Wilby goes wild in a sunburnt country
Source: The Age ()
Leaving Getaway hasn’t stopped Sorrel Wilby from finding
extraordinary places. By Bridget McManus.
SORREL WILBY’S lust for adventure was never going to be
satisfied on Channel Nine’s cheery travelogue Getaway. The
writer, photographer and artist was the first female Westerner to
trek 3000 kilometres solo across Tibet. With her husband, cameraman
Chris Ciantar, she crossed the Himalayas. She has cycled 17,000
kilometres through Japan, Korea, Taiwan, China and Thailand. Most
recently, she scaled Africa’s highest peaks for Australian
production company Beyond International.
So Wilby, 46, doesn’t begrudge that three years ago “someone (at
Nine) looked in the fridge and noticed my use-by date was up”. She
left Getaway “without a whimper” and wrote travel articles,
children’s books, presented ABC’s Painting Australia, and
wrote, produced and presented a series of travel documentaries for
Australian Geographic, Best of Australia.
“(Nine) did me a great favour because I went off and made
programs that I really wanted to make,” Wilby says from Norfolk
Island, where she and Ciantar, who run the television station
together, live with their two small children. “I came from that
documentary background and then had all of that amazing experience
on Getaway, which put more of a commercial head on my
shoulders. Now when I’m making my own programs, I’ve almost created
a new genre in that I’ve joined those two things together. Whereas
travel shows tell you where you should stay and which is the best
cocktail at the bar and all that sort of stuff, I don’t even go
there in these films. The science and the natural history and the
culture are layered into the whole experience.”
In the first of five episodes of Best of Australia to
screen on Nine over summer, Wilby dives with manta rays (the sting
ray’s benign relation), helps catch crocodiles and flies an
plane over Broome. She pauses between stunts for
conversations with locals — rangers, conservationists, and
traditional …