ST JAMES
To fit with our theme it had to be mainly a public land hunt with a bit of a journey to it. Not only that, but filming pig hunting for non-pig hunters is tricky
Ideally it is open country so you can see everything that’s going on and there has to be elements of interest that aren’t just scruffy ol’ boris’s (myself included) to keep them entertained. And of course you have to use dogs on the softer end of the scale so you don’t offend Karen and get kicked off telly!
Over a few years I scouted around a bit of country always keeping an eye out but nothing really fit the bill, not something I’d confidently tell Willie to commit a trip to. In 2019 we decided we were doing an episode regardless. That meant Willie, Greg and Emil spent the bulk of the year filming the awesome season 6 you’ve just watched, then we left a silly little two week window at the end for our pig hunting trip! It was a recipe for disaster and it made organization a nightmare. Willie had already left for Africa with Ash, so it was left to me to organise an episode … I’d only ever been in one!! Fortunately we’d involved Shaun Monk (AKA Monkey) in our plans, and even though plans A-Z fell over he had a hunt in mind as backup.
The St James Conservation Area is what Monkey had in mind, and it’s a spectacular place. I’m going to go in to a lot more history and detail in a subsequent article, but in a nutshell it is a huge 193,230 acre high country station steeped in early settler history that was purchased by the government in 2008 for a whopping $40,000,000. It’s made most famous for non-hunters by the St James cycleway that
