Howie Cooke: Artivism

When was the last time you had an epiphany? 

Artist/activist Howie Cooke shares the sudden realisation that steered the course of his life's work - a handful of decades on the front lines of marine protection via NGOs, art, music and direct action. 

Howie has spent 50 years boogie boarding, playing guitar and painting. He has shown in hundreds of art exhibitions around the world – in addition to his large-scale murals, mostly of cetaceans. 

Twenty years ago, Howie co-founded the NGO Surfers for Cetaceans to activate surf media on the issue of whaling. S4C then grew into one of surfing’s most scrappily impactful direct action organisations – through campaigns like Transparentsea, films like Academy Award winning documentary The Cove, and collaborating with groups like Paul Watson’s Sea Shepherd.

Along the way we dig into what keeps conviction alive as you age: ideals without absolutism, humor as a tool, and the role of the artist in a world flooded with distraction. 

If you care about the power of art, cetacean conservation, ocean pollution, or creative environmental activism, this conversation offers both practical lessons and deep emotional re-centering. 

We talk through the campaigns, contradictions, and  mindset that have kept Howie moving forward without slipping (too far) into perfectionism or despair.

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Listen with Lauren L. Hill & Dave Rastovich

Sound + Video Engineer: Ben J Alexander

Theme song: Shannon Sol Carroll

Additional music by Kai Mcgilvray   + Ben J Alexander

Join the conversation: @Waterpeoplepodcast 

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Thanks to our generous sponsors this season:

Patagonia Australia 

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Transcript

A Surreal Bowie Recording Moment

SPEAKER_00 0:00

I bought the guitar to David, handed it to him, and I ended up playing his guitar, which had been given him by Ronnie Wood at the end of the Stones tour in 81. I took a chance and played on the second beat with the electric guitar cross Bowie playing primary chords. On the first beat, I was playing bar chords. You know, I was like, wow, I recorded a John Lennon song on a Rolling Stone guitar with David Bowie. It's never gonna get better.

SPEAKER_06 0:22

Welcome to Water People, a podcast about the aquatic experiences that shape who we become back on land. I'm your host, Lauren Hill, joined by my partner Dave Rastovich. Here we get to talk story with some of the most interesting and adept water folk on the planet. We acknowledge the Bunjalang Nation, the traditional custodians of the land and waters where we work and play, who have cared for this sea country for tens of thousands of years. Respect and gratitude to all First Nations people, including elders, past, present, and emerging. This season is supported by Patagonia, whose purpose-driven mission is to use business to save our home planet. Today we're in conversation with Howie Cook, 50 years a boogie boarder, guitarist, and painter. Howie has shown in hundreds of art exhibitions around the world, in addition to his large-scale murals, mostly of cetaceans. The International Whaling Commission was established in 1946 as the global body responsible for the management of whaling and the conservation of whales. It has 88 member countries. Howie has attended 18 of the last 19 meetings, where he peacefully protests the continuation of whaling and the mistreatment of whales and dolphins. Over the past handful of decades, Howie has contributed to scores of initiatives that impact the marine environment, from the Binyabutts campaign for Bondi Beach to pushing for Parliament to acknowledge the Blue Groper as Australia's first marine icon. Twenty years ago, Howie co-founded the NGO Surfers for Cetaceans to activate surf media on the issue of whaling. S4C then grew into one of surfing's most scrappily impactful direct action organizations through campaigns like Transparency, films like the Academy Award-winning documentary The Cove, and collaborating with groups like Paul Watson's Sea Shepherd.

SPEAKER_05 2:19

Howie Cook is a prolific artist, a kind of one-man movement in a way. He's always had such an enthusiasm for all things in life and a curiosity, but also a kind of fierce and fun type of caring. And uh I met Howie a couple decades ago when I was in my early 20s and really looking for people who were enacting their cares and concerns for the ocean mainly. And Howie and I just happened to have some mutual friends who said you guys should meet, and when we did, my life was never the same. And essentially Howie brought to my life uh so many fun moments and and so many great adventures, but really showed me through his actions and his true convictions how to give a shit about the world, essentially. Like how to how to just get busy with those cares and concerns for the world. And I've always just been so grateful for Howie because of that ability to enact care and have a good time at the same time.

SPEAKER_06 3:30

A big part of this podcast from the start was capturing the stories, sharing the stories of elders in particular who, and this is key, maintain that sparkle in their eye for life and a closeness to life, and Howie's definitely been one of those key people for both of us.

SPEAKER_05 3:49

Yeah, certainly.

SPEAKER_06 3:50

How do you make sense of the way that Howie moves through the world? Specifically his speed, but also the way he does it without concern for finances.

SPEAKER_05 4:01

Yeah, yeah. Just you know, I I feel like Howie's uh a creature from another era, and we hear that in this story, chatting with Howie about his time in the Pacific and you know, just sailing around and drifting from one adventure to the next and saying yes, yeah, saying yes over and over and over. And I really feel that you know that value and getting to hear from people who are in their 70s or older is just that we hear from a period in time a lot of us romanticize and think of as revolutionary, and the music that we really love, you and I, comes from the 70s, and when you get to sit with Howie and have a cup of tea and start talking story, and he reveals stories from that period in time on the front line of activism, of social issues, of music, of art, of ecological issues. It's just like a s it's a straight shot into that period in time, and he can then also alert us to how things have changed, you know, how the baselines have shifted, and for us to not accept that, oh, there's not that many fish in your local rivers, or oh yeah, there's not that many of that one bird species migrating, or hey, there's tens of thousands of whales now migrating along this coast and when we were kids, and back then there were only a few hundred. So that kind of perspective is super valuable and really useful. We get a lot out of that, huh?

SPEAKER_06 5:23

Yeah, so much. And I always get really inspired, encouraged, enlivened specifically by the campaigns or the movements that Howie's been part of. You know, it's easy to like kind of roll your eyes at the idea of beach cleanups or specifically picking up cigarette butts off of beaches. But it used to be not so long ago that beaches, our beaches were littered with cigarette butts. And Howie was part of this movement in in Bondi to bin your butts to remind smokers that the beach isn't an ashtray. And small actions like tossing a cigarette butt has larger implications for the broader ecosystem and of course for all the people who are in trying to enjoy the the coast. So we've seen beaches change radically because of these, because of people who cared enough to step in and focus, concentrate their energy on something very specific. And then we see, of course, whales, whale migration, the blossoming humpback population along the east coast of Australia here being one of the most successful conservation wins in the history of conservation. And that's because of engaged activists like Howie Cook.

SPEAKER_05 6:39

Yeah, I also feel there's a real experience with Howie of various types of intelligence and redefining, well not redefining, but rethinking what intelligence looks like, sounds like, and how it moves in the world. And I I recall the first hangouts with Howie where I would gush about surfing with dolphins on waves, you know, eye to eye, and the magic of all of that, and then Howie would launch into the specifics of their anatomy and why perhaps they are so spectacular with these huge brains and huge hearts and living in this weightless realm and you know, their hands, their skeletal structures wrapped up in their pectoral fins so they can't create weapons and and of mass destruction and all of that. And so I o I really appreciate that because how he has that ability to put himself in the skin of a cetacean and see the world through their eyes, and then he can bring that to music, he can bring that especially to a paintbrush and paint some of the most spectacular, ocean-centric images that are just burnt in your brain once you see them. I feel like that's yeah, that's like this really amazing aspect of sharing time with Howie, where I feel as though you kind of get a break from being a human and see and feel things in different ways. And I guess essentially, isn't that what we really need to be doing so much of in this period in time where there's so much division and conflict in the world, and perhaps a lot of those conflicts, be they personal or very political and big, they come from a lack of being able to place ourselves in the skin of another. And so how his artivism, his art, his ability to write and paint and place us in a so-called other and see the world anew is really wonderful, and that's part of his vibrance, is still at this age to have such a enthusiasm, a spark, and a passion to pass on to people.

SPEAKER_06 8:33

And I would add to that his ability to engage in big, heavy, serious political, global issues and still have a damn good time.

A Cliffside Whale Epiphany

SPEAKER_05 8:44

Oh, yeah, 100%. Like going to Antarctica with Paul Watson and Sea Shepherd and being on those missions there to get between supposedly protected whales in the Southern Ocean and the industrial versions of whaling that were going after those whales, or be it, you know, in the face of bureaucrats or corporate heads of company that are implicit in whale kills or radically inhumane practices around the world. And yeah, Howie steps straight up to it and looks for the humanity in each other and doesn't look for conflict, he looks for what's the connection there, and that's I've always admired that because I I don't have that ability in that same way. I'm more quick to anger perhaps, but so grateful to be able to sit down and get Howie in a seat for a little while because he is a fast-moving creature, and also to get him to sit down and talk because he's so humble and sort of self-deprecating around his art, his activism, and all the work he does, and he didn't feel like he was worthy to sit down. And this took us like two years of wrangling to get a good friend to sit down and do this because he was so uh humble about his adventures and his achievements, and there's a real beauty in that too. So, yeah, a meandering, wonderful conversation and an insight into one of the more adventurous and sustained adventurous lives either of us have ever had the good fortune to come into great contact with. So, yeah, very stoked. Ask me the question, please. Yeah, well, the question is not like the time in your life where you were never the same, your life changed, just a time because I've known you so long, I know you have millions of those, probably more of those than anyone I know in terms of an adventurous life. Though the one I feel like I hear you speak of with the most heartfelt like weight behind it is whale-related. So you've had a moment. What was that moment?

SPEAKER_00 10:54

Well, that that's true. Because as a kid, I was infatuated with with dinosaurs and whales, obviously, like we all are. And I did used to carry around this Wheat Picks card. Remember the days of wheat cards and wheels? I don't remember plastic. Steve Kilby, you know, talked about this the other day. Hilarious thing I watched about the little plastic toys and the little aircraft carriers was the big one to get. Totally, yeah. And the little submarines you put baking powder or something and they move along, yeah, yeah, yeah. And it was there was a card and it was the battle, the unseen battle, between sperm whale and the giant squid. And this fascinated me. It could happen a mile down in the sea in the dark. And I it was only decades later that I realized, oh shit, that is the battle between the biggest brained uh vertebrate with the biggest brained invertebrate. And the cetaceans and cephalopods have been a lifelong fascination. But it it did the pivotal moment definitely was when I was about 20, 21. I moved out because of living in Fiji, uh loving that island life. I looked for that island life, moved out of Auckland to Waiheke, came back and I lived with a Bancal Street or the Blues Band, which was really a great time as well. But moved to the island and I met a woman from out there. So we moved up to a cliff at Honey Tangy looking out over the sea, and then that was supposed to be in transitory, you know, like to a farm. And I would not leave. The women moved off, and I remember my girlfriend saying, I've lost you to the frickin' whales. Because I had this epiphany. I had this thing where just one day it just hit me. There were there there was this moment I was out on the cliff that looking out over the Harake Gulf, over Coromandel Barrier, Great Barrier, beautiful. And it may have been that I was looking at dolphins or something, but whatever. Suddenly I was like, this is so good. It is planet ocean. The greatest people on this planet are clearly the whales and dolphins. And you know, I felt a sense of relief, that downgrade from like, we humans, top of the paradigm, you know, like blah blah blah, we're closest to God, all this bullshit that goes on, and suddenly it was like, oh, just coming down a few notches, you know, the whales, the whales and the dolphins, and then you know, you just start thinking about elephants and silverbacks and all the other animals we used to think about that clearly have magnificent societies and magnificent intelligence. But it was the whale, it was my love of the ocean since I was a little kid. I just you know, just loving the sea. And I just went, that's it. That was it. And I just went, that's it. I'm gonna be a voice for whales and dolphins till the day I die, committed like that. And immediately in the same moment, I just went, Well, I have to be vegetarian. If I'm gonna speak for whales and dolphins, I can't go out there and proselytize. And I didn't have any worry about that. You know, let's get some ideals going with this. Like, you feel insignificant, like what difference can I make? But the ideals of your inspiration, you know, like carry you.

SPEAKER_05 14:06

Did that immediately start taking shape in the form of your art then? Or what other skills were you employing when you thought, okay, voice for Cetacea for Wales Dolphins? What shape did that take?

SPEAKER_00 14:21

Yeah, definitely. Painting. Painting. And I was already or no, maybe around the same time I I became guitarist in a band called Island. We were the band on Waiheke Island for a couple of years, and that gave me an income of$15 a week playing Saturday, Friday and Saturday nights. But the rest of my time, I when I had this perfectly, I went, I I don't want to do nine to five again. I I'm gonna find my own way. So it was a lot of resolve, you know, like okay, I'm gonna have to make it as a painter, I'm gonna get this income when I can as a musician. And and and I was I'd met this lovely woman uh around that time. I'd started painting whales. And I think, yeah, I think she arrived as a fully fledged vegetarian and and I was like, yeah, I was thinking I should, and something, whatever, it all came together at the same time. Yeah, and I started doing these big paintings, and I think this first canvas that I bought was the only big canvas I ever bought thereafter. It was the first one, and then I went, I can make these.

