On top of an ocean of emotion

Looking at your photos on the internet, it’s like Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner: ‘Water, water everywhere/ Nor any drop to drink’. There’s seawater just about everywhere. Why is that?

I grew up in South Australia and studied marine biology at Flinders University until I was in my mid-20s. I was 85 per cent through my studies when I realised that my love of the ocean wasn’t so much scientific as interpretive and artistic. I was destined to spend too much time in the laboratory and not enough time in the ocean.

So I started pursuing photography as more than a hobby and switched to doing a two-year course at the Centre for Creative Photography in Adelaide. Which took me four years because I did it while assisting any commercial