GROWING up in East Africa, Bob Poole’s childhood was a world away from yours or mine.

His father was the director of the Peace Corps and during the 1960s and ‘70s, his family trailed the concentrations of the “big five”; elephant, buffalo, lion, leopard and the black rhinoceros.

Since, he’s tracked elephants in the Mali desert, followed wildebeest across the Serengeti and travelled the roadless regions of war-torn Sudan as an Emmy award-winning filmmaker for National Geographic.

Yet despite his long list of adventures, there’s one fight he’s yet to conquer; saving Africa’s lost Eden.

When civil war hit in Mozambique, the wildlife of Gorongosa National Park was decimated. For almost a decade, the park was abandoned, and it became the battleground for opposing forces. Poachers moved in and took advantage of the crisis. Elephants were slaughtered for their ivory, zebras were shot for their meat. Hippo populations were slashed by 95 per cent.

By the end of the war, just handfuls of animals were left; 15 buffalo, five zebra, six lions.

But the story of Gorongosa’s elephant population is particularly touching.

Of all the images he has captured in his illustrious career, news.com.au asked Bob to chose one image that particularly touched him.

Here, he explains which picture he chose, and why ...

This photograph (above) is my sister’s, Dr Joyce Poole of Elephant Voices (she is recognised as one of the world’s foremost experts on elephant behaviour) and I was filming video while she shot this photo.

To me, it says so much about these particular elephants I’ve been working with in Gorongosa National Park, a 4000sq km park at the southern end of the Great African Rift Valley in the heart of central Mozambique.

When people first look at elephants they think they’re big, they got these big ears, they have trunks, they all kind of look the same, but if you look at the image carefully they all look totally different.

If you look from the right to the left, the one on the farthest right has big smooth ears and no tusks. Next to it, its ears are spread with wide ripples all the way down to her ears with short pointed tusks.

The elephant to her left has kind of a big round body with small ears and small tusks. The one to the far left of that is obviously very different looking to the others. She’s got this massively crumpled right ear and little tusks. She in fact is the matriarch of this family.

Elephants live in family groups, they’re lead by usually the oldest female, known as the matriarch. Elephant families work like this; great grandmothers, grandmothers, mothers and all of their babies. Males leave their families in their mid-late teens but the family stays together bonded for life, even the males will come back to visit their mothers periodically. They’re very tight, they live long lives, up to 70-plus years old.

To me why this photograph is interesting is because there are so many levels. You can see in this photograph that these elephants are unnerved, something has got their attention.

What it is, is us.

American philanthropist Greg Carr formed a partnership with the Mozambique government on a 20-year project to restore Gorongosa National Park. I came with National Geographic in 2008 to make a film and fell in love with the park and the project.

We are working in Gorongosa with a population of elephants that are remnants of what was once a huge herd. About 97 per cent of all the elephants there were killed in a long civil war. They were killed for their ivory which was used to trade for guns and ammunition to fight this war.

The poaching in Gorongosa was done mostly by the military on both sides of the civil war.

One of the things about this photograph you might not recognise is that the elephants are very alert, they’re obviously interested in us, they’re all looking directly at us, some of them have their trunks up, their ears out, they’re paying close attention to us.

That’s because the elephants of Gorongosa don’t like us very well any more. You can imagine, there used to be a population of 4000 elephants and now you’re down to less than 400.

These elephants are really quite worried about people. When elephants are worried about people, typically what they do is run away.

Most places where you do see elephants in the wild, they’re being protected to a large degree, they [elephants] understand that people who come in vehicles aren’t a threat to them.

However here, in Gorongosa where we’ve been working, elephants are still incredibly persecuted there, they still don’t trust vehicles.

The elephants in this picture are quite different to elephants that I’ve seen almost everywhere across Africa.

They’re worried about us but they’re not running away. That’s because in this particular place, which is unlike almost anywhere that I can think of, these elephants are bunched together. They come at you as a group and group charge.

This family is a family we know well. We call them the Mabenzes family. Each one of these elephants we know individually, we’ve given them names and we know their character and their behaviour.

To me it’s such an interesting photograph on so many levels, because it says so much not only about elephants in general but these individual personalities.

This family are the remnants of the bigger population that was lost living in this park.

The heavy poaching probably ended in the mid-’90s, at that time they’d cleaned out most of the ivory. It was lawless.

Twenty years later, the elephants still avoid human contact.

In this particular park, what’s going to save it is tourism, people coming to visit. But the elephants pose quite a threat, and they scare people.

We have been working there for many years trying to gain their trust. We do that by spending time in their presence, and it works. Over time we get accepted by these elephants, and this is one family we’ve made tremendous progress with. Although they still can be quite scary.

The one on the very left, the matriarch, we call her “Provocadora”.

Mozambique is a Portuguese-speaking country. It was a colony of Portugal for some 500 years, the people there speak Portuguese so we’ve named a lot of these elephants Portuguese names.

We call her Provocadora because she’s an instigator. She instigates her family to charge.

She’s in her late-50s, she’s been through a lot. She’s seen horrible, horrible things.

This sounds terrible, but no doubt if you did autopsies on the older ones, they’re full of bullets, they’re full of lead. Many of them have bullet holes in their ears, they know what bullets are, they know what guns are.

It’s terrible.

- You can watch Bob Poole share stories from Gorongosa National Park and more at National Geographic Live presents Nature Roars Back: Bob Poole live on stage. Bob will be visiting Melbourne, Sydney, Perth and Adelaide this August. For details visit www.natgeolive.org/australia.