Meet Our Geeks - Micheal

Hi, I'm Michael and I'm originally from Sydney and moved to central Victoria near the headwaters of the Loddon River and then to Canberra. I work in the Murray-Darling Basin Authority on river health. I look at plants and animals in the river and the hydrology of the rivers the way the water flows and put that together into some sort of understanding of the ecosystem and river health. For me it was just an passion knife for plants. I was an avid bushwalker, an avid climber, an avid skiier and rafting and always out doors from very early and quite a junior high school level I was in the environment and always fascinated by the plants and so I used to carry little guides with me and so I'd know all the names of the plants and people would get bored with me stopping and taking photographs of plants. I was really just that passion so I always knew I'd do things with plants. High school was maths, english, physics, chemistry, economics, for my high school certificate. Then a whole range of other things, mostly in sciences more so than the arts throughout high school. I went inot university and did a bachelor degree in science and that was the combination of really small things like chemistry, molecular biology and really big things like climatology and land management, and so I went on to a masters degree and that was on plants again, but this time twelve months in antarctica spent looking at plants in extreme environments, and that was a masters then a PHD on plants again and this was the relationship between plants and streams so organic matter dynamics for my PHD. Twenty years ago my wife to be and I were riding from Menindee through to Broken Hill down to Adelaide across to Geelong via the coast and we were riding pushbikes and so I would... we chose to do that in summer and that was forty degree heat and headwinds. We're riding along and I've got my didgeridoo strapped on the back of the bike and we get down to Goolwa near the mouth of the Murray River. We're facing a big ride right across the... circumnavigating the lower lakes (Lake Alexandrina and Lake Albert) on the lower part of the Murray River, and so a big circumnavigation of that. It was very hot, very dry and we want to go to the Coorong and someone puts in a good word to the barrage operator, the barrages are perfectly flat little causeway that runs right across the entrance of the lakes through to the Coorong, and the barrage operator says: "no worries, I'll open the gate and let you through early in the morning". So we were they bright and early in the morning and then just had by ourselves this perfect ride just meandering along with pelican, seals, all sorts of things with the lakes to the left the Coorong to the right, so we were just able to cross to the Coorong - fantastic. For me that's relatively easy, because it's all about passion. I got into this world through a passion for plants and it wouldn't really matter whether you had a passion for plants, apassion for people, a passion for the earth or a passion for something, the environmental science really brings together all of that: people, economics, geography, hydrology engineering, science and really plants and animals. Finding the avenue for that passion and environmental science really allows you to follow all of those sides or any of those sides fully.