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Des Bartlett became one of the world's leading wildlife film makers in a career that lasted more than 50 years. He worked with the renowned documentary makers Armand Denis and Michaela Denis before making the Emmy award-winning Flight of the Snow Geese (1972), one of the greatest wildlife shows on earth.
During his career he shot more than 609,000 metres of film on six continents and made more than 200 documentaries. He contributed film, stills and articles to National Geographic, with whom, in 1993, he won a second Emmy for Survivors of the Skeleton Coast (1993), shot on the desert coastline of Namibia, his adopted homeland for the past 31 years.
In 1956, Bartlett was married in London to a fellow Australian, Jen Edmondson, who was playing tennis at Wimbledon. So began one of the most successful and enduring husband-and-wife partnerships in wildlife film history, with him shooting the moving pictures and her most of the stills. She gave up her tennis career to return with him to Africa, where Armand was producing documentaries for the BBC. The first series, Filming in Africa (1955), was followed by On Safari (1957). Presented by Armand and his wife, Michaela, the programs' animal behaviour sequences were largely the work of Bartlett and helped establish the popularity of the television wildlife documentary.
Norman Desmond Bartlett was born on April 2, 1927 in Canungra, Queensland. His father was a head teacher and keen naturalist who had the largest private butterfly collection in Australia and imbued his son with an early interest in natural history. Bartlett started work in a Brisbane bank at 16 but had ambitions to be a pilot and aircraft designer. He joined the ATC (Air Training Corps) and his design of the Bartlett Bullet plane was published in a 1944 edition of Wings Magazine, the official journal of the RAAF. After turning 18, Bartlett joined the RAAF, but his dreams of becoming a fighter pilot were never fulfilled as the war came to an end. He turned instead to photography, running a studio in Brisbane with a friend before taking a job at the department of information's films division in Melbourne.
He began his career in 1952 spending 12 months filming in eastern and central Australia for Under the Southern Cross (1954), a documentary by Armand. Bartlett spent five months on his own travelling by dugout canoe to a remote area of New Guinea to film the Sepik River people for the Denises' feature film, Among the Headhunters (1955).
In 1954 he flew to Kenya to join the Denises, who had signed a contract with the BBC. The resulting television programs, Filming in Africa and On Safari, became extremely popular. Bartlett was based in Kenya for 10 years, filming 70 half-hour programs and 104 short Animaland children's films. After the birth of their daughter Julie, in Australia in 1957, the Bartletts returned to Kenya. Julie lived an idyllic childhood ''on safari'' and Des realised a boyhood dream when he and Jen learned to fly.
In 1964, he went to film in North America. Eighteen months later Armand retired and Bartlett signed with Britain's Survival Anglia, whose wildlife shows were sold to more than 100 countries. Patient, painstaking, reliable and modest yet resourceful, Bartlett remained one of Survival's top three cameramen for 20 years. His film The World of the Beaver (1970), helped to establish the one-hour wildlife documentary as a component of the peak-time television schedules, and in 1973 won an Emmy for Flight of the Snow Geese.
The Bartletts followed the geese on their 4000-kilometre migration from Hudson Bay to the Mississippi Delta, obtaining stunning footage of the birds in flight by adopting orphans that regarded them as parents and could be filmed in close-up.
In 1978 they went back to Africa, planning to spend six months filming lions in Namibia, but stayed for over 30 years.
