It is a curious psychological truth that sometimes we need decades to fully process the most impactful chapters of our lives.
Back in September 1996, I found myself, once again in the back of a Cessna 404, flying a geophysical water survey over the arid landscapes of Namibia. I was young, newly married to my bush pilot husband, and—truth be told—my mind was less focused on the complex transboundary water politics below than it was on the sheer excitement of the adventure. I was thrilled to be back in southern Africa, and eager to reconnect with the lifelong friends I’d made a few years earlier while working in Botswana’s booming safari industry in 1992 and 1993.
Operating the survey equipment on low-level airborne surveys in Namibia and Botswana in 1995 and 1996 was exciting, but could be lonely when I wasn’t working with my husband, Eivind.
When we were on the ground in sometimes remote, dust-swept camps, my creative escape was worlds away from the African heat. I spent my free hours writing light-hearted Regency romantic comedies, and Victorian murder mysteries. As a former journalist from South Australia, I certainly had the tools to document the massive environmental and political shifts happening right in front of me.
Yet, when you are actively living the adventure, you rarely possess the distance required to shape it into fiction.
It took thirty years of perspective to finally look back at those African skies and realise I had been flying directly over the blueprints of a crisis.
The Fragile Miracle of 1996
In the winter and spring of 1996, a quiet panic was simmering across the Okavango Delta. Southern Africa was locked in the grip of a devastating regional drought. With Namibia’s central dams drying up, the government in Windhoek made a desperate, accelerated push to build a 250-kilometer emergency pipeline from Rundu to Grootfontein to siphon water from the Okavango River system before the capital ran completely dry.
Because the newly formed Permanent Okavango River Basin Water Commission (OKACOM) was only two years old, this was its very first baptism by fire. Tense, high-pressure delegations were moving between countries, trying to balance Namibia’s desperate thirst against Botswana’s profound vulnerability.
Up in the tourist hub of Maun, the safari industry was terrified. The Okavango Delta is a topographical marvel—an entirely self-contained inland oasis that drops less than two meters across a massive 150-kilometer expanse. Because it is so extraordinarily flat, the tiniest sand shift or upstream water diversion can permanently alter the landscape. If the seasonal floods from Angola were siphoned off upstream, the wild animals that migrated to the Delta every dry season would simply stop coming. The entire ecosystem, and the eco-tourism industry built around it, was balanced on a knife-edge.
The Mystery We Didn’t yet Know
What none of us knew in 1996—and what even the world’s leading scientists didn't fully grasp—was how little we actually understood the river system that was being fought over.
It wasn’t until twenty-seven years later, in 2023, that the National Geographic Okavango Wilderness Project finally published a groundbreaking discovery that properly explained this complex geography. For generations, the true, definitive source of the Okavango had been shrouded in mystery. The 2023 findings revealed that the master key to the entire basin belongs to a vast, hidden network of dense peatlands in the Angolan Highlands—aptly named Lisima Iya Mwono, or the “Source of Life.”
Holding an estimated 100 trillion gallons of water up to 12 feet deep, this “Angola Highlands Water Tower” acts as a massive sponge, slowly releasing the water that supplies over 95% of the Okavango Basin. It is a system so vital and unique that just this year, in 2026, it was officially designated as Angola's very first Wetland of International Importance by the Ramsar Convention.
Back in 1996, we were flying over this miracle, entirely ignorant of its origins and heartbeat.
From Memories to Page-Turners
It is exactly this blend of memory, history, and missing pieces that inspired my transition from writing romantic comedies set in the ballrooms of the Regency to immersing myself in the sweeping sands of African historical suspense.
When I sat down to write Wings over the Okavango I wanted to capture the exact pressure-cooker environment of Maun in September 1996 with some of the characters who first appeared in Book One of my Wings over Africa series—Whispers in the Kalahari. Chief among these is Angie, the teenage runaway from ‘Whispers’, looking for her real father, Starky. With Wings over the Okavango taking place six years later, Angie has become estranged from the father with whom she briefly reconnected. But when Starky is wrongly accused of the murder of a German hunting client, Angie risks everything—including her life—to find the real killer.
So, the looming water crisis, the hostile delegations arriving for emergency forums, the corporate sharks exploiting environmental panic, and the bush pilots navigating the pages of Wings over the Okavango are the echoes of a world I saw firsthand through the windows of a Cessna 404 windows, 250ft below, three decades ago.
Sometimes, you have to leave a place behind for half a lifetime to truly understand the stories it was trying to tell you all along.