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Ian Mackersey is a New Zealand
writer and documentary film producer acclaimed for his deeply researched
and revelationary biographies.
His first, published in London in 1985, and still in print, was
the life of L T C (Tom) Rolt, the prolific author and pioneer of
the leisure cruising industry on Britain’s inland waterways.
He was inspired to write the book and research Rolt’s life
from his own love of the English canals which he and his family
regularly cruised in their own narrow beam boat from its home port
in a London suburb.
The first of his aviation biographies, Jean Batten: The Garbo
of the Skies (1991), a finalist for two New Zealand book awards,
is soon to become a major international movie. The story of the
most reckless, successful and secretive of the celebrated long-distance
women aviators of the 1930s, the biography – and a TV documentary
Mackersey directed – revealed for the first time the truth
about the sad and reclusive life of this glamorous woman pilot,
solving in the process the mystery of her bizarre death in 1982.
In 1999, following his success with aviation’s ‘Garbo’,
Ian Mackersey produced Smithy, the first fully definitive biography
of the legendary Australian pilot, Sir Charles Kingsford Smith,
whose disappearance over the Indian Ocean in 1935 remains one of
aviation’s great unsolved mysteries. His latest book, a new
study of the life of the American bicyclemakers who invented the
aeroplane: The Wright Brothers: The Remarkable Story of the
Aviation Pioneers who Changed the World was published in London
in November 2003.
A former head of film and television production at British Airways
in London, where his documentaries took 24 international awards,
Ian Mackersey is an ex-pilot, journalist, magazine editor, TV documentary
producer and the author of nine books, including two novels. He
began his writing career as a reporter on daily newspapers in New
Zealand before going to London to work in Fleet Street and later
as a feature writer for Royal Air Force Review, travelling
the world reporting on the RAF’s global operations. There followed
a year in Hong Kong as night news editor of the South China
Morning Post, the editorship, back at the Air Ministry in London,
of the RAF’s flying training journal, Air Clues, and
a move in 1958 to Central Africa for seven years.
In Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) he edited a monthly magazine for a copper
mining group and in the mid-1960s established a documentary film
unit in newly independent Zambia. His most successful film, Luapula
Journey, which was accepted by the Edinburgh Festival and has
remained a cult movie throughout Central Africa for 40 years, was
a vivid portrayal of a week in the life of a Zambian fish trader;
the simple story unfolded entirely in the local Bemba language –
with an English commentary for European audiences. Another of his
films, Snow on the Equator, featured an expedition he made
into the Ruwenzori, the fabled Mountains of the Moon on the Congo/Uganda
border.
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| Ian Mackersey in New Zealand's Kaimanawa
mountains, 2003. |
Back in London in 1965 Mackersey joined the public affairs department
of British Airways (then BOAC) to manage its film, television and
photographic operations, during which time he wrote and produced
for world-wide television a flow of documentaries about airline
operations, including three about the supersonic airliner Concorde.
In 1983, after an absence of 35 years, he returned to live and work
again in New Zealand where, in Auckland, he and his wife, Caroline,
a former BBC-TV researcher, formed a film production company to
make documentary programmes for TVNZ. Since the early 1990s Mackersey
has devoted his life to full-time writing, travelling the world
researching his books for his London publisher. Africa still calls.
One of his deep desires is to tell the story of the great unfulfilled
dream of Cecil Rhodes to build an Imperial railway through the length
of Africa from the Cape to Cairo.
Contact Ian Mackersey |
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