SPEAKER_03 15:32

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 15:33

So I started making my own canvases, and I was painting big whale paintings, and that's one right behind you over there on the wall. That's the second whale painting I ever did. It's got the date on it, 1976. The grey. That grey whale she got a little black and white Jacques Cousteau photo, because that previous Girl Pignot moved to the island because of her, and I got I had my epiphany about the whales, and then she left saying, Oh, we've lost you to the whales. She had actually bought me the Jacques Cousteau book on the whales, and it became viable. And there was a little photo of that grey whale, and Jacques Cousteau had said, This is a pregnant grey whale swimming upside down. So I painted it and brought it to colour, and I remember making all that barnacle texture with the oil paint, like shh, you know, the impasto sort of thing, building up that effect. But the beautiful thing is an upside-down whale like that has got the biggest goofy grin. And then, you know, I'm going, oh my god, this whale's pregnant, she's swimming in neutral buoyancy. I know what I'm gonna call this painting, falling in love. Right. Yeah, awesome. And and it's funny because on the back of that it says this painting belongs to Helen. It's like she said, You gotta Helen was the the woman who came along and we had this beautiful life together, and and um she said, You you gotta leave that to me in your will. Classic. Still got that written on the back from a week. Yeah.

Labs Acid And Latin Roots

SPEAKER_05 17:04

So how did that take shape then? If you're like, you know, you get this big epiphanipical moment. I love that word. Niptical. Oh yeah. And it sounds like you would have had a lot of clarity around that. It sounded like a real lightning bolt kind of moment. It was and you're painting, and then as I've known you, you're you're like a real yes man in terms of saying yes to opportunities and adventures in life. Like I mean that in the most complimentary way, because I just think I can just imagine you at that point making this decision, going, Alright, I'm not gonna do the nine to five thing. So I'm doing art, I'm doing music, I'm doing whatever I can to stay out of that rigidity of a nine-to-five clock dominated life. So you've got these real strong senses that you want to stick to. That includes not taking government support as well. Exactly, that was the other one, yeah. Great. So then what does that look like? Like you you you've got a pretty interesting list of experiences with jobs that I thought would be interesting for people to hear because I feel like you know, there's times where you've you've worked in the lab space, you've worked in the fishing space, even, you've worked in these different areas which I feel have impacted you. Like when you speak of the science of cetacea or the science the scientific method in the world, I feel like you have a good grasp on that. And I've always wondered how how did that happen if you're talking about playing for 15 bucks a week and painting murals.

SPEAKER_00 18:46

And growing my own, we were growing our own veggies. The place on that. That's a big one too. It was huge. We inherited that. There was a Hare Krishna guy, lovely guy, and we took over, I took over the rental of that house, and then Helen came along. But there was this it was this garden, like the whole size of this area here, this guy planted out, everyone just kept it going. I know you had the the epiphany about gardening. I remember you going, ow, I'm a gardener now. Around about COVID, especially.

SPEAKER_05 19:14

Yeah, yeah, especially. But were you saying yes to things that when they came across that you you were like wanting an education of sorts in that, or were you just saying yes for what the truth is, I I it was it was fortunate as it turned out, I didn't go to uni, bit of trouble with the law.

SPEAKER_00 19:30

Nicking of Y. I I feel like that was divine intervention. No, don't waste your time at seventh form at school this wasted year and then university. And I went straight out into a high-powered job, biochemical research technician for plant diseases at the TSIR. It's a mouthful, isn't it? And I did synthesize um cytokine made before in the world, you know, like I analyzed all the chemicals in the natural wax of golden delicious apples over a two-year period. I mean, wow, you know, yeah. A Bristol freighter flew up from South Ireland and delivered all these apples to me, and I sat there for ages docking three on each, three on the sunny side, three on the you know, you this circular thing, so you know your exact surface area. But the thing was at the same time myself and an Irish technician working in mycology, this is in a big laboratory. Um, they even grew the marijuana there for the police posters saying, This is a marijuana plant. So I'd go up to that lab and they'd show me through scanning microscopes these bubbles of golden syrup on the underside of the of the leaves. And of course, I'm 17. Wow. Doing this high-powered stuff in charge of the dangerous chemical store, which meant that I was nicking a Winchester of alcohol out of there every so often and making from all my mates making this ridiculously strong homebrew or something. Sort of homebrew. So I just cocktail people want to make cocktails pure alcohol. Yeah, it was pretty silly, but that's what you do. Yeah. So myself and this Irish technician who's a radical guy and a and a professorial type who is just a crazy mad scientist. He we started trying to make LSD in that lab. And of course, at the same time, you know, I'd moved out of home and was running with a whole gang of great guys, two basically two schools on the same wavelength coming out of that school and and meeting in the city and forming big um platings and getting right into acid. And and it was another thing. It was just brilliant. Acid just just totally woke me up. Like, I don't want to do this job for I don't want to be an old geezer getting a gold watch.

SPEAKER_05 21:48

And it was all about making music, all of us buying up electric guitars and so you did that then I'm all I can't recall when or how you got your Wordsmithery, your editing abilities, where does that come from? Because over the years, and we've done things where we've worked on a project together, and I might come up with a concept, but I have no academic skill to back it up and like wrap it up in the right words and stuff. I might throw words out there and you'll come along and go, oh well, this word in particular, and you'll bring out the red pen and it's always spot on, and it's an enhancement when you come with that red pen. Where did that come from?

SPEAKER_00 22:30

Have thought about that. I I think it comes from me going to a boarding school in New Zealand. I won a scholarship there. Let two commoners in to this very posh school, which is under investigation for abuse. Um and I was there when that was definitely going on. And only lasted four months, supposed to be three years, but it was horrific. But you know, I came out of it with a couple of benefits. One of it was I'd learnt really strong. I'd been really versed and really enjoyed learning Latin. And later on, when I needed to make some work, I just sort of see the Latin root of how to put that word together. Wow. But um, and also I came out of it with a very strong resistance, like a a distaste for religion and Christianity and all that sort of stuff.

SPEAKER_05 23:21

So the boarding school was affiliated with church or something. Oh, it was yeah, it was an Anglican. Yeah, it was that also where you got your disdain for the nine to five thing, too, you reckon?

SPEAKER_00 23:30

No, not no, no, it was different times back then. You could walk into a job and go, no, I don't like it, and you could leave at lunch and just go, oh, and there were jobs galore. Wow. We cross the road and I'll try the Really? Yeah, I don't I don't I haven't really thought about it.

SPEAKER_05 23:48

And this is New Zealand you're talking about too, yeah, which is certainly not the case right now when you hear about. I've got friends in New Zealand who were just telling me last week about how he's an Aussie who's moved there, and they're like, Why are you moving here? There's no work, everyone's going to Australia. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So wow, that's very different. Very different. So you could float like that. That's how you yeah.

SPEAKER_01 24:09

Yeah, that was the asshole. You were the unflushable guy, he just kept floating around. Why hasn't he come back from lunch? He's still sitting there.

Fishing Boats Sanctuaries And Threats

SPEAKER_00 24:19

It's like yeah, and I had crazy jobs. Uh that yeah, that was all part of it. And the the you mentioned about uh fishing, uh became a uh Danish saying trawleman crew because I wanted this. Is when I was living on Waiheke Island, so it's the mid-70s, that the last 70s. Um, and I just wanted to get out of, I'd had my epiphany about whales, I was painting whales. I just wanted to get out there, out to the Moahina's and beyond, you know, out into the Gulf, out past the noises, and actually find whale uh whales. And um, because it's not as easy as this humpback highway we had here. 100%. Yeah. The whales are much further out beyond the the Moahina's actually Cobalt Channel, they can be way out there towards Great Barrier. So I was out on this fishing trawler, 42-footer, um, and yeah, so sort of did see whales, and dolphins were fantastic. They would leap from their stern, from the from the stern and come at eye level past you on working on the winches. And I'd be Jim, the engineer. There's only three of us on board. Jim Jim would be on the other winch, and I'd go, Jim, Jim, check it out. And he wouldn't even look at the dolphins. He had it always had a fag in his mouth, and he'd go, yeah, yeah, throw the fag on the deck, crush it out with his foot and go, yeah, yeah, dolphins.

SPEAKER_02 25:43

I was like, look at this. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 25:47

Like this eye-level checking you out. Yeah. And uh, but the good thing about having that experience of being a trawleman, and sometimes being in the in the ice hole, uh, up to your waist and fish, and just going, I don't really like this job. You know, the you feel for the fish. And and I had my karmic moment where a numray electrocuted me in the ice hold and threw me right across the hold. You know, I was trying to move it, and it was big and then super heavy. It just gave me everything it it had. And I just went off the ground, boom, across the other side of the hole. And I had a lot of respect for that fish, of course, and we eventually got it out and over the side. But yeah, I just started to question that. But later on, when I was living at Bondoy, and moved to Australia, and I was living at Bondo, just jumping ahead a bit, but I proposed for Bondo Bay to become a total marine sanctuary in the early 90s. I'd come back from living in Europe for three years or something. And and that's when that was another period where things where things really kicked in for me. But I um had proposed this and I was at precinct meetings, you know, the other things like blue graper steak fish were all coming on, trying to get protection for giant cuttlefish, because I really started to realise how magnificent cephalopods are. And I got rung up by the sort of lead deep ocean spear gunner champion. You know, they have those spearfishing bags, they're all covered in camo gear and shut trying to shoot uh bluefin tuna and wahoo and stuff. And and he rang me out, he said, Are you how we cook? And I said, Yeah, and he goes, I'm so-and-so, and I'm coming to get you. And you fuck you, and you think about Total Sanctuary for Bondi. And he went on and on. I'm like this, holding it away from your head. He's just yelling at me and swearing at me. And by the time he finished, I said, Sounds like you and I got a lot in common. He went, What? And I said, like what? And I said, like the ocean. I said, I don't think it's for you with your spear gun and me with my underwater camera to stand in a position of elitism over the general public, a lot of them who need to get just learn how to be s comfortably and safely in the sea without you know us owning it over them in whatever way. And and uh he had actually said to me, Yeah, he'd call me a Johnny come lately. You know, I had long hair then and everything. I wasn't you Johnny come lately, you know. What does that even mean? Oh, you know, you're just one of these um um what's the word, you know, some sort of a righteous yuppie, you know, who's arrived in Bondi and's got this feel good project or something. I don't know.

SPEAKER_02 28:36

Yep.

SPEAKER_00 28:36

And so it was very helpful for me when he was when he when I said well what I finished saying to him. Said, anyway, I will be at those precinct meetings. You're saying you could come down and have a go at me. And uh and I just need you to know that I'm an ex-long liner, an ex-trawlman, Danish saying a trawleman, and uh had been a spear fisherman in Tahiti, and I will meet you down there. You can come and meet this Johnny come lately, see ya. Yep. He never turned up.

SPEAKER_05 29:05

Classic. Yeah. But yeah, well that's the thing, isn't it? It's like that kind of perspective, and I'm glad you shared that because I've I've I've wondered over the years how much you've called upon those experiences like in the lab, those experiences like in the islands in Tahiti and hanging with locals and then on board fishing vessels. And it's just cool to hear that you know, that's like a lived experiential education, very which is super valid, like and you can see how valid it is when you talk to another fisher or a person and they go, Oh, okay.

Whaling Footage Sparks A Mission

SPEAKER_00 29:41

And you know, one one of the things we used to see, we used to see trawlers operating illegally. You know, you you might bring back 50 baskets of fish to the market at uh West Haven there, which is now a trendy place in Auckland, but but in those days it was a you know a drawbridge and all that, and it was all fishing boats and all the Yugoslavs coming down to buy their fish by the basket and all that for their for their shops. And you'd watch these trawlers sweeping really close to the beaches, lay their net right in close to the beach and then drag out as fast as they could. And we I remember watching a trawler must have pulled like 130 baskets. It was it was just it was laying over like this on the verge of collapse. And and you know, you'd never daub anyone in, I suppose. But the the good thing is the Haraky Gulf ultimately they just stuck these solid protection laws down all over the Haraku Gulf, and all the snapper came back and all that kind of thing. And but um what I would also say to that is back in in those earlier days when I had my epiphany on Wahiki Island, I quickly got involved with Project New Zealand, uh yeah, Project Jonah New Zealand. And uh the I must add to that actually that the epiphany about whales, as much as it was a lightning bolt, I did get off the island and go to see a Project Jonah movie night in Parnell in a hall. And this is the days when whenever whales were shown, the only footage was whaling footage. And to see shots taken from behind the harpoons and whales explode and all the pieces of flesh hitting the cameras is just horrific. And and this film just showed 30 in a row, 30 whales shot, just blowing up in your face. Horrific stuff. And then the film it also showed the first underwater footage ever shot of fin whales gliding through the sea. They used to call them greyhounds of the sea, and they just long, sleek noses, and nothing like these bloated drawings done from whales that are upside down on a on a slipway full of compressed air. And this film, including the first ever footage of bowhead whales in the Bering Sea, these magnificent bright whales rising up in front of these guys in frigid waters. I mean, it was so impressive. Nowadays, whatever that film was, it would probably look very primitive compared to underwater photography. But it was the first footage coming out. And I went back to the island feeling like I was holding a word whale in my hands like this. I did. I was carrying home a little baby from the hospital. Yeah, so I would say that actually was the beginning of this.

SPEAKER_05 32:29

That's super interesting too, Howie, because to me that would make me feel moving forward that art, film, music, movie like that, it is so powerful in its ability to motivate and enact people to get you moving. And I can see now over the years how yeah, you seeing that having that experience has carried into your versions of doing that through time, whether it be a big exhibition or a huge mural or your partnership and movie projects or whatever. Um, so it's really cool to hear that. So let's jump then, because you mentioned I just wanted to ally to that Project Jonah.

