Wild at heart

Kiwi Josh James (above right) shares his survival tips in a new Discovery Channel show. Kerry Harvey reports.

Stuck for a holiday idea this summer? Josh James, the West Coast bushman who has been labelled the Kiwi Bear Grylls, can help with that.

His typical family holiday goes something like this.

“Usually, Mum stays home and me and the boys go out on an adventure. We just go up a river and do a bit fishing and a bit of hunting and camping and lighting fires, a bit of bushcraft stuff, playing with knives and axes and fires,” he says.

“It’s a lot of fun and really good for the kids too. It’s great for their learning and gets them away from their devices and into the real world.”

For fellow Kiwis less confident of their survival skills, he suggests a trial run or two in the backyard.

“Build a survival shelter in the garden and if it gets cold you can just run back inside. It’s a fun way to spend an evening – lighting a fire and building a shelter and hanging out with the insects and bugs.”

Or you could all snuggle up on the couch and watch Kiwi Survival,a one-off special that follows James and his mates as they trial new bush challenges for the people who sign up for the adventure tours that are their daily bread and butter.

James and his fellow guides Dan Lane, Muel James and Sam Harrison descend into some of the country’s claustrophobia-inducing limestone caves, battle volatile weather conditions and take on the Wanganui River Swamp.

Pushing themselves to the limit, they’ll use Kiwi ingenuity to survive with only what they can carry on their backs. Fancy a bed made from sticks or a possum dinner? They will show you how to do it.

“We’re just a bunch of mates out there having fun and getting it done,” James says. “All the other reality TV shows are strangers or just people put in awkward situations, like Naked And Afraid. This is just me and my mates out in the bush having a good time. I mean we do have a few mishaps along the way but there’s a lot of fun.”

James has been sharing his lifestyle – and that of his Canadian wife Kristen and young sons Jack, Charlie and Sonny Jim – on the internet for years, posting hunting videos, gear reviews, motivational clips and even the occasional political rant on his Facebook and YouTube profiles.

Josh James Kiwi Bushman has just shy of 68,000 Facebook likes and more than 30,000 subscribers on YouTube. Some of his videos have had hundreds of thousands and, in some cases, more than one million views.

About five years ago, the Discovery Channel came calling and the result was Kings Of The Wild, a hybrid hunting and cooking show with British chef Matt Tebbutt that took the pair around the world.

A year later, James joined two US military fanatics for the eighth season of Dual Survival, again filmed overseas.

Kiwi Survival is his first foray into making television in his home country.

“New Zealand’s such a fantastic location because everything’s so close and it’s so diverse and there’s such a huge variety of adventures on offer,” James says, revealing he owes his television career to the pesky possum.

“I was trapping possums in the bush and I did a video called the Possum Whisperer for a friend of mine, a Canadian fellow, who wanted to see what I was doing.

“Everyone just said, ‘Holy moly that was really good’, so I figured I had a bit of a knack for producing. I started the YouTube channel and things just snowballed from there.”

James counts himself lucky to be able to earn a living doing what he loves and, while the bulk of his followers are Kiwis and Australians, he says fewer and fewer of us are getting out in the great outdoors.

“It’s good for the soul. It’s good to put everything on hold and go somewhere where there’s no cell reception and just enjoy life. It’s great,” he says. “The clock goes down and there’s no time. It’s either day time or night time. Just the simple things in life that matter I guess – family time, campfire, warm food. I think people are losing that part of their lives.”

“It’s good to put everything on hold and go somewhere where there’s no cell reception and just enjoy life.” – Josh James