“ I was brought up in the bush of Western Victoria. It was very primitive, no electricity or running water. They had a lot of soldiers up there just trying to eke out a living. I was there for the first 10 years of my life. As kids we would take off and told to come back by tea time so we were out in the bush or over the hills and far away. Such a terrific upbringing for kids because they’re really free, busy, fit and able to satisfy their curiosity about things. I think that sort of upbringing gives you geographical awareness. I always know where I’m going without needing a map at all. You just sort of consciously sense where you are and which way you need to turn next. Country kids are like that and we were incredibly free to make mistakes where I grew up.
One of my mates bailed up a big grey roo with a rifle and it ripped his guts open with his claws. He never did that again. Another time he was climbing through a fence a fair way from home and he shot himself in the foot with a 22 but he was smart enough not to take his shoe off. He had to crawl a couple of miles home so people did make mistakes but that’s the way we learned. I fell into a culvert where kids used to throw broken bottles. I gained about 30 scars from that. Another time I was chased by a bull and ran into a barbed wire fence neck first. You need a few war wounds to feel like you’ve learnt something.
At the age of eleven I moved from the bush to the beach and bought a kayak with my pocket money, painted it and started solo sea kayaking. I had no fear of the sea. I put a sail on it. I made a spear gun out of my grandfathers silver service he brought out from England. I made one, lost and raided his silver service again. No fish were caught but I was always making and designing things. That’s where my love of the ocean started. As a teenager I went off and did an adult level Outward Bound Course. It was a test to see if teens could hack a 28 day adult course and we did very well. It was so hot and dry on the Hawkesbury River.
I then went off to the UK as a professional mountaineering instructor, wound up in Scotland and North Wales leading expeditions. I then mounted and led Australia’s first expedition to the Arctic. Nobody had heard about the Arctic. That was 1986 although I first went there 1985 and made the documentary film which is showing tonight. I had a yacht up there I ran for 4 years. I took some multi millionaires from Melbourne to West Greenland. Previous to that I had worked with Peregrine Expeditions up in the Himalayas. Adventure expeditions have been a huge part of my life. In the 2000s I got into the corporate scene. I ended up being trained as a trainer which also helped me personally. I then ended up becoming an executive leadership coach.
The expedition which we filmed cost about two and a half million dollars in todays money. We were out there for 3 to 4 months. Took 18 months full time work to pull it together but I had been planning it for about 8 years before that. These things take a long time. We’ve been working on the Oceanic Research Institute for 10 years so its just beginning to formulate now.
The expedition was a 1,000 km sea kayak voyage down the coast of East Greenland. It was supposed to happen in Summer but we had to get men and equipment up there which required a boat. We couldn’t fly in so we bought a yacht in England. We hit a number of force 10 storms which did a lot of damage to the boat. We ended up starting in Winter.
It was a bad season for these hurricane type winds called Pitoraqs. These are winds that come down from a 10,000 foot ice cap at about 260kms an hour. We had 2 storms within 3 days and then we headed off and ran into a few more travelling along the coast. We were hit by a really bad one and got trapped on a big rock of about half a kilometre long out in the sea. We found a little cave at one end and hid in the cave out of the wind and about 8 o’clock at night the sea came straight in. A wave rushed in and we were washed out. Two of us ran to where the kayaks were tethered. Two were still buried under the snow but 2 were still in the water. The other 2 guys managed to get some of our supplies out and into stock sacks which they put up higher. It was freezing, The wind was so strong you had to crawl or you’d be blown over. We ended up bivouacking which is sleeping without a tent.
In the morning we saw we were on the most isolated part of the rock. The storm blew for a week. The storm surges got higher and higher. One by one all of our bags were washed away. We had wet clothes, wet sleeping bags and we still had the kayaks. Inside one we found a two man, one day ration pack that lasted 4 of us for a week. We didn’t have water and you can’t eat snow. We moved camp 7 times and each time the sea came up and washed away where we had been.
Finally it stopped. We reckon another day we would have been far too weak to get off the island. We would have died on that rock. The foxes would have picked us over during the winter and we’d be bones. We would never be found. We would have vanished without trace. We were so thin and hungry and I don’t know how we survived but we did and even then we were still cracking jokes. There were little puddles of water at the top of the island but it was salt. It didn’t occur to us that waves could break over the top.
We knew there was a hunting camp 100 km’s south somewhere. We had to assume that our yacht with the film crew and food could have sunk. We had to discount the possibility that the boat had survived. We had to assume that their were some Inuit hunters in a hut down there. At this stage we had been missing for 11 days and in the weather we’d had the crew would rightfully think we were dead. We paddled down and found a hut which was used by the hunters and we saw a guy and his son. He’d heard about us because the yacht had been sheltering in his little harbour. We ate some duck and we stayed in the warm hut. It stopped blowing for a day so we headed off. We got in the polar current and made good speed. We met with the crew.
On the very day we left to return back to the safety of the channel at the bottom of Greenland we were hit by another terrible storm. The guy I had employed as a sailing master said if there’s a big storm you always head out to see as it’s safer. He was a huge bully and turned out to be completely unqualified. He took us out to sea and we should have stayed in a little bay somewhere. Our engine was nowhere near powerful enough. We got knocked over by 50 foot waves. The boat was smashed up, the windows were broken in, the electronics soaked. This idiot sailing master claimed that he’d damaged his pelvis so we had to wrap him up and put him in a bunk. The rudder was broken, the propeller tangled in ropes. We were just drifting.
A freighter found us and towed us to shore. We took him to hospital where they found nothing wrong with him. He was a malingerer. That was that trip.
We had a professional film crew on board and luckily the footage survived. We got back to Melbourne and turned it into a very successful one hour documentary which sold to Discovery Channel, BBC, ABC, everywhere. The film will be showing tonight at the Star Court theatre here in Lismore. We are raising funds for Arctic research.
We now know where we were is one of the hottest melt zones on earth. Greenland contributes 65% percent of the melt to sea rise. That part of the coast that I know very well as you see a lot in a kayak that you miss in a boat. While we are there we will also do an inventory of about 200 glaciers in that area in what’s called ground truthing. As Cousteou said..’You have to see it for yourself to know.’ Satellites can tell us where the glacier ends but they can’t tell you what condition it’s in. It’s called discovery science and its multi disciplinary.
We have a guy from the uni who will be studying cold water corals. We are taking a very tough top Australian diver with us. We are doing work for NASA who are mapping the sea floor around Greenland. The science is called Bathymetry. We have 2 expeditions planned for 2019 and 2020. We are also doing some work with the Laboratory of Applied Bio Acoustics which is essentially sticking a microphone in the water. The ocean is incredible noisy. The first survey will involve the whales and the animals on the coast as nobody really knows. Theres no-one there to observe them so this is a way to do it accurately. Shipping and geology blasts blow the ear drums out of whales so they can’t hear the ships coming and they get hit. We will have the worlds leading bio acoustic scientist with us as well. We will also do work with clean air monitoring. We have one in Tassie run by CSIRO.
The ORI (Oceanic Research Institute) is a Australias first International Oceanic and climate research organisation so we’re going to be out there flying the flag for Australia which is great. It really will boost our international reputation for research. We are also the only organisation of our type in the world in that we operating from traditional wooden sailing vessels. This means we are the only truly sustainable research organisation. There is only one other based in Paris and they run an aluminium schooner but she’s made of metal. All those thing are made of oil or come out of the ground. That represents carbon release whereas building in wood represents carbon capture.
My base is in France but I’m back and forwards. I’m doing work here with SCU. We have some incredible people on our research committee. My role is organising it all and finding the right people for the job. I’ll be doing this till I drop dead. Retirement is not a concept I have any familiarity with. I have more books to write.”