But I did it out of a sense of duty to the place which I love and has given me some of the greatest experiences of my life.'īaiyungu woman Hazel Walgar shared the history of Traditional Owners while watching an archaeological dig in a cave in Cape Range National Park. 'Also, I've spent 40 years of my life doing what I can to dodge being in the media so I was a bit reluctant about television. I was always going to be the only one on the boat or in the cave who didn't know what they were doing but I'm the person who has the most focus on them, so, that's kind of embarrassing. Also, for me, as a sole trader for 1,000 years, having to work with 'committees' and so many fingers in the pot, trying to make something a bit poetic out of something that can look pretty prosaic on paper was terrifying. You don't just write one script, and then revise it, you an aspirational script, a recipe for what you'd like if you can get all the ingredients, and then two years later you end up writing a script based on what ended up being 2,000 hours of footage.

'I don't have any qualifications to write a natural history series, I've never done it before, so that was a bit terrifying in the sense of how do I do this? With natural history there's quite a bit of scientific information that you have to convey – there might be five or seven scientific papers and you get 20 or 50 words. 'It felt that I was doing it in survival mode, in perpetual panic,' says Winton. ( Supplied: Blue Media Exmouth/Violeta J Brosig) Used to working on his own as a writer, Tim Winton found it confronting having the cameras focused on him.

Cloud street by tim winton