Telepathy Experiments And Dolphin Encounters

SPEAKER_00 33:15

There's things, there's things I was doing then that I wouldn't be able to do now. Like, you know, I don't have science degrees, I don't have official tickets all over me, but I was doing autopsies on dolphins, washed in out of the sea. Uh I remember on Waheke Island, uh, in particular doing an autopsy on a common dolphin. And this was such early days, 1977, say, that you know, I was taking out the gallbladder and um the liver and the kidneys of these dolphins, putting them in plastic bags, and they were going off to be examined in laboratories. And this was the beginning of looking at what the effect of the agricultural runoff into the sea was having in New Zealand, which had already had this hideous dioxin agent orange thing for to do with Vietnam. Yeah, Dow, agrochemical, all of that. My first ever protest was walking up Queen Street with a picture I'd butt painted of an exploding head. It was the beer in New Zealand against the Vietnam War in the early 70s. 10,000 people walking up Queen Street. So, yeah, so just the I wouldn't be allowed to do that now. And I also got to meet Frank Robson, who was this dude down in Napier, who was earned up writing two books. He was able to communicate with dolphins and whales telepathically. It was extraordinary. And he wrote those books, Pictures in a Dolphin's Mind and uh Talking Dolphins Thinking Whales, or something like that. I had those books. But I visited him in those early days when it was all huge thing opening up for me. He was magniped. He was like a guy out of a Gary Larson cartoon. He was a big boofy old guy, you know. And but he he was this extraordinary man. He had whale brains and jars in his garage, and he had this uh ability to communicate with dolphins. He would go out in a boat with people on board and say, be surrounded by common dolphins, and he'd go, all right, choose a dolphin, something it can do, no? And some um piece of seaweed over right flipper. Okay, which dolphin? That one. You just look at this dolphin trying to back up with a piece of seaweed over its right flipper. He had worked for Marine Land in Napier and he'd suddenly realised it's nothing to do with the fish and the whistles. And he went there at night and he did this thing, and they just go to this end of the pool, come back, stand up, they just said you get it. They were looking at him, like you get it.

SPEAKER_05 35:47

Wow, yeah, yeah. I remember diving into this with you years ago, and I've always loved the one of the details of how he was doing that, where he would essentially place himself in their fins, and he would send them the image of them doing the thing, like putting the seaweed over their right fin flipper and coming to the boat. But he would send them the images of them doing that from their point of view. It was always about you having crystal clear, rock solid focus and sending them that image, but always from their point of view, so that if you wanted to say you're sitting on your surfboard, you would visualize how you would look if you were that dolphin over there swimming towards you and your feet up to your what your you know, your wetsuit, the colour, the fins under under your board, the pattern on your board, then you up on the surface. And I have to say, You've been trying that a bit? I've been trying, and I feel like doing that for about 20 odd years.

SPEAKER_01 36:51

Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 36:52

Yeah, because you remember you mentioning that to me. And I think I saw that book, and we've got a residential pot of dolphins behind where we live, big group of mums and young ones, and a few males that are hanging around surfing too, that have just pair-bonded. And I have a lot of days in the year where I see more dolphins in that day than I do humans because of where we live. I'll slip behind our place through the forests and I won't see any humans, but I'll go down and surf a stretch where there's no one surfing except this residential dolphin pod, and I'll do that with them. And it's strangely consistent how often I'll get to our beach and they're there waiting for me at the peak. It's a very long beach. They could be surfing anywhere along that stretch. Yet, so often when I come out of the dunes, I look up and down the beach, I'm like right there at the one rip bank that comes and goes, it's always moving along that beach, so I'm always changing where I surf, but they will be there. It's not like I'm surfing the exact same spot every time, right? You know, so they just know my behavior, I know theirs. It's always changing, but we'll always intersect. So that's cool that you got to hang. I forgot that detail that you'd you'd met that guy.

SPEAKER_00 38:12

And when and do you sometimes go out with swimming goggles to sit like duck over the side and no snorkel boarding is a thing, but I don't do that.

SPEAKER_05 38:20

Yeah, yeah. So it's cool. Yeah, that's got one guy I met years ago, he's like, People laugh at me. He doesn't know why. He said, People laugh at me, but I want to be able to see the dolphins and the turtles and everything in between waves, so I'll go swimming with my my mask and snorkel on.

SPEAKER_00 38:34

Well, but what I mean is those little swimming bottles that can just hang around your neck. Yeah, they're not in the way, you know.

SPEAKER_05 38:39

But no. Okay, so you meant wow, that's so interesting to have had those encounters all around that time.

From Rainbow Warrior To Bondi

SPEAKER_00 38:46

There's a very strange genera and that and oh, and I was thinking I was I ended up at Auckland University giving a talk on whales and dolphins. Had no qualifications, just had started reading, and of course, the important thing, just the last thing I'd say before leaving New Zealand in 1985, was that back then in the 70s, Australia was considering ending whaling. It used to happen out at Albany at Shane's Beach, and they were killing sperm whales, and it was horrific, of course. I've looked down on that whaling station, and someone's saying, Do you want to go down there? And I went, No. But I was asked, I was in Project Jonah and doing all this different stuff, and I was asked, would I write a submission to the West Australian Government inquiry, which ultimately led to the Sydney Frost report, and I still have copies of that. And I did, I wrote it, and it was read out in Parliament over there by a Greenpeace activist. So I was I wrote, I would have written that in 1978, and I still have a copy of it, and it's still it still holds up. And it went down something like 92 submissions from around the world against the Shane's Beach Whaling Station and seven, four, which were mostly just the station and the West Australian government. It makes jobs. We have uh Richard Jones living in our community. I'm pretty sure he was part of the contingent when over there, the whaling station protected itself with Hell's Angels with bike chains and stuff like that. It was serious stuff. They were tough. But the the interesting about that in terms of our interaction with whales, this I suppose the sad side of it is that the whalers knew how the sperm whales, the biggest brain who's ever lived on the planet, this incredible, unknowable intelligence. Um you know, John Lilly wrote about them saying if you want to impress a whale, you know, he's talking about sperm whale, brain seven times bigger than ours, but you only using the one pound like we do for motor functions. We have a couple of pounds in our three-pound brains of cosmic consciousness, they call it. So sperm whales with a 22, 22 pound brain have a lot of cosmic conscious stuff going on, and and the whalers would go out and they would find the whale because they had spotter planes, they'd find the pot of sperm whales, and a guy would walk out out of the front and light a stick of dynamite and throw it up in the air, and it would explode over the surface, and immediately sperm whales would send the women and the children, you know, like go, go, go. Women and children would run, and the sperm whale males would stay hold themselves up out of the sea and do this thing of what acting as the target, like the boat would go towards them and they would dive and reappear and do all the stuff to protect the calves. And eventually they would all get shot because it was spot a plane, and you know, and then they would shoot the mothers, and then they would leave the undersized whales, the calves alone in the sea of blood and sharks. It was just just mental, absolutely mental. And you know, I'm gonna say something that is sort of lost in this whole story now, which the Yankee whalers and and later on, who were always hunting sperm whales along the line, they talked about how the whales would gather and put their heads together in the sea and they would lie with their heads. You know, there's that logging thing where they are upright, sort of sleeping and dozing, but also putting their heads all together in a circle, and they used to call it the marguerite flower. And they used to shoot the whales, like call it picking the marguerite petals, because the whales tried to hold that circle, it was so important to them, they kept trying to hold it. And a book came out in the 70s which was really influential on me, so I started to build this huge library of everything I could find in whales. I think it was called Day of the Dolphin or something like this. Um and it basically was saying that the whales, the biggest brain on the planet, form this circle, a massive biocomputer, and the word for the day comes in from the universe. You got 12 whales, 144 pounds of massive cosmic consciousness, and they send the message out, which is sung around the world by the humpback whales, and by the by in one day in the old totally intact acoustic channels, there they are a blue whale with dolphin surfing, dots dolphins surfing on her bow wave, are all sharing the message. Beautiful concept. Which ultimately in this book leads to the whales deciding that we are we have we're godless, we have no empathy.

SPEAKER_05 43:37

We're we're humans, you mean humans, yeah, humans.

SPEAKER_00 43:40

We're humans, and yeah, they've been waiting and waiting with utter patience, goodwill, unconditional friendship, and we just keep hammering them. But the final insult is to say that there was a God that created all us, but has long left those we are the paradigm of existence and we don't need anything. And they just throw themselves ashore until there's none left. Humans watch them come ashore for three weeks and they're gone. Like all that's left is the spacecraft and the crew have left. Yeah. Yeah. And and that was important for me because I started to paint paintings like of um whales streaming through one golden mean rectangle of of stars to another, like trans moving through different spaces. And sometimes like one in particular, the Lakehurst Leviathan painting, was a whale bleeding from one reality into another reality where it was going to be safer away from humans. And I called it Lakehurst Leviathan because that's where the Zeppelin blew up on its mooring post near New York at Lakehurst. So like a whale caught by the tail and blowing.

SPEAKER_05 44:47

That's really cool to hear though, Howie, because I'd I'd never heard you speak to the that and the roots of paintings like Exodus and your ones of whales leaving Earth and flying through the atmosphere out of space. And you know, because they're paintings that you look at and there's something in them, like because I've shared those paintings with so many friends around the world over the years. Oh yeah, and it's there's something to it, and something where you feel like, yeah, wouldn't you escape us if you could? Yes. Wouldn't you get the fuck out of here if you could? Yes. And this sort of self, yeah, this embarrassment uh at being among a human community that is capable of those sort of things, like picking those pedals.

SPEAKER_00 45:38

So wouldn't it be a good proposal and I can stand proudly as a boogie boarder? Because because they wear those, those guys that get into it wear those gloves with the little webbing between the fingers for paddling out. You think about it, the surfers are actually the people, a lot of them, all along these coastlines, who are essentially part of a looks like an evolution of leaving the land and going back into the sea. Because this is what the whales did, and it's it's incredible. Like 60 million years ago, elephants, bear animals, pigs, different ones that led to different species, walked back into the sea and moved their nostrils up onto their heads, put their forefingers and thumbs into mittens at the end of warfare, yeah, end of manipulation, and lay down in the sea the biggest domain of this planet, this blue planet, it should be called ocean. And they became these graceful, peaceful, tai chi master, yoga masters of generous people in the sea and evolved, um, kept evolving, and along with sharks, of course, sharks even had already done that. Sharks were uh coming from the early fish. And um, but I I just keep thinking, well, the sharks started off 420 million years ago, became electromagnetic masters of the sea. You know, I'm alluding to John Peck here, and and then the whales turn up and the dolphins from it source or whatever, but but these animals evolve into a much better place. They get away from warfare, they get away from the need for shelter and and territory. They just live in a place that fully supports them with no gravity. I mean, how good is that? And they can surf.

SPEAKER_05 47:34

Yeah. All day and night. Day and night. Yeah, well, that is. I mean, you're a moon set too. We're trying in our small ways to return.

SPEAKER_00 47:44

So what do you think? But I hear you.

SPEAKER_05 47:46

You know, well, I hear you, and I also think that that makes sense when I remember you saying, you know, are we people who live at the edge of the ocean? Or are we people who live at the edge of the land and where we identify with can identify who we are, and of you know, our hearts and our minds are in the ocean more than they are here among the land in the sun in a lot of ways, not always.

SPEAKER_00 48:13

But it's no, there's a lot of benefits about the terrestrial side of things, like you said, that's food and spices and herbs. Cooking hot food. The dolphins are like, oh, she's making pastas, look at them, we're on cold fish. But but but yeah, I'd forgotten about that. That's a very good point about that raising that point. And it was allied to me saying the privilege of being human is that we have these rocky outcrops that that allow us to be in communion with the people of the sea, you know, that it could just be all ocean, yeah, and everyone would be happy because we wouldn't be there. But we have this thing and it's it's it's a squandered opportunity, isn't it? It's like um that song I wrote in the Faroe Islands, the Sea Shepherd campaign, and I wrote this song called Fuck You Pilot Whale Killers, and the core one of the the core one of the lines was squandered a great friendship, a heritage supreme, brought so much bitterness and hatred to such a sweet dream. You know, ripping the wings off butterflies. What what kind of satisfaction do you get out of that? And meanwhile, let's go and fly an amoeba on Mars. It's so exciting. It's just it's incomprehensible, and I guess that's what we end up realizing. There really are those two sorts of humans on the planet, the ones who think that they belong to the earth, and the ones who think the earth belongs to them. And that's you know, when you when you realise they really are those two types of people, you can realise who your drive is too, you know, and and hope that those lost souls or those reptilian sort of souls as people call them can somehow get it and come to it. And everyone who jumps in the sea with a whale, a manta ray, a whale shark, you know, a leopard shark or a thresher shark or whatever they've been in the sea with, they come out transformed.

SPEAKER_05 50:11

Are they dolphins? Yeah, yeah, for sure. In and that's an interesting thing, because I think when we talk about language and key words, which you've always been such uh you've always had a keen ear and eye for. When I hear people talk about the ocean and people going onto the ocean rather than into the ocean, you hear about, you know, like the difference between going out on a boat and being on the surface, as opposed to then being out in the ocean, being underwater, and you know, closing your eyes perhaps, but going underwater and hearing the song, hearing the cetacean song that's happening around you at that point, and feeling the strength, the speed, the sensitivity of these incredible creatures that when they swim beside you and they're you know 40 water to a hundred foot long, say with the blue blue whale. Remember when we were in California sailing down the coast in the tiny little hobies, and we had our blue whale encounter. One of those blue whales came up under my little hobie with Nick Lovecchia, the two of us on it, and our video footage shows this, and the knuckles, the huge, like bigger than our heads-sized vertebrae knuckles coming up and rolling up at the surface, coming under our little hobie, but never touching. Yes, within inches, inches, and all these little whirlpools and vortices and vortexes coming off this huge, like 90-foot plus body, but within inches of our boat, our tiny little kayak, really, but never touching. And we all know it when you reach out, and the dolphins right there, and you're surfing, and they're like coming up in your face, and you smell their terrible breath, and you're like, Oh, we're gonna touch, and they'll just be like, Oh, not this time, buddy. And they'll but that sensitivity is just incredible. That spatial awareness, that body awareness is something that you don't get through being on a boat on the ocean. It's in we need to get in. And so I've always into vulnerability.

SPEAKER_00 52:28

Exactly, yeah, yeah, exactly. So you know, dolphins know when someone's terrified, you know, when they come, you know, when they come in, like a water goes and something, everyone is out in the water and go swimming between people. Some people are just so freaked out, and they just will recognise who they shouldn't go near, you know. You they come surfing down a wave. I've had that thing where dolphins come in, you're like, bring it on, and they go, they go, they flippers go past you like this over your shoulder, like on either side, and they come back and they kind of stand on their tails and laughing, like, you didn't freak out, man. I've had that experience. Yeah, but if if there's surfing, they're coming down, and someone is just, oh my god, oh my god, they just they wear away so fast.

SPEAKER_05 53:10

Yeah, yeah. Well, these are things that we experience where we are thankfully those dolphins are um around and healthy enough for us to have these encounters. So you get to Oz and you're you know, you're you're in Bondi, and you know, Australia is a trippy place. You've got a huge city of millions right next to these incredible coves and bays and beaches and cliffs and a somewhat thriving ocean, and here you are plonked at that central beach, one of the most famous beaches in the world, Bondi.

SPEAKER_00 53:46

Brad Farmer called it the um the crown jewel of the tiara of Australian beaches.

SPEAKER_05 53:56

Which is pretty good. Yeah, why not? Yeah. So you're there, you know, and and you know, when were you there? What was going on? How did you respond to what was happening?

SPEAKER_00 54:06

Well, um I left with my girlfriend in England two weeks after the Rainbow Warrior bombing.

SPEAKER_05 54:11

So that was '85. And that was a Green Peace vessel that wasn't harbour. Sunk.

SPEAKER_00 54:17

A second bomb felt like it was going to blow the house that we lived in in Ponsme off in St. Mary's Bay Road, blow us off the piles.

SPEAKER_05 54:25

So this was pretty volatile time. You know, like we think about people marching in the streets for whaling to end, we think about that whole movement, yeah. The protest movements happening, yeah, atomic testing in the Pacific. Uh you've got something like Greenpeace, you know, making noise and getting in the way of um countries and companies, and so their vessel was literally blown up.

David Bowie And The Cheapest Guitar

SPEAKER_00 54:51

Well, uh and you left. Well, well, I will say to that, I've I did feel strong connection when they came in. Not only had they gone and done the job of moving everyone off Rongalap Island, the port radioactive island that the United States should have done decades before sorted that that out, but they came down to basically most of the sailors were Waiheke Island, a whole lot of friends of mine who was a flutilla of boats getting ready to go, and Greenpeace ship was going to be able to, for the first time, broadcast out to the world live. And of course, there'd been those other instances, you know. Um, and I'd lived in Tahiti the 81 to 83, being a set painter on the Mutiny on the Bounty movie. It was good times, you know, delivering yachts, sailed there, sailed back on the bounty. And but it that original catch that I sailed from the Bay of Islands to Borabor on, we were boarded at sea by the French Navy in the Sea of Moons off going past Morea heading towards Papayiti, coming down from the islands under the wind. And um I was the only person awake probably. It was dawn, and I was sailing this 93-foot catch. Not so much, you know, I had trim trimmed sails and was bringing her in across the Sea of Moons. But we were boarded by this French frigate, and they came on board with machine guns and you know, the steam guns or whatever called everything. And um, and so and and there was a time when I was in Tahiti where an anti-nuclear boat came and I could speak quite good Tahitian and you know average French and all the rest of it. So I acted as a translator for them, taking them through Papahiti and introducing them. There was a movement against the the atomic bombs being blown up in Tahiti. So I went out that day when she arrived on a yacht, and we hundreds of yachts sailed in with her. So it was extremely dark. She was blowing up, and everyone knew it was the French government. And um, yeah, but that was a period where um living at Bondo Beach, um I sort of was reconnecting, if you like, with with the thing of the 70s, the whale, the the latter 70s with whales. You know, I'd gone off and I'd lived in the islands, and I was painting about island life, and sure I painted some whales swimming through coconut trees and stuff, but it was it was a different, slightly different period of my life, and I was having a lot of water time, a lot of diving and stuff. But Bondo Beach sort of started to bring me back into the whole picture, and it was because I started doing all these drawings at the beach, and I was noticing all these people lying on their back smoking and then just reaching across and sticking their very conveniently, pushing the cigarette butt down into the beach, and this really pissed me off because again, I'm going back to the 70s, but the in the 70s there was a massive stranding of of false killer whales, and ultimately they were all lost, 287 whales. It's huge stranding. I'd flown off the island with Helen, my girlfriend, and there was a lot of stupidity going on. They were determined to come back because they wouldn't didn't want to leave anyone behind. Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries turned up with 303s and started shooting the whales in the head, saying they're putting them in the misery and cutting their throats with knives. And I'm like this just in this whole new whale thing, life, running down this beach, screaming at them, like where you're dying, screaming, swearing at them. And they're like, What? And I go, whales don't breathe through their throats. So these poor whales are lying there. You know, a whale that's stranded will shut itself down. You can't really tell whether it's alive or dead. They're not going to breathe. They can stop breathing and still be alive, stop breathing for 20 minutes or half an hour. And they were just doing this, cutting their throats. So I took lots of black and white photographs and hurled an exhibition back then about it. And so now I'm back on Bondo Beach and I'm seeing this first world privileged smokers using the beach as an ashtray. And and um that led to me not only cleaning the beach and getting into lots of entanglements with people, I had to eventually learn how to say excuse me, I might be wrong, but it just looked like you used the beach as an ashtray, you know, because I was just marching up people going, This is a friggin' beach, not an ashtray. Boom, the flights on, you know. And people saying, I'm gonna call the police. And I get I worked out all these strategies. I'm gonna call the police. I go, there's the 20 cents, there's the phone box, let's go. By the time I finish with you, it's gonna be a$600 fine because it's on the beach,$200 in the street,$600, and you're gonna you're gonna lose, and by the time I finished with you, you're gonna lose your house and your car. And they would just go, fuck you, and run off. Classic. And um, it didn't matter whether it was a supermodel or a guy covered in Taz, I was a frickin' bulldog. Yeah, I just got a bee in my bonnet. I wrote on that wall down there at the south end where cookie and all those savage surfers there that took no prisoners that hung out. I wrote, This is a beach, not an ashtray, and blue lettering. It lasted for about 20 years on that wall. And and and and of course I drifted into council and uh I formed this group called the Grainies, and ended up eating meeting Ian Cohen for the first time. Yes, you know, and he's sitting on the beach with me, and he goes, What do you call yourselves again? I go, The grainies, and I go like this, and I scoop up some sand in my hand, and I showed him the handshake we had with it where you drain the sand, you'd cross little fingers and put press your thumbs together. It was only three of us, but we had the special handshake. And and he goes, That's and I said, Grainies, grainies is a is now become a derogatory word, so fuck it. We're gonna have the grainies. And he goes, Oh, I love that. Can I use that? And I'm quite sure. Great, great, and I'd be at these council meetings and I'd say, You've got 66 Y-Wove bins on the beach. Why are you using this beautiful beach as a rubbish collection point? It should be a neutral space. There shouldn't be any litter, there should, but you know, it and and and I proposed that they should cut into the up on the wall there, on the promenade, they should cut into the park places and have flushed-in bins that then the those um little buggies they use for life saving up and down the beach or whatever, they could just go along the promenade, empty the bins, and basically a lot of that sort of things happened. And I was at that council uh a council meeting, was it a lot of them in bare feet, long hair? One of the councillors after it was over came over to me and said, I suppose the why were bins could just start disappearing. No, I was the kind of person that would disappear that would be. Oh, oh, oh, yes. But eventually the council did exactly that. Yeah. And and now you it's just unthinkable that there would be bins on the beach as for Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 1:02:04

Okay, so that's on the beach, and then what about in the water? Because I know once you started getting in the water, you're talking about the blue groper, your connection to that fish.

SPEAKER_00 1:02:16

A lot happened around the blue groper, and that came about because I'd become drafted in as an honorary member of the Dolphin Society, and that that was the Libya de Bergerac, that was Planet Arc was involved. It was all about cleaning up waterways, and I had just harped on so much about cigarette butts in the city that Planet Arc came in and used all of my photography and and of streets and stuff leading to the sea, and the council was getting me to paint uh drains. So I was writing Fish Wish It Wouldn't Rain Rubbish and um and rain rubbish. And with um upturned umbrellas. Blue gropers holding upturned umbrellas. So Olivia said, You've got to meet a special friend of ours, and brought me to the Blue Groper Bluey at Cloballey, and that was another moment in my life where it completely transfixed me. You know, it was like it I became I realized that it wasn't other people sorting things out, it was me. You know, that it was really coming down to me. I'd done these other things in the 70s, but suddenly it was like, no, this is not good enough. We can't have this litter going out on the beach and entangling dolphins and turtles. We we can't have this blue groper impacted by people who are trying to fish it out of the water and then throw it away because it's too big. That's what they do with blue gropers. Yeah. Get the photo, throw it away, throw it in the bin. And at that time with the uh Dolphin Society, I had this passion about taking the human rights charter of 1948 and writing a declaration for marine mammals charter of rights. And I wrote it and it's all catalogued in a book.

SPEAKER_05 1:04:02

This is called The Dolphin Within by Olivia D. Bergerac. And that's got the Marine Rights.

SPEAKER_00 1:04:09

Well, I just looked it up because I wanted to check on it when I was um talking to Paul Watson the other day. And uh not talking to him here, but online, and so I wrote it and it was launched by them on a boat in the Sydney Harbour, a 10-article piece from Human Rights Charter, which is a lot longer. But I always remembered article four, which says no dolph no whale or dolphin shall be held in servitude or slavery, the slave trade in all its many forms shall be banned, or something like that. Yeah, prohibited in all their forms. Yeah. And all I did was just take this 1948 language and uh take the ten most appropriate ones from the charter.

SPEAKER_05 1:04:54

Oh, it's so good, Howie. I'm just looking at the ten points right here. And I think we'll put this with this recording for people to proliferate because this this needs to be seen by people. It's so great. Okay, so you're doing that.

SPEAKER_00 1:05:12

So that was 96. So all of these things happened in 96 prior to moving to Byron. So I I got the International Decoration of Marine Mammal Rights up, Charter One Cetacean. Uh, I held an exhibition, I was holding a lot of exhibitions, and I held a particular one called Devalued Art for a Desecrated Planet, and that's where I had paintings that show beautiful paintings of of the blue groper, of dolphins, of whales, of cuttlefish. And I had pl there was one which was an actual door that I painted all over, and I'd put statistics of from the smoking, uh, from hospital about smoking and stuff, and covered it in cigarette butts. And it was called Devalued Art for a Descrated Planet. And actually, it it said something, let me get this right. It said something like the mountains lead to the river, the river leads To the sea. The ocean never was an ashtray meant to be. So it's something like that at the top. The New York River Run thing. And at that time also I uh Ocean uh sorry, Granies, the Granies, I'd been approached and had now become Ocean S. And that stood this is the name I came up with, and there was council funding with the guy who approached me, and so we became stronger. So when I was going into Parliament or doing these other things, I was going in as a co-director of Ocean S, which stood for Oceanic and Coastal Environmental Awareness near Sydney. And I wanted to spread it right around Australia because it every state capital had a different first letter. So it's going to be Ocean P for Perth, Ocean H for Hobart, Ocean M for uh Melbourne, so on. And what it what I wanted to do was uh, because I was in Parliament proposing urban marine zones and say the people of these city ocean interfaces should be able to decide the parameters, not GPS points. So Sydney was very much Baronjo to Bundina, that was the term I came up with, and activate all the urban divers and go, no, not good enough. Sydney temperate reef is fabulous, and so we've got four million people, that's four million people to keep it clean. And so it was a very empowering time. I became really empowered. Sometimes I go, Oh geez, it's a lot of bond eye. But I can look back on it and go, I really got empowered by that. And um and some things failed. I tried to get protection for giant cuttlefish had to let it go.

SPEAKER_05 1:07:39

That's also important to hear. I think it's cool that you've uh said that. I've I've never heard that. Was there any other things that you were like explorations, avenues you went down that didn't quite work?

SPEAKER_00 1:07:49

Yeah, well, the other one was the UMZ, the UMS, urban marine zones. But the interesting was I did get something that's now always tabled in Parliament, and it's called urban marine conservation. Because I went in there and was hot under the collar about that. Also tabling blue grape state fish and so on. And you know, I I remember in that Royal Commission um six parliamentarians and I was naming um maybe I've said this before about a an editor of a fishing magazine, Rat Hunt's fishing magazine, a guy called um, it doesn't matter, but he was coming after me about saying let's have uh blue gropers or you know, the protection of blue gropers across the UMZ, let's um have Bondi as a full sanctuary. And he said, he was talking to me in his editorial, he said, by the time I've finished, by the time we have finished with you, the fishing lobby, you'll be as popular as the guy who banned Christmas. I read all the stuff out, Paul Kidd, that was his name, read all the stuff out in Parliament. And they were like, Oh, what's the name of this editor again in the magazine and you know, pictures of Rex Hunt fishing, uh kissing fish now? Yeah, all that 70% of which are gonna die. And so I said at one point about the Minister of Fisheries, Bob Martin, I said it, you know, I said, you know, Bob Carr, he swims with the blue groper in Clow Valley. He gets it. You know, that it was the he was the key to me uh getting it through. And and I said, But Mr. Fisheries, he's a fisherman and he doesn't like to get his feet wet. I'd like to take him and put him underwater. I only got that far. They all erupted in laughter, and then Ian Cohen said, a lot of people would like to put him underwater.

SPEAKER_05 1:09:33

Just for a swim, just for a swim speaker. Just for a looks like now you know that the you can't touch the blue groper anywhere in New South Wales. Yeah. It's great. I I'm swimming often around here and just see them just doping around the way they do so beautifully. They've just got the gentlest, wonderful aura about them. So that's right before we met. So it was only really a handful of years after that that that we met because you came to the Northern Rivers.

SPEAKER_00 1:10:03

Those were the things I needed to get in the bag. It was get your butts off our beaches, the posters I made, which were all um handmade, you know, every single part cut and paste. But they went right across Australia, didn't that didn't just stay at in the Waverley precinct. And uh Blue Groper State Fish, the decoration of Marine Mammal Rights, the bins off the beach, it was just firing on all cylinders. And then once you know I launched that thing as Bog Carr at the beach and uh the Blue Groper, I was basically right, I'm out because I had secured my little shack here up north, and and it took me four months to get here. And I was so happy to get up here. And friends of mine were saying, You'll be back in six months, you know, you'll miss it. And I was like, I don't think so. Yeah, and here we are, how many years? Here we are, 30 years later. Yeah, and then it wasn't lot that long after that we met. Yeah, and we're just sitting on the floor of your house, is that how I remember it?

SPEAKER_05 1:11:00

I would have thought we were at a doof in the forest, and we said, Yeah, man, are you like being underwater too? If you want to tell the story. We're gonna save the world!

SPEAKER_01 1:11:07

If you want to tell the story that way, do you finally the beach coming down nice? Yeah, yeah, I think yeah, we can hear each other speak. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:11:16

No, no, I didn't even go to a lot of doofs to tell the truth.

SPEAKER_05 1:11:19

Me either.

SPEAKER_00 1:11:20

Yeah, I didn't either. But I got drawn into the things like the Timbara gold mine, and that that there were things going on up here that equally act activated me into like, whoa, this is great. Look, there's this community that really go for it, you know, whether it's Patterson's Hill or Timbara or you know, there's so many things going on, you know. Bentley is just but but you and I met, and I pretty much I think have told that story uh that um we end up in Italy because of I was on my way there, and um it it took a year or so I got the name right. And I'm really stoked that it's been 20 years of 20 years of we've been existing and we uh I like to think that unlike organizations that get really top-heavy, they end up building a hierarchy, they're desperate for funding, they're always seeking grants, sometimes their priorities shift as we've seen and think organizations like Greenpeace are, you know, refurbishing the offices in Amsterdam,$14 million they did back in the day, writing compromise things in their charters saying uh Greenpeace is not opposed to whaling in principle, because they think that's the way to speak to Aboriginal whaling, which is not the right way to write about these things. And so the good thing about S4C is we're just a loose, a very loose group of cats. You remember New Zealand? Kiwis against seabird mining, say can you come and help us? It was like corralling cats, everyone's somewhere. You'll probably know why. Hilton's somewhere, we just pull this group together, but we have done it without uh calling asking for the public for funding, or we're we're not corruptible. You know, we've stuck to our uh core mission, and it and the original mission was to activate surf media, remember, and speaking about this killing whales and dolphins. There was a niche waiting for us, put it that way.

SPEAKER_05 1:13:28

Yeah, yeah. Well, Howie, I think all of that that you've just shared was what I actually really hoped you'd share. Because I feel like the breadth, the depth of your stories and experiences can even be illustrated in the fact that when you were talking about sailing to Tahiti, you uh you just dropped in there. Oh, yeah, just you know, sailing back on the bounty over the sea of moons, and there was like a little passage there where you said a few things that we could easily just focus on that part of your life, and it would be the most engaging and enthralling story. And I guess that's what I'm so grateful for is that when you came along and we started spending time together creating project ideas and wanting to use what skills we had collectively for issues around dolphin whale, porpoise, that you had all of these stories to call on. And that's what I really have treasured is that if I mention something to you, you've pretty much got an experiential perspective on that thing, and like obscure things like labs and fishing and art and protests and confronting people who are poaching, confronting people who are outright inhumane killers of animals, approaching the superstars, the bowies, the celebrities type people, but having a laugh at spending time with the minds, the great minds like Paul Watson's, and being able to sit there with him and battle with him about ideas and things and throw it back and forth and have a hilarious laugh, and then the next moment be like, you know, butting the heads and you know, like, and then going to Antarctica, being on Sea Shepherd vessels, being down in the Southern Ocean, all these things, man. It's just it's super inspiring. And I know for all of the people that we've had adventures with around the world who have met you, and I think of people like Chris Delmar, I think of people like Joel Parkinson. Every time I see Joel, which is really rarely one of the great surfers in the world, you know, he'll go, Oh, you seen Howie lately? What's that guy up to? I bet you he's been doing something fun. Yeah, shit like that. It's just it's just great. And I just know like in your wake, in the waters around and behind you, are a lot of those people. So I'm so stoked that we get to share this in this way.

SPEAKER_00 1:16:03

That's I appreciate that.

SPEAKER_05 1:16:04

Oh, 100%, man.

SPEAKER_00 1:16:05

I I honest how do I even put it? You know, like a lot of the time I'm just getting older and just trying to keep things together and you know, just think I'm overwhelmed by all the art that's sitting in this house, and I should try and archive that and this, and you know, it I'm just like everyone else trying to figure it out as I go. It was great that we crossed paths because we empowered each other, and you brought so many things to it. And the world just keeps rolling over and rolling over. And and I have, you know, I've said that before, you know, you meet all these amazing people, and they're my icons, they're my sort of heroes as a kid, you know, that they're all moving out. And and that includes painters that I knew and and I came out. Moving out as in leaving their bodies, leaving the planet, yeah. And and you sort of think about the ones who are still here and go, come on, hang in there because they're your wall that you had as a teenager, that's that wall against mortality. You don't have to think about it because those guys are older, they're dealing with it, but don't have to think about it, and then suddenly you are in that space thinking about it, and you realise these kind of roll-over generational things. But that idea of when uh an elder dies, a library burns down to the ground is affecting me in the sense, how do I this is podcast is a wonderful thing in that sense. How do I do what do I do with all these journals? And and and and if I don't describe what the the symbolism inside the paintings is, uh it'll be misrepresented. Because the number of times I've said to people, oh, you know, what's going on there is that represents this and that. Oh my god, suddenly they see it differently. A hundred percent. And you know, we were talking about pa whale paintings, how I started out. I was such a crazy symbolist when I everything had all the paintings had to have that. And there was a painting called The Sound of Light, and it had the great pyramids in across the desert in Egypt. This is when we're talking about those early days, and there was a blue whale and a calf swimming, and I drew the circle on the canvas to start with that went through the two-thirds point of the special point in the pyramids two-thirds up from the base, and that circle was the same curve as the blue whale's belly, the mother, the calf, and it was called the sound of light, and that's when I wrote that poem. God, I should I would actually like to read that. I don't have it directly in front of me, but I think I can remember it. The sound of light. It's because of that book. Do you remember that favourite book of mine, Gifts of Unknown Things by Allah Watson? And he's walking along the beach with the Indonesian girl Tia, and he says he realizes that there's this purple flowered plant there, and she's referring to it as brown. And he's going, the Latin name for that plant's brown. And he's he's going, this girl, 12-year-old girl, she has absolute sound and vision connected totally. Sound and vision of the body. And um and he says to her, So what's the what's the sound of white? And she says, Do you remember? The sound of white is where the sea meets the land. And he goes, Oh my god, and I went the same when I read it. I went, oh my god, this ancient line that goes white line right around defines this land, the earth and the ocean, and their connection is this white line that has this sound, which is the surf, you know, which is the surf line. And and I sat down as a consequence of reading that book when I was on Waiheke Island and wrote a poem into the book, which is published in the book called To the Whale's Born, which I launched years later in when I was in Bondi. But um, life is the question, waves are the key, love is the answer, kiss a whale for me. The sound of light is where the sea meets the sand, and while the whale lives, waves of love are lapping on the land. I think I've left a piece out.

SPEAKER_05 1:20:26

That sounds pretty amazing to me.

SPEAKER_00 1:20:28

But I wrote that poem. It'll be on the back of that grey whale painting because I wrote it on the but I wrote that poem on the back of all of my big whale paintings back in the 70s. You know, I wrote lots of those things like uh When in Life Breathe, When in Search War, When in Love Swim. And it was a picture, it was a dolphin and a calf with their tails on the sandy bottom just lifting up like this. Um and so many of those things. I yeah. I wrote one about well, I'm I should have the thing in front of me, but it was something like about where does life begin? Stop and think. Does it start with what you eat and drink, eat or drink? Life begins with each breath. Out there in the sea, steeped in ancient mystery, live a peeper, long before this song is sung, we stab them in the lungs. The deepest breathers, the biggest brains, the greatest lovers, it's insane. We stab them in the lungs. And when there's no more air and you say it's not fair, where do you go to get some more? To your local friendly store. And when there's no more air and you say it's all wrong, just remember the whales. Their soul. They never wanted our madness all along.

SPEAKER_06 1:21:48

If you've enjoyed listening to the conversation so far, consider also subscribing to Water People on Spotify or Apple Podcasts. It'll help other people find the show. And if you're feeling inspired, leave us a review. We love hearing from you. And now a word from the folks who helped make the podcast possible. Patagonia is a business to save our home planet. Founded by Yvonne Chinard in 1973, Patagonia is a surf and outdoor apparel company based in Ventura, California. As a certified B Corp and a founding member of 1% for the planet, the company is recognized internationally for its product quality and environmental activism, as well as its contributions of nearly$230 million to environmental organizations. Its unique ownership structure reflects that the Earth is its only shareholder. Profits not reinvested back into the business are paid as dividends to protect the planet. Learn more at patagonia.com.au. Many of us look to supplements and special diets to maintain our health, but ignore the obvious. We are water. It's what we're made of, and it's what supports every bodily function. Primal water, the water our ancestors thrived on, is energized, alkaline, and made for real hydration. It doesn't come from the industrialized, often contaminated water systems most of us rely on. For the last 25 years, Elkaway has been researching and for finding ways to mimic natural water systems. We invite you to learn more about primal water and support their charitable work with BirdLife Australia. Head to elkaway.com to score a$50 discount using code WaterPeople. That's elkaway.com. What do you do when your sunglass lenses inevitably get scuffed or scraped? The top drawer of our kitchen island was where scratched sunglasses went to die. Until we learned about the sunglass fix, they've been at the forefront of the repair revolution since 2006 and carry more than 600,000 lens options. So there's a solution for every frame. We found Marcenis on thesunglassfix.com and within a few days received brand new polarized lenses to easily install at home. A billion pairs of sunglasses are made each year with hundreds of millions ending up in landfill. The Sunglass Fix offers free lens shipping in Australia and two 161 countries around the world, as well as subsidized express tracked shipping worldwide for less than$5 in any currency. They're a proud member of 1% for the planet and are ready to help make your favorite frames last longer. Use the code WaterPeople for 10% off your purchase today at thesunglassfix.com. And I want to ask you about your experience with the great David Bowie.

SPEAKER_00 1:24:42

Well, first of all, if I'm talking about David Bowie, it's proof that I am actually the old part in the equation, right? And I've got to make that disclaimer. I'm just a boogie boarder. I'm just a boogie boarder.

SPEAKER_06 1:24:54

It's also big.

SPEAKER_00 1:24:55

It's got nothing to do with that.

SPEAKER_06 1:24:56

It's also big boogie boarding.

SPEAKER_01 1:24:58

Am I allowed to still be in the room?

SPEAKER_06 1:25:00

Hey, you can't be that old because boogie boarding existed during your lifetime.

SPEAKER_00 1:25:05

I was living in Tahiti because you know the the two important things, apart from all the really important things in my life is art, uh, painting and music. I'd sailed to Tahiti, was living there between 81 and 83. It wasn't three years, it was just over two years. An exhilarating adventure. Eventually, French customs kicked me out after sort of 15 months I'd been there, which was incredible because most people get kicked out after a couple of months. But because I was a painter, it's the one exception they make because they know they fucked over Paul Gogan. Am I allowed to say that? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it's like, oh god, that was a bit dumb. And so painters, artist painters, are the only people who are allowed to walk work in Tahiti without a foreign person work permit or an alien work permit or and I was not an alien. Wow, I didn't know that. But I was a New Zealander, so that became a problem later. Yeah. Um so I sailed with this guy on a on a 25-foot morgan with a three-foot, not a very deep draft. We sailed from, I guess maybe Papahiti.

SPEAKER_02 1:26:11

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:26:11

Or Morea, probably. And we sailed across to uh to Raratonga. And we arrived in an incredible cyclone. It was smashing the island from the north. I mean, smashing ships up in the north in the Abu Harbour or the Avarua Harbour. And we came down the coast on that east side. It was horrible. And we got to the round to the end and we threw a pick like onto the back of the island. You can imagine the whole of Raratonga, the little yacht going up and down, up and down on the hat on this. And after a while, we would just jack of it, you know, just being tossed around. So we with a seagull motor was somehow or other we inched our way halfway up the coast into the Nartinga little uh inlet. But to get in, we had to lash an oar onto one side. And so my mate Mark was on the on the tiller and I was on the steering oar, and we surfed. And this is this is actually it was surfing, so this is a good start. We surfed a 25-foot sloop down this big wave into the inlet, and it was touch and go. I mean, there was a stick on either side marking the edges of the entrance, and they were so close, and we were like screaming, okay, let's go to get it out of this howling gale. And we surfed this yacht down this way and into the inlet, and peace came upon us because we were in the shelter of the coconut trees. And what transpired pretty quickly for me and the other sailors was that the film that was being made, Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence, they came and grabbed all the yachtis because we're all skinny and as prisoners of war in the movie.

SPEAKER_05 1:27:50

That is hilarious. Oh, that's great. So if you sail, you pretty much look the equivalent of a prisoner of war. Yeah, okay. Right on. So fish and race. Fish and rice. You were pulled into that circle then. Were you one of those people?

SPEAKER_00 1:28:07

I was a prisoner of war with my mate. And we didn't know that we knew Bowie was in everything. It was just it was just that they issued us army uniforms. We would get up in the morning to go off to work, which was great because we were getting cash. And we'd get in the rubber ducky and rowishore and then we'd walk into this prisoner of war camp, which was in the Nartingia Valley. Like we were in the we were parked right in this little tiny lagoon that we'd surfed into. And so we just could walk down this dirt road amongst all the Raratongan huts and stuff, houses, and uh to work. And we would arrive at work, which was like uh barbed wire, and it was so authentic, had sentry towers, and there were all these Japanese guys with they were actually using Nfield 303 rifles with but with real bayonets on them as well. And they had white gloves on and the whole sort of Japanese Second World War thing, and it would they were quite terrifying when we would walk onto the set and and and they would be they would charge at us in certain scenes with the bayonets and come right at us going, I'm doing it like this, and they would come right at you like a foot away with a bayonet. We'd be at the Raratong, and then and you know, you'd the Bowie would be there having a meal, and there was Jack Thompson, there was Tom Conti, there was uh Raishi Sakamoto who only died a couple of years ago, beautiful Japanese piano player who wrote the theme music for them for the film. A guy who I knew from Waiaheki Island and all that sort of thing, who was playing an officer, and he came to me and said, Hey Hal, have you got a guitar on that yacht? And I said, Yeah, because I was I was playing in some clubs and things in Tahiti with this 1960s Tesco electric guitar, you know, with F-holes. I have never been able to find that guitar online, searching through all the Tesco catalogue. So I had this guitar which which I bought off a scrub cutter on Waheke Island for 25 bucks. They used to cost$18 brand new from the Taiwan production line. But I bought it from this big sort of Mori beautiful guy, good mate, and he uh wanted to have a guitar strap on it, so he hammered a nail in one end of the hammer and the nail in the other. But anyway, I used to use it as a as a slide guitar in the band that I was playing in on Waihiki Island called Island. It was how I made my income back in those days in the mid-70s. We played for two or three years and we were the band. And when we were playing blues, I always had that guitar off the side set up for slide playing. But I'd converted it back to a normal guitar and I brought it through to the hotel to give to this guy, Grant Bridger. He was an actor, he was a Thalesbian. And I arrived with Mark at the hotel on a Saturday night, the Rara Tongans, big hotel. Most of these people were staying there. And virtually no one was there. It was empty. Like everyone had gone to the banana court or whatever in town. There was Raishi Sakamoto at the pool table, and there was a Japanese woman, and there was Mark and I, and there was a boy hanging out there. I don't know what he was doing. That was it. It was completely empty. And the Japanese woman came over to me and said, Oh, excuse me, but would you like to team up with me and play pool against these two gentlemen? I went, sure. I was a snooker player. And I had my guitar, you know, just leaning against the wall. And while we were playing, Bowie came out. Bowie just appeared and was drinking a beer and just smiling and watching the game. And I didn't we didn't talk to him. He was playing and he was watching the game. And at the end, I went to the bar to get a beer at this huge big circular bar in the Rural Tongman Hotel. And the only person at the bar was David Bowie. And I asked, got a beer, and then I turned to David and said, David, how would you like to play the world's cheapest electric guitar over there? And pointed at the guitar, and he went, Yeah, all right. So he gets up, we go over there, we sit down. Mark was on my right, Bowie was on my left with the guitar. He started playing all these songs, and and we were singing our hearts out, drinking beer and singing these songs. And there were songs like um Lonely Days Ago and I'm a going home, my baby. She wrote me a letter, uh, which is called the letter, maybe, or or the box tops, anyway. That he was listening to all that sort of music and he was leaning on me and and all of that, and it was really fun. I mean, one of the most easygoing guys you could possibly meet. Anyway, he was hilarious. He was laughing at me and laughing with me, and we we sang all these other songs, and then he said, Look, I really love that guitar, if I could borrow it sometime. And I went, Yeah. And he didn't want to take it right then, and he sort of disappeared. And all I remember is walking into his hotel room and him sitting on his double bed and me handing him the guitar. He's going, Oh, great. And then sitting in that room was a guitarist from a band in Auckland called Steve. There was a guy next to him who's the drummer mate of mine, Peter Olsen. There was another friend of mine called Peter Dwyer sitting on the floor with a bass guitar that was plugged into an amp. And that this guy, Steve, had the uh guitar that was plugged into the amp. And there was a uh Aurara Tonga kid there who had obviously brought the amp. And then there were four New Zealand women who worked on the movie. One of them went on to marry Jack Thompson. Jack told me that himself just more recently. So I'm standing against the wall, I've handed over the guitar, and they're they're going through this thing of practicing this song, practicing War is Over by John Lennon. And I'm like, oh God, I wish I was playing that guitar. And then as I was looking at the guitar, I was going, I know that guitar from somewhere. I know that friggin' guitar. And I remembered that in Tahiti before I left, there was a life magazine had come out and had a picture of the last concert of the Rolling Stones of the 25 cities right across America called the greatest rock and roll show on earth in 1981. And there's a picture of them in Madison Square Garden, sweat, scarves, you know, the all the boys, and they're like this arm and arm. And I looked at the guitar that Ronnie Wood had slung around him and went, What sort of guitar is that? It looks like an oversized SG, beautiful red, but it's only got one pickup. What the hell is it? And there it was looking at me across the room, and I went, I think, I think that's that guitar. And it turned it transpired, of course, that at the end of the tour, David Bowie was living in New York. Uh Ronnie Wood handed him the guitar, said, Here, have it. They were great mates, great English mates from way back. I'm kind of like, Oh god, I wish I was doing this, uh, chord sheets and everything. And I it was only after really David Bowie died that I thought about that, and I realised what he'd probably done has gone like that little flick of the head. I jump across, of course, ching, and I've got the guitar and the first guitar, I shouldn't mention his name. But uh had been playing exactly what uh Bowie was playing uh primary chords on the first beat, four-four, so accent on the first beat and hitting all the four four uh accents after that in the primary chords. And Bowie's just playing my guitar acoustic. And when I sat down, I took a huge risk. Picked this guitar's running through an amp, and it's the best electric guitar I've ever played. And the and I go, Oh my god, this is amazing. The pickup was on polished rails, and you could push it up and down the guitar, it had ultra lights on it, it was beautiful. And I took a risk and I went to secondary position, like not primary chords, but secondary. I so you know, an A was up on the fifth rack kind of thing, and I accented on the second beat. So instead of it being one with Bowie, I was going one, two, three, four, one, two, three more across these bar chords. And in the moment I started doing it, and I look at David, he bit the side of his lip and he went, That's what I want. These crazy two eyes. We played through one take. It'd been about four before that or something, and he went, That's it, and signed off, and it was like, Yes. And you know, I was like, Wow, I recorded a John Lynn song on a Rolling Stone guitar with David Bowie, it's never gonna get better. That's the Bowie story.

Holding Conviction Without Absolutism

SPEAKER_05 1:35:46

I was thinking that would be fun for us to visit is your history of occupations, and I feel like what's interesting about that list is that you know you've had that vow of committing to whale and dolphin communities around the world, being a voice for them and an artful life, and one of the aspects of that you alluded to was the avoiding the nine to five. Also, some of the things I've heard you say over the years about different jobs you had, being in the fishing industry, experience in that first hand experience being in kind of media role, really like things like editing, having a critical eye when it comes to language and how we communicate in the world, then science and it, you know, being in labs, and just I I was recalling, I'm like, whoa, actually, you got quite the list. So can you take us through that list?

SPEAKER_00 1:36:38

There's no way I could come up with a full list off the top of my head, of course, because it's a long span of time, 50 years. But you're right, I committed that there's the years when I left home to going right, that's it, no more nine to five, and then the jobs became, you know, a day's work here, digging ditches, and building fences or whatever, building houses. The thing you're passionate about, you spend a lot of time doing it for free all the time. It's like, what do they say? Don't give up your day job, that sort of thing. You've you you've got to pull in the thing that keeps supporting the thing you really want to be doing. Yeah. But but I never did do nine to five again. Yeah. And you know, but it it it sort of reminds me like when we were travelling the world um just doing all those whale murals. Like, what was it? It was the whale a day that crossed up all down California, all down Chile. Like, get out of the guy, got three you got three hours. And I'd be like, just going flat out and paint pouring over me, painting those humpback whales in San Antonio or whatever where they set fire to the fishing boat. Remember that? That's the stuff that's the stuff often that brings me the biggest joy. It's not, oh, I sold a painting. Wow, that's so cool, I'm successful. It's no, it's it's actually out there painting these big I painted a hundred foot blue whale in Auckland. That was my first one ever. Wow back in the early 70s or something. I I way back. It used to be on the news once a week. Oh, the blue whale still hasn't been vandalised. The people the pity people of Auckland have fallen in love with the blue whale and someone stuck a poem on it. That was just no one would work this way. But like all those things, like the you know, the whale teepee I sort of alluded to, the whale teepee carried a very positive message, you know, the dove and the dolphin meeting, the let's love the people of sea written and pong and all that kind of stuff. And I I suppose this is coming back to me using the term artivism, that you know, that's what I was feeling. Um this is a this is a real buzz. It's got nothing to do with galleries, nothing to do with money, and everything to do with communicating with community, getting a message out, and it's a very positive message, you know, like whales are swimming along these walls and um the whale teepees there flying flags that in Japanese say truth, compassion, family, future, all these kinds of things are Japanese and and um so yeah, I I I mentioned that because it was never a a job, but you've asked me about jobs, and and I'd say, actually, the jobs I didn't get paid for were actually the best ones. You know?

SPEAKER_05 1:39:14

Yeah. Was there ever a a point in your life where art was just sort of like I don't know, a fun just sort of semi-superfluous thing to do? Like you were just scribbling and I don't know, you just or you were painting and stuff, but you it it didn't have that uh feeling behind it of purpose or usefulness in the world. I I j I asked that because ever since I've known you, your art goes in all kinds of directions, but you seem so super duper lit up when it is asked for and used in a purposeful way. Is there ever a time where that wasn't? That's a point.

SPEAKER_00 1:39:56

You know, that's a that's a really good question, and I've never pondered that before, but I feel that when I was younger, yes, I understood it had power, but I d didn't engage in the concept that I engage engaged with later in my life with the idea of artivism. And you know, a as a you know, I was started out when I was four or five or whatever. My dad used to joke, say by the time you were five, I'd filled up an apple carton with all your drawings and burnt them. But he he was a big influence on me because he was a a a good artist and he used to go to life drawing sessions when you know and and paint and big influence on me. And of course, also he would bring home art, um he would bring home printing inks for me from the factory, and uh I'd squirt them all over boards, and and you know, even then I'd have a picture of a little guy holding a sign. I'd pour I'd get sand from the beach and drop it in to the ink, and then I had this little guy standing there, help stamp out quicksand, and just loved wordplay, and I'd have springs coming out of the paintings. I mean, I wish I had I did this big one that was like that. I wish I still owned it. It was a childhood masterpiece, if you like. It was the definitive one. But of course, coming up through being a teenager, you start to explore dark things that that, and I don't know if it's teenage young women, but but but teenage boys, this you like get interested in war, you know. Uh I was so fascinated by aircraft. The faster they went, which tended to be military aircraft, I I got a I I was in the air training corps between the age of 14 and 16, training to be a pilot. And I did a lot of interesting flying. Sorry, interesting for me. I did a lot of could have been interesting people on the ground, actually. But um, you know, flying gliders where they'd hand over control to me and you'd do Himmelman rolls and stuff like this, the age of 15, rolling, doing the Himmelman roll. And I got this is not just necessarily for broadcast, it sounds like I'm big noting, but but I I got rated as the best pilot in my squadron, number six squadron, including the adults. So when we were flying in New Zealand military aircraft, when when we'd go on these things, like I was the one that was called up to sit between the pilot and the co-pilot on a Bristol freighter, and they had an observation dome in them, and I could lie on the floor and be talking to the pilot. I was obsessed. And um Hercules, in a being flying in a Hercules between North Island and South Island, or going on board a Sunderland flying boat, which is clearly my most romantically fantastic aircraft ever in my life, to go out on a boat and climb on board and go through a Sunderland flying boat. And you know, back in those days I petition I tried to petition the city of Auckland that they should save a Sunderland flying boat and use it as a floating restaurant on the waterfront of Auckland. And I was dead set serious and I was trying, but I was dismissed as uh, you know, a a a young teenager. What the fuck is he talking about? I digressed, but I did have all these passions. I suppose that's what I'm saying. I was I was very passionate. I was passionate about the outside world. And my parents sent away for a thing called knowledge that came from England, and it was a weekly instalment that ended up this wide, an encyclopedia that wide, or there was books about all these different countries around the world, and I'd go, Oh, the Philippines, 7,600 islands, I've got to go. You know, like Mayon, perfect volcano, which I got to see last year, you know. So, yes, I was painting as a teenager, I became fascinated with surrealism, Salvador Dali, and all that sort of stuff, and started to paint things like skulls with monsters coming through. Yeah, that's what you know you do. But it felt like it was connected to carving your own course and going against I don't know, your parents or society that who had been saying, you go to church, you you know, behave yourself like that, the society saying all that, you go to school, it it's a long-winded way of saying to your auntie, yes, I felt that art was really special. And and and I can say that as a young teenager as well, I was completely smitten about Jimi Hendrix and his guitar playing. I'd formed a band at 15. We used to we used to play, we played a we played at a tennis club, the the tennis club that our family played at. Because we were a family of four and we play that play down there and uh we got a gig there, and halfway through the gig of playing Hendrix and Cream, stuff like that, they went over and just grabbed the power cord and pulled it out of the wall. And we had to just carry our gear out of this hall while they started playing records of the monkeys and the Hermons Hermits.

SPEAKER_05 1:44:53

Mrs. Jones, you have a lovely daughter.

SPEAKER_00 1:44:57

You know that shit, man. Yeah, it was like you know, the Red Baron and all that. And I was sitting in the little rain shed they have looking over the courts, and I was sitting there holding my guitar, which I don't know what the guitar was in those days, but ultimately I owned a Jansen Invader. Oh, I wish I'd never let that guitar go. They are as rare as hens' teeth, and they're worth more than US Stratocasters. The those Dutch brothers that made this guitar in the 60s, and they made such a brilliant guitar. And there's a photo of me at 18 playing it, laughing my head up for long hair, and it's like, oh.

SPEAKER_06 1:45:31

Can we share it with us?

SPEAKER_00 1:45:32

There's my Jensen the photo. Yeah. Oh yeah, I've got photos, some photos from that era. And but but I was sitting in the hut, you'll appreciate this, with my guitar and my little Concord container amp, which was made in Auckland, which used to electrocute me about every 20 minutes. And my parents never knew that my guitar was amp through the strings was electrocuting me. There were bare wires in this amp. And I used to just go, oh guys, I've just got to let it cool down and let it cool down for five minutes and then get it for 10 minutes, and then I'd let it cool down to get five minutes. You know, you got no money. I mean, I was a paper boy making two two pounds a week. But I'm sitting in the shed, one guy's come out of the hall this way, not of our band. The guy's come out of the hall this way, the all teenage kid, and another one's come this way, and the guy coming in goes, hey, is there a live band? And he goes, Oh no, they stopped playing. And he said, What were they like? And he went, They're fucked. And they're fucked.

SPEAKER_01 1:46:31

And I sat there and went, oh, he said, band. I'm in a band. I didn't give a rat's ass about what he said about us. I was just like, yes, we're a band. Even after being kicked out of the hall. Yeah, pulled a plug and written in.

SPEAKER_05 1:46:49

I couldn't, I was like this, like that says everything. Yeah. This is great at all. So when we first met Howie, it was somewhere around 2003, four, somewhere around then. Do you remember what year Sorrento Italy IWC was?

SPEAKER_00 1:47:06

Yeah, 2004, I think. You know, I was gonna write them down because there's as a prompt. Yeah. Because I always have to look them up in terms of the year.

SPEAKER_05 1:47:14

Because you've done, you've attended so many of those. So when we first met, I just really remember you informing me of what was happening in the world of whale and dolphin and human interactions, and I was just never the same, actually. You just you just totally removed this curtain that revealed all of this stuff about the ocean and humans and animal interaction in the ocean, that just blew my mind because I thought at that time, you know, 23-year-old or whatever, I know the ocean, I know everything that's going on in the world of water stuff, and it I was just clueless. So when you told me the things you were sharing with me, which was about the industrial whaling exploits of various countries and big inhumane kills of dolphins and whales around the world, and about the trafficking of cetaceans and all of that, you just lit me up. And I remember we were talking, like, okay, well, what can we do? What can we do together to work on this? And the first thing you were saying was, I'm going to this IWC meeting, the International Whaling Commission, and you'd been to that meeting before. You had had your guitar in your hand, you had brushes, and you were painting signs, you were painting murals, all kinds of stuff visually, but also you were out the front of this meeting as a one-man protest presence a lot of the time. And you were really asking for help and support and and togetherness in that. And I was so lit up by your enthusiasm, your motivation, your joyfulness with it, though. And so signed up to say, Yeah, let's meet in Sorrento in Italy. And there was only a couple of us that came, but the idea was to be able to attend that, maybe get into the meeting and um observe and stuff, but mostly be that presence at the front of the meeting that essentially achieved the goal of putting the industrial whalers on note that they were attending this meeting and the world was going to know it wasn't just going to slip away into silence and be unobserved. And our ability to be there with cameras and writers and artists and a humpback whale suit, Dave. That's right, yeah. You I got an I tried to wore a silly suit and confronted one of the anti whale and you didn't even know they were getting in the way of them. Yeah. So antics, right? And so and that's where it began for us. And and yeah, I just recall that sense of being like, wow, look at this guy, look at you there doing that work and largely. On your own in that capacity, and that's how the ball started rolling for us, and working on that, and then subsequently we would follow that meeting each year. It was put in another random place that would be difficult to get to on purpose, more than likely, and we would be that presence and to the point where, say, the Chilean one many years later, you know, we had a lot of people out the front of that.

SPEAKER_00 1:50:28

I think that was 2008, wasn't it? Yeah.

The Artist’s Role In A Noisy World

SPEAKER_05 1:50:31

We had a lot of energy around those meetings. And I just think that contrast was interesting, just noting that at the beginning it was it was you. It was like a single voice out there shouting and singing till you're boss, you know? So yeah, so I just wanted to say that like that was where our paths crossed and how we started to spend time to together. And then um, from that was pretty much a constant flow of ideas and experiments and activism where we would bounce things off each other, like, hey, okay, so this is happening down here. Oh, Paul Watson's in the mix in that Southern Ocean now with this boat, the Farley Moat. Oh, there's a spot, or they're gonna go to the Galapagos, and I'll jump on there, or hey, they need help alerting people in this area of the world, and we would just roll from one thing to another. We started surfers for cetaceans together, which is basically aiming to be that voice for the surfing community around the world speaking on behalf of the greatest surfers in the world, dolphins and um whales and poppases, but specifically the dolphin with the surfing. And so I just recall us really never having a break. It would just go from one thing to the next. It was just one opportunity to the next, and I kept that up for a few years, and I hit a point of being burnt out in 2009 because for me it was basically fulfill my sort of obligations as a professional surfer thing and keep that ball bouncing. But essentially, I all I wanted to be doing was our surface for station work. But it got to a point where I was pretty spent and we came up with a new way of doing some activism ventures, which was the transparency idea of sailing, moving slowly through coastlines so that we weren't burning ourselves out and were having quality time with coastal communities, sort of blending ideas so that you could do your activism, but not at the expense of your own personal health and just burn out and be good for nothing in what a couple years or so. But all of that makes me marvel at the fact that you haven't burnt out, you just keep going, and every year you have your I have slowed down, yes, slowed down, but but that's fine, but you just you haven't lost your convictions, your willingness to be engaged. And I don't know if you want to speak to this, Lauren, but I want to know how you do that, and I want for other people to hear potentially how they could in their own ways be capable of that.

SPEAKER_06 1:53:11

I'll just add a slight bit of backstory. We've been talking a little bit about the arc of conviction and how, like you were talking about when you're a teenager, you feel so much, and it's right at the edge of your skin for so many of us. It's jumping out of us. We want to engage, we want to work out who we are in the context of this crazy world and how we can do things differently. One of the saddest things is to see kids who aren't pushing against convention. Kids who aren't pushing against convention is one of the saddest things to me. But so many of us at that point in our lives are pushing and and striving and we're hungry for doing things better. And then things happen and life gets, I don't know if it's long or monotonous or distracted, but many of us fall away from our convictions or we let go of our convictions. And I'm interested, how have you held them and stayed true to them?

SPEAKER_00 1:54:05

Well, that's I really love what you said there, both of you. And I would say, first of all, across to you, Dave, that collusion between us, you brought all those elements, including uh filmmakers and so on, that that really expanded the whole story. I mean, Mick McIntyre talked about how still the general public doesn't really know what's going on with International Whaling Commission and stuff like this. And film is such a powerful medium, isn't it? And and all those things like you dreamed up the paddle out and Taiji, Killing Cove. And you know, for me, I was being pulled along by this new stuff that you brought to the party. So, you know, you can say about my energy or arc of commitment, and I I can understand that, but I was extremely bolstered by this team that grew up around us called Surface Facetations, which you basically facilitated. And to you, Lauren, just wanted to say your comment about what you're saying about uh youth, and I've I'm a great fan of youth culture in the sense I've been in pub situations, I've been in situations I don't know where where that I'm standing amongst a bunch of old geezers and I have to tell myself I'm similar age, and they're just giving up. They're just giving up and they're going, all right, there's five kids today, they're just all on their phones and they're fucking useless. And I go, listen, you lot, I'd throw my bag in with them any day before I throw it in with you lot, you hopeless losers. Like that. And and then of course I have to get out of the pub or whatever. But in my in this book of some things, I've written here, I noticed I remember there's a line here, nurture the students' revolutions. Because it always comes, generally, change, important change, usually comes through younger people who are demanding a better world. And at the other end, as becoming senior citizens, I'm speaking for myself, not you guys, but you know, you this whole thing about where we move through an arc, and you talk about your family people, and I am too, through my daughter and grandchildren. You move through this arc of what's important can change and everything one thing you tried there, now you're doing it this way, and so on. But it it is upon us to support that energy that comes from young people and go, that's where it's gonna work. That's where it that's you and you know, obviously, uh in this heinous, warmongering, greedy, fucked up world that, you know, where the Trump card is always being played, you just look at the incredible resilience and goodness and shining of people, of young people in Gaza, in Palestine, West Bank, in Iran, and just go, that is way beyond. I don't think I to go through what they go through, I don't think I'd last very long. Those people mobilizing right now in the in in Iran are going out knowing they can be shot dead, you know. The the the people trying to collect water and and rebuild things in Gaza know the same thing. And yeah, I it I I suppose I'm saying all that because somewhere between the passion and zealousness of your youth and the sort of calming down, slowing down, and sort of retrospective look that starts to happen as well as Ford is you just see the importance of people having that kind of drive, that kind of passion, and they exist everywhere. That's the point I'm making. I look at lots of other people, put it that way, and I go, Oh my god, they're amazing. Look what they're doing for elephants, look at that. That guy, uh um Aaron, in getting to 25 elephants liberated from chains last year in Southeast Asia. I'm just like, oh, it's so good. Swimming an elephant across the river that they start to get swept away, and him and the elephant are helping each other get across the river, you know, or rescuing a mum who's been separated from the baby, rescuing the mum and the baby and getting them to the sanctuary. And yeah.

SPEAKER_05 1:58:05

When we spoke of this the other day about the arc of convictions and stuff, like we were just really discussing how it feels for us right now. I definitely know this for myself. I was reading David Attenborough's oceans book that's accompanying the documentary that they recently made, which is fantastic, and it was talking about super trawlers and the absolute devastation on the ocean that super super trawlers inflict, which is industrial scale massively removed from traditional fishing methods and collecting methods around the world, just a modern atrocity. And I was thinking about how, you know, in in my later years when I would be, you know, certain that I was about to leave my body, geez, I would love to go and scuttle as many of those fuckers as I could. I would love to just go sink as many of them as I could. It's like that is a an urge I had. It just came out of nowhere because I was like, I just remember us discussing a lot of that sort of stuff in my when I was in my 20s because we were getting moments with Captain Paul Watson and we're seeing the efficacy of direct action, non-violent direct action, and the real need of halting those sort of vessels and those practices while the law catches up, or you know, um government agencies enforce laws and stuff. Um but it it got me thinking about yeah, those different times in life where your convictions come out in different ways, you know. And I just wondered if you had any, I guess, insights for people who are listening to this around how to keep that kind of vibrancy. And one of the things you mentioned the other day, which I was hoping we could capture right now, was your aversion to absolutism, is one thing you said.

SPEAKER_03 1:59:52

Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 1:59:52

You want to wrap up on that?

Humor As A Tool For Change

SPEAKER_00 1:59:54

You know, I used to get into ship fights when I was an an uh sea shepherd crew in the Antarctic and stuff, and there were all these righteous vegans, you know, and the ship was vegan, and I was all for that. I like the idea of declaring the vessel of the campaign vegan. We've done that with S4C. Yep. People come in and out and they go, Oh, you're a vegan while you're here. Oh, I'm a helicopter pilot, you're a vegan while you're here. For those hundred days in the Antarctic, you're a vegan. No drama, you're not gonna die. You can go back to whatever you want once you leave that campaign. And I really like that process, that way of going forward, rather than getting into this absolutism, this perfectionism of you know, your your voice is your opinion is of no consequence because you this and that. And so, right from a long time ago, I mean, just being an artist, you realize the pointlessness of perfectionism, don't you? It's like, oh fuck, that was a snake. No, it's not. Just keep going. You'll be alright. It's not it's not very painful. Keep going. And um absolutism, you know, we've had enough of that from world religions, from Christianity going this and that, you're going to hell. It's just just a pile of bullshit, which is put down on top of people to make their lives even more miserable if they can't work stuff out for themselves and they believe that they're going to be told the right things by authorities. And I see no authority in absolutism or perfectionism. So, yeah, that's because I suppose that's my answer to that. And interesting, there's another word, idealism, which is which is always receives a cynical response, right? To me, the whole point is to have ideals. The whole point is to is to have ideals and try your best in the way that is true to your heart and your conscience, to that ideal or principle for that matter. But if you don't, if once in a while, you know, oh my god, I'm in the middle of this remote island and the only thing to eat is fish and rice. I'm gonna eat the fish, you know, or something. And not beat myself up about it. We've had enough of the Catholic Church saying, Feel guilty about everything. And the the cynics will always go, oh, idealists, you know. That's exactly what we need. We need to set ideals and go, we're all flawed. The whole system has its flawlessness living on planet Earth. As beautiful as the planet is, we're all caught in this problem of duality and you pain and suffering with you know love and joy. And you just do your best. That is all it is, is just do your best. You don't beat yourself up, you can make amends, you know, like, oh, I just flew to the International Whaling Commission. What a lovely opportunity for a first world privileged male to turn up in Brazil or Morocco. I want to get there, I need to get there, there is a way to get there, but yeah, I'm gonna come home and plant the friggin' tree or some trees, you know, because that's just working with your own conscience. It's not virtue signalling. That's a really interesting term, and I think it's a very real thing. You see people doing stuff just uh my god, if I do this, I'll just skip the accolades, you know. It's all that shit. Yeah, we all have to move through life going, mmm, that feels like bullshit. Plenty of that, and then these people who who adhere to the absolute perfect ideal of something called veganism or non-violence, you know, or whatever it is.

SPEAKER_06 2:03:24

Do you think the world that we're living in is one in which it's more difficult to hear our conscience?

SPEAKER_00 2:03:32

That's a question, isn't it?

SPEAKER_06 2:03:34

I mean, as someone who's gotten to live through the introduction of many layers of bombardment or authoritarian influence or just influence from the outside world into our personal lives, do you think it's more difficult or is it the same? Is it actually just the same?

SPEAKER_00 2:03:52

In one way to answer that question, I feel like we come to this planet to experience choice. People talk about love and all the rest of it, but love is part of the duality. You can choose which part of the duality you want to be involved in, and that you rely on your conscience to do that. And I see a lot of cowardly things going on in terms of conscience, in the way there is this uh maniac running amok and breaking so many systems of uh uh community standards and national ideas of identity, and we know who we're talking about. And that's been almost like a ch that's almost like a challenge. So, what are you gonna do? What are you gonna do about this? Oh, you're still gonna find measly little words to make some logic out of this incredibly illogical behavior that is affecting so many people and is giving permission to so many other regimes or governments around the world to start behaving badly. And that's why, you know, again, it comes back to admiring the people who've got the courage to stand up against that. And it's not always me, I don't always have that courage. I recognize when I'm doing that, and I recognise it because my conscience is speaking to me. And and then you know how we make little excuses for each other. Well, I'm not gonna step over there and take the bullet because I could live another day to do something over here, but you look at yourself and go, you chicken shit. So I I don't know if that's sort of answering your question, but the world needs good conscience because we have to make our way through this paradigm and this paradox of duality. And it and it it's even such a paradox that, like, oh, so after we die, we go to heaven and there's no nothing exciting going on at all. Heaven is a place where absolutely nothing happens. It's like, oh, that doesn't sound great either, right? I'm not signing up for that.

SPEAKER_06 2:05:47

I've never heard heaven painted quite that way before.

SPEAKER_00 2:05:50

It's a line, isn't it? Uh simply read or something. Heaven is a place where nothing ever happens. And so we're we are assailed when you talk about social media and stuff, we're assailed by so many opinions. And everyone's getting pretty righteous about it. And there are people people who just want to cause trouble out there, trolls and bots, and it we're we're being invaded by artificial intelligence as if we're gonna hand over all this stuff.

SPEAKER_06 2:06:18

What is the role of the artist in that world, in this world?

SPEAKER_00 2:06:21

Role of the artist is to maintain the dignity of humans and the the and the and the consciousness and conscience and goodwill of of humans. Just the other day I was talking with somebody who was talking about how they want to go through uni and get you know marine conservation degrees and stuff, and people always think that I've done that, not a chance. And I'm one of those people who's always saying, Oh, don't do that, just go and be an artist, travel the world, find out what you want to do. You know, there's always something out there that a human can be in service to, you know, be putting a well in Africa or you know, helping that that pangolin. And it doesn't require a huge amount of um homework. It's just like, well, that's not logical what's going on there. Let's get it sorted. What the fuck are those dolphins and seals doing in concrete tanks? That's not right. And you don't need any science backing, you don't need anybody, and everything that you're gonna throw throw up against if it's gonna come against you is a lie. It's based on people wanting to make money or people having some weird issue about wanting to engage an animal from freedom because they never got the freedom they wanted when they were younger or something. I don't know. I'm sure a lot of psychologists could have a field day about why people do these things, but the reality is it's an honour and a privilege to be able to have those moments where you just did something in a personal, quiet contract with an unseen or seen animal. That's all it is. Or or or a human, of course. But you know, I've had that all the time. People say to me, What about the starving kids in Africa? Why don't you do something about that? And I'm like, um, and I can understand why Paul Watson goes, Listen, I'm just doing the ocean fuck off. It covers so much of the planet. They try and derail, that's what people try and do. They'll derail you when they're not going to do anything. What about the rhinos? I go, why don't you do something about the rhinos? Yeah, so yeah.

Hearts Bigger Than Brains

SPEAKER_05 2:08:23

That makes me think that reminds me how we when we were in the thick of collaborating with Captain Paul and C Shepherd in the early 2000s and watching his sort of masterful way that he would deal with those scenarios where people would call out his approach and suggest he'd work on something more important or pressing or whatever. Yes. And tone it down a bit. Yeah, I always loved the response of, and you know, I'm I'm bringing this up because I feel like this is a really useful skill, and people should approach those kind of moments with irate people or righteous people in this way. And so Captain Paul would say, Oh, that's so great that you're so lit up about that issue. Yeah. If it is something else other than whale and dolphin uh issues, and then he would say, And what are you doing about it? And how can I help you? Yes, it's very genius. But it is good, yeah. And that in this moment in time where we have so many people getting on a soapbox and pointing fingers at others and forgetting that there's three pointing back at themselves whenever they point, I think that's a really great way to go about it. Yes. And it's a softening of a moment that is hardening up into a kind of conflicting type of dynamic. Um, and so I just feel like, yeah, it's really wonderful when we get to have these sort of conversations, or you hear from people like Captain Paul who have been through so many experiments and activism, that's the way I like to think of them, because there isn't a golden formula for this. And that was also a phrase thrown around in his circles back then that I really appreciated, which was you know, if there was a way for every environmental campaign, even that word sucks to me because it's submilitary-based, but if there was a way that every initiative a community creates to solve a problem, social or ecological, we would be using it. We'd all be employing it. But there isn't that golden formula in my experience, anyway. So that requires us to experiment. That requires us to come up with things like visual petitions, blockades, lock-ons, governmental lobbying, whale tepees, all these variations. And again, that feels like a softening to me. There's a softening aspect to that that I feel is really important right now when there are so many hardening moments happening between people and nations and animals, even. And so I just really uh enjoyed that when we would have those moments in time. You would be very good at keeping conversations going, not just being like, oh, you know, complying with a confrontational absolutist response. It would be more of that kind of response, like Captain Paul said, of, yeah, great, what are you doing? How can I help you?

SPEAKER_00 2:11:09

Yeah, I've been pretty confrontational. I learned a lot by cleaning Bondi Beach. I learned I learned how I learned so much from confronting, I don't know, 6,000 people who were littering or formed a group called the Grainies. And out of that came Oceaness, became a director of that. And it I learned along the way, I learned about how to deal with councils, politicians, um, mayors, um, uh irate people who've been chat who are challenged and and turn it all around, you know, like and also learnt how to say, excuse me, I might be wrong, but did you just use the beach as an ashtray sort of things like that? Yeah. And we're seeing right now all those monks walking through the United States, and it's just beautiful. I mean, it it's stunning. And they are not making any demands, they're not making any requests, they're not pushing. Barrow, they're not making our statement, and the effectiveness of what they're doing is mind-blowing, you know, at a time when it's really needed. So, yeah, there are many, many ways. Yeah. And um, yeah, many ways.

SPEAKER_05 2:12:13

So I think that's yeah, what I was trying to get to, and what I feel like is always circling us whenever we get to hang out, or is always certainly I feel is circling you, is is that um artful approach and that experimental approach to giving a shit, essentially, to being like, okay, this is an issue or something I ki I care strongly about.

SPEAKER_00 2:12:36

Hmm, how can I come at this from a dastardly cartoon? Yeah, cut. Because I must say, you know, I I don't know whether this this podcast will come across uh too serious or something, but we've had a lot of humor in the whole thing of our journey together. There's been so much good humour, so great camaraderie, and and all the people drawn in are instantly there's a place for them right there around the fire. Yeah, all these surfers who come in and and local people, you know, all the way down the coast of Chile, all that's all that, all that stuff, and it was always laughing and laughing. And I always think, yeah, that's that's a huge key to the whole thing, you know, that you only help build change was people who come from different cultures and different stuff like that by finding some sort of camaraderie somewhere. And this, you know, even the the whale killers, I mean, I get right in their face, they threaten have threatened to kill me and stuff like that. But the the reality is I don't hate them. One of my little mantras when when people are yelling at me or being aggressive is to to to look across them and have some sort of sympathy, to think how unfortunate for that person to be so locked in to something that could they really feel good about when they come to their final day leaving the planet and go, I shot a lot of whales in the back, or or you know, this kind of thing. Yeah, I I could meet a whale harpooner and say, Let's drink some psaki and tell me about it and be interested because we're we're all in the mix together. Sometimes people have the opportunity to shine more than others or inspire and stuff like that, and that's those we need that. But in the end, we're all moving together towards whatever the ultimate destinations are. But it's really helpful to be able to look across at that serious issue that you're involved with, and there's a cartoon on the other side that's just taking the piss relentlessly, and sometimes taking the piss out of myself. Remember when we used to go around and we would be talking to community, surf community showing movies and stuff like that, and I always go, He's the surfer, I'm the whale guy. Just to clarify. And I remember when I was proposing Bondo Beach as a marine sanctuary, Bondo Beach Bay. I got up and said, just set the record straight, I'm just a boogie boy, and this guy starts giving me stick, going, Well, you should fuck off then. Don't there is no name to that guy, so but but laughing, yeah, and me laughing, and it's like, yeah, I'll take it, I'll take it because that's that's my reality. But I have boogie you know out on huge waves out here with George Greeno, and I actually like the drop down the wave right to the bottom, the eye level was, but yeah, I can't stand up hardly for nuts. I did when I was younger, but one of the things that I was always saying as a consequence when we you you would speak on behalf of the serpent community and so on, that which is in the front of that book I wrote back then, which is not enough time to do everything, plenty of time to do anything, just enough time to do something. In a way, that particular aphorism I'd come up with sort of was carrying me right through. When you ask about the arc of commitment and stuff like that, or energy. And you know, I I know there was there was other things always filled about that. I haven't heard that in years. There's a lot to be said for the fantastic thing that comes around when you set your mind to something, the universe colludes with you, and people come to help you. And what starts out is like, oh god, how the hell am I gonna do this? I've got no money, and all the things you can come up with, the negatives. But if you go, I don't care, I'm gonna do it, then the universe colludes with you, and before you know it, there are these incredible connections being made, and there's this kind of synchronicity, there's this goodwill, and there's this good luck that happens, you know, crazy good luck. You had it when you were paddling up the coast of New Zealand, and eight Maui dolphins turned up, and you the the technician had forgotten to turn the camera on, you turned it on, it would have been dead by then, and you got the footage of the dolphin. You just go, Well, isn't that the universe just stepping out? Mr. Rastovich is going to film the Maui dolphin, the super rare Maui dolphin is being filmed now. Right? It's it's it's those kind of things where you just go, I just feel like an angel crossed my path. And I feel like that sometimes when you're in some sort of danger, you know, and you can sometimes it's it's it's a little I I'm not part of the woo-woo gang at all, but I just that other thing that's real to us as human beings, going, why are we here? Where are we going? What's it all about? And sometimes you just feel this otherliness presence, and you just you just know it's there. And and it's the same thing. People could say all sorts of things around it, but you just go, Oh yeah, that's nice that you feel that. Whatever. Because you know it's super real for you. And you've probably been in some battle. Well, I remember sitting this is that this doesn't have to be the thing, but I remember when wherever we were in the world, and I honestly can't remember, we're sitting in a van, and you had just been somersaulted inside Tiaopu, and and we're where those Aussie commentators went, Oh yeah, good night. Good night, Rasta