My first stop on my next adventure was Perth and although I was dying to get to Exmouth, I had planned a couple of days in the city to visit former Australasian Scholar, Steven Lindfield and to attend Brad Norman’s whale shark fundraiser in Kings Park. I also have family in Perth so a long awaited catch up with my sister and Grandparents was definitely in order. I hope I didn’t surprise you too much Grandma!
I met Steve at the University of Western Australia (UWA). While Steve has spent the last couple of years conducting fieldwork in Guam, he is currently writing up his PhD at UWA, and very kindly offered to show me around his lab. Highlights of the day were definitely eating vegetarian pizza at the University bar, learning the ins and outs of stereo video data retrieval, and helping out with at stereo video camera calibration. That night we had dinner with Steve and his mates including Gabriel Vienna (an old friend from Undersea Explorer). I had heaps of fun meeting everybody that night and especially enjoyed watching Steve’s fish movies shot in 3D – awesome!!
The night of the 9th of May, I met Steve and his parents in Subiaco and headed to beautiful Kings Park for the Oceans Alive 2012 Gala Fundraiser. Brad Norman’s work in developing the ECOCEAN visual database of whale shark encounters earned him a Rolex Award for Enterprise in 2006. Thanks to the help of Rolex, the ECOCEAN database now has input from 38 countries and had identified more than 1200 individual sharks from 4500 logged encounters! That night we were there to help raise funds specifically to develop community education projects and undertake specific research to insure whale shark conservation. We arrived at Frasers function centre and I had a good look at all the beautiful pieces of artwork and memorabilia donated for the silent auction. We then watched talks by Western Australia’s Chief Scientist, Professor Lyn Beazley and Great White Shark Expert, Dr Barry Bruce with a couple of brief intermissions from a remote control white shark which kept deviously making its way onto the stage. Highly sought after items were then auctioned off including none other than Valerie Taylor’s pink wetsuit, and a signed didgeridoo from Xavier Rudd! Overall the night was a fabulous success with all the funding raised from tickets and the auctions going to help protect threatened whale sharks.
The University of Western Australia is set on the banks of the beautiful Swan River and what better place to practice a bit of photography. Having had my beautiful Olympus camera for only a couple of weeks there was definitely a lot of learning to do and Steve was nice enough to give me some pointers the next day. Got to admit, Black Swans, would not have been my first choice of subject though, and I tried not to make my innate fear of Swans too obvious as I was told to get closer and closer – “just not my eyes Mr Swan,” I kept saying to myself. It didn’t take long before I felt quite a bit more confident with the basic operations of the camera. I certainly wasn’t an expert yet but I was well on my way to hopefully getting some decent shots. We then headed over to the University of Western Australia’s Oceans Institute where I was fortunate enough to listen to some fantastic new Honours research and meet Professor Euan Harvey, an expert in Underwater Stereo-video.
I want to sincerely thank Steve Lindfield for not only taking me under his wing in Perth, but also for helping me organise my scholarship since being selected in April. Thanks so much to Brad Norman for allowing me to come to the Gala Event. Huge thank you to my sister, Fabienne for letting me stay in Fremantle and driving me all over the city. Finally, big thanks to Alex Parker, a fantastic up and coming kite surfing videographer for giving me some brilliant filming tips.
