fairs was based on gender. Men visited farm and stock exhibits, machine sheds and farm equipment and later in the day the race track.

The recent government support to the UK nuclear industry was strongly contested for a flurry of nuclear-specific factors, ranging from its questionable commercial competitiveness, the safety and security stakes its very operations entail, the unresolved matter of waste management and finally the restrictions it levels for the development of alternative and more sustainable sources of energy production. The latest nuclear revival practically came as a bolt from the blue, as the 2006 Energy Review and 2007 White Paper revived the nuclear industry from the slumber it had fallen into since it had last been politically scrutinised in May 1995. The 1995 Energy Review had reached the conclusion that all new nuclear build projects were to be cancelled on the grounds that nuclear power was no longer deemed economically viable – a decision favoured by both the Central Electricity Generating Board (CEGB) and Nuclear Electric at the time. Yet, as opposed to a sustained decline in political interest visible in many other Western countries, the British governments in power have remained steadfast in their will to carry the nuclear project through for the past fifteen years. The attachment of the British government to the nuclear technology has seemingly been second to none in the British industrial landscape. For many commentators, it was not necessarily the product of an ideological commitment to the industry, as opposed to the French case for instance, though; it has had more to do with the sector's constrained innovation capabilities, commonly known as technological entrapment or lock-in in industrial policies, or more broadly, path dependence in political science. First applied in economics and then developed in political science in the 1990s, the concept of path dependence refers to historical and in-built restrictions on policy change or shifts in political trajectories; this concept helps trace forms of continuity and discontinuity in public policy. In this line of analysis, changes in policy are mostly prompted by exogeneous shocks or critical junctures which tend to upset the established institutional order and create temporary windows of political opportunity to change political course.

This chapter thus acts as a scene-setter and offers to put recent political choices into historical perspectives, to understand today's governmental commitments and how they fall in line – or stray – from the original roots of the British nuclear venture in the late 1950s.

The February day is cold and windy. My car's window washers try to keep up with the driving rain that makes visibility uncertain. I stay focused on the road ahead of me as I drive along the coast highway toward Astoria, Oregon's first city and home of the FisherPoets festival. From the warmth of my car, I am reminded of Lewis and Clark's response to Oregon's northwestern coast during their winter encampment of 1805–06. Lewis and Clark and the 33 members of the Corps of Discovery lived in 50’ × 50’ Fort Clatsop (named for the Clatsop tribe) located near today's Astoria and surrounded by the forests and wetlands of the Youngs River estuary. Unlike the Clatsop, who were in their clothing style and longhouses adapted to the climate, the men of the Corps of Discovery got sick from the constant cold and wet. Lewis had intended to stay at Fort Clatsop until April but decided to leave early “to get out of the place” as the men were increasingly physically and emotionally debilitated by the climate.

Fur trader John Jacob Astor's expeditions (for which Astoria is named) had a similar experience. In order to expand the reach of his American Fur Company, Astor sent expeditions by ship and land to set up a site at the mouth of the Columbia River. His ship the Tonquin, captained by Jonathan Thorn, arrived in the spring of 1811. Once landed, they built, despite the rain and mud, Fort Astoria, on a hill overlooking the estuary of the Young and the Columbia Rivers. This was the first American settlement in the Oregon Country. Notwithstanding an adequate supply of food from the abundance of fish, deer, elk and root vegetables that were often supplied with help from the Clatsop, the men were so depressed by the constant rain that three of them deserted thinking they would escape to the Spanish missions a thousand miles to the south.

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:

Introduction

Any study like this faces the challenge of how to do justice to the individual energy and efforts of filmmakers like the Hugheses and Jouberts but also to indicate the other forces shaping the emergence and development of the genre in Southern Africa. No one study could do justice to thousands of films and television broadcasts that emerged during this period. At the same time, the description of the conditions favouring the development of a creative industry without a sense of the creative power of the product seems trivial.

But the analysis of books and Wikipedia entries about wildlife films and nature documentaries suggests that nobody really has much idea of what one should be saying about them. Should a scholarly study provide a chronology of films and filmmakers with some analysis of key developments (Bousé 2000; Mitman 1999), or a kind of check of the social acceptability and influence of the statements in the films (Chris 2006), or look at the inner workings of one production company like the NHU? (Davies 1998; Gouyon 2019; Louson 2018).

Let me put the problem a little differently. Imagine you are asked to say something intelligent about the opening scene of Kalahari – Wilderness without Water (1983) in which eyes emerge from the dark and then a mysterious and barely known animal, a brown hyena, comes into focus close to the camera and chews on some old bones, with commentary on how well adapted for survival in the Kalahari they are. Literary scholars produce annotated scholarly editions of important texts, and on Amazon Prime Video now, one can with a click of a computer mouse see all sorts of details about elements of the scene: the actors; the music playing; the original plot. What might an Amazon Prime Video or scholarly edition of an important wildlife film list? It seems to me that none of the scholarly studies has a coherent idea of what should be there or how that would help our understanding of the film and its strengths. It seems we need theory.

Landscape

The Columbia River Gorge began evolving 12 to 17 million years ago at the same time as the Cascade Range was forming. The most dramatic changes in the Columbia River Gorge took place at the end of the last Ice Age when the Missoula Floods cut the steep walls that exist today and left layers of volcanic rock exposed. The Gorge is 7,993 feet deep. The Columbia River is 1,243 miles long with a drainage basin that extends into seven states in the United States as well as British Columbia. Sixty sizeable rivers or streams flow into the Columbia River. The largest is the Snake River in northeastern Oregon with a watershed of 108,000 square miles (Figure 7).

Situated south of the Columbia River Gorge, the Columbia Plateau is a consequence of extensive lava flows. Seventeen million years ago a rising jet of lava, referred to as the Yellowstone hot spot, traversed five miles underground and sent lava flowing from a series of 10 to 25-mile-long fissures in northeastern Oregon. “Lava flooded from the cracks and spread out across the landscape burying forests, filling streams and forming dams that in turn caused impoundments or lakes much like cake icing fills the imperfections of a surface.” Other fissures and related lava flows continued for more than a million years and traveled 400 miles along the Columbia River from eastern Oregon to the coast. The sea stacks of Oregon's northern beaches are the remnant of the Columbia River basalt flows.

A variety of wetlands, such as potholes, marshes and meadows, are found throughout the Columbia Plateau. A crust of blue-green algae, lichens and mosses protects and enriches the soil. Aromatic shrubs such as sagebrush and bitterbrush offer good browsing to a wide range of wildlife from Sage Grouse and Pygmy Rabbits to Mule Deer and Rocky Mountain Elk. Forests of Ponderosa pine and Douglas-fir grow from the foothills of the Columbia Plateau to the surrounding mountain ranges. Extending from the Columbia Plateau are the Blue Mountains of northeastern Oregon. They are made up of several mountain ranges including the Ochoco and Maury Mountains, the Greenhorn Range, the Strawberry Mountains and the Wallowa Mountains.

The most disapproving view of rhyme is that it is a merely decorative element. This idea has been promoted by many writers for many years—and it may well be the dominant view now. Part of the objection to rhyme is the fear that rhyme may dictate the poetry, compelling poets to express themselves otherwise than they would have intended. An extreme illustration of the importance of rhyme is the once fashionable game of bouts-rimés, in which players were given the rhymes for a poem they would then have to write. An especially good example of what this could mean comes from an anonymous eighteenth-century poem, “The Poetess’s Bouts-Rimés”:

In its diction and its sentiments, this is clearly a very conventional poem of the period, one that conforms to received ideas about eighteenth-century poetry and about women’s poetry. What follows is, to put it mildly, less conventional: the only words in the remaining eight lines are the rhyme words, which appear in the following order: “desire,” “fire,” “lie,” “thigh,” “wide,” “ride,” “night,” “delight.” “The Poetess’s Bouts-Rimés” gestures toward the possibility of a poem that is only rhyme without anything else at all.

Rhyme is not usually as important as it in this poem, of course. To me, one of the most interesting looks at the limitations of rhyme comes from Andrew Marvell’s poem “On Mr Milton’s Paradise Lost,” which was first printed in 1674 in the second edition of Milton’s poem. After discussing the many strengths of the poem as a whole, Marvell addresses the then unusual fact that Milton’s epic does not rhyme: “Well mightst thou scorn thy Readers to allure / With tinkling Rime” (45-6). He goes on to dismiss rhyme as merely a kind of accessory that “we for fashion wear” (50) and then gracefully admits his own complicity in the matter: “I too transported by the Mode offend, / And while I meant to Praise thee must Commend” (51-2).