Australian Damien Mander is the unlikely founder of Zimbabwe’s all-female anti-poaching unit

Lures of the sea I was born in 1979 and grew up in a fishing town called Mornington, in Victoria, Australia. I love the ocean. I’ve got saltwater running through my veins. There was a pier and fishermen used these lures to fish for squid at night. They were expensive and they’d get caught on the bottom.

I used to come down before school, collect them, then sell them back to the fishermen. At 13 years old, I was making money. It was me and two friends, but I was always the one going in when the water was the coldest or murkiest. That led to me wanting to be a diver in the navy – anybody can be a diving instructor, but very few people become a navy diver.

12 days of hell I joined the Royal Australian Navy as an electronics technician; they wouldn’t accept divers straight off the street. They needed more technicians than divers so they were reluctant to let me transfer. I wrote a letter a day to the commanding officer until they were sick of me and let me do the Clearance Diver Acceptance Test.

They let me do that because they thought I’d fail and come back and finish my electrician training. Of course I didn’t fail, though the test was 12 days of hell. You’re put through physical and mental torture, and the four pillars of misery: hungry, tired, cold and wet. But the sense of adventure appealed.

Dive troop I became a clearance diver then September 11 happened, three years later. The Australian government formed a tactical assault group and, for the first time, entry to special forces was opened to the public and the entire Australian Defence Force. I came across from the navy into the dive troop. It had been a struggle: on the last day of the course they pulled five of us in and said we were fail­ing. I had that day to prove myself. When you look back on life, there are a few key moments that changed its direction significantly. That was one of them. I was the only one who got through.