Will Millard
TV presenter, writer, anthropologist – Will Millard has many strings to his bow, as Amy Ludford finds out in a chat that takes in fishing, travel expeditions, and the hidden treasures of Wales.
Your book, The Old Man and the Sand Eel, is about your own experiences. How long ago did you set out on that journey to catch that eel, and where did it take you?
The idea was conceived four years ago when fishing off the coast of Dorset as I caught a Greater Sand Eel. Only after taking a video and throwing it back did I realise I had just caught the British record size, and it’s nerdy but this was my greatest chance of appearing in the record books. I was gutted. This was a quest for redemption, going around the country for two years trying to catch another record fish. It also then became a realisation that we underestimate the importance of fresh water in our lives. Being waterside has this meditative, mindful effect on us. I’ll be at the Cardiff Book Festival in September with the book, and I’m looking forward to it.
Fishing was a big link to your grandfather. Has keeping this thing from your childhood helped you keep focused on your sense of self?
Definitely. My dad worked a lot growing up so I was lucky to have time with my grandad. I started learning to fish with him aged four in the Fens, and he taught me all about the natural world.
Growing older, I noticed I’ve moved away from a lot of what he taught me about the rounded nature of fishing. That it’s also about the surroundings, the symphony of elements that make up a natural environment. I needed to get back to that. There can be a lot of tension with your parental figures growing up. When you get older, especially when you start having your own kids, you look back on your parental relationships differently. You see them as more human. It’s important to look back on those relationships as it helps you to grow as a person.
Hidden Cardiff showed us some very cool things. What else is there hidden around us that you’ll show in the new series, Hidden Wales?
This country is so full of amazing and rich historical sites; we’ve shot in about 40 locations so far.
There are cave systems in Pembrokeshire where you have to abseil down and pendulum swing into sea caves, you can spend 30 minutes crawling through holes to emerge in this massive cavern; more people have stood in the moon than inside this cave. And there’s ruined Jacobean houses in mid-Wales that still give the sense of immense wealth they would have when built. We don’t do the best job of looking after places. If they’d been in the USA they’d be celebrated and people would travel hundreds of miles to visit. But here, there’ll be this bush and behind it where one of the great Welsh forefathers used to live, but there’s no money to maintain it so it’s fallen into ruin. I’m hoping to get it to air in Autumn.
Would you say the theme of heritage is important to you? It appears to be really prevalent and paramount to your work.
Yeah, we seem to take history for granted. Museums and the National Trust give a sense of really looked after items. But once you start meeting people and looking beneath the surface, you find things that aren’t as protected as it seems and you can’t help but be passionate.
These sites and relics are everything, they inform us about our culture and how we got to where we are. If it wasn’t for the Cyfarthfa Ironworks, basically rotting under the A470 on the way to the Brecon Beacons, the industrial revolution wouldn’t have happened the way it did in Britain. It was massively important to the entire direction of the British Isles, and we just move on so quickly. Without the works we wouldn’t be sat in Cardiff doing this interview, because it wouldn’t exist, but we forget as soon as the world moves on. It’s all who has the money to look after a historical site? Is it really relevant? Of course it is!
You spent a year in West Papua filming My Year with the Tribe. They know about Western culture, but was documenting their existence paramount for us to know they did indeed exist before they vanish? Was it tense at times?
Traditional identity is finite. We were trying to get a note of tribal history because it isn’t recorded. When a generation goes, so does their wealth of knowledge. There are only two elders left to represent the hunter-gatherer tradition of the whole Korowai tribe; it’s an amazing piece of the tribal history because of what they’ve done and achieved, but we all come from a hunter-gatherer tradition. It’s not just informing on the Korowai but also on an element of our pasts.
It’s inevitable people are going to change and it’s important to record these changes. Every community in the world is in transition through evolution, modernising and changing to survive; that’s what we’re recording. It’s an elemental piece of geography when a tribe moves to a whole new style of living. The Korowai have never lived in a village with a headman and community structure, instead living across 400 square miles of hostile rainforest; their first [experience] of the outside modern world did add conflict. Any cultural community in a state of transition will have conflict, it’s part of the human condition.
I got robbed by my main contributor at the end of the year, but in context these things were happening within the tribe all the time. Even the headman had his house burned down in a dispute over money. The conflict resolution was aggressive, but that’s how we learn; I knew what we were capturing was an essential part of living together.
Within the many different projects, you’ve worked on, what’s been the biggest lesson that’s shaped your outlook and the way you do things?
It seems cliché, but the biggest thing is you have to leave your prejudices at the door. In a tribe, they expect you to go in and patronise them, and as an Englishman in Wales there’s also this tension between the two national identities, but you have to take people as they really are. Try to listen to what people are telling you, they can be from New Guinea or mid-Wales but both of them have stories to pique your interest and that tell you how people live. Both stories are equivalent, you just need an open mind.
The Old Man And The Sand Eel, Viking Books. Price: £9.99. Info: www.willmillard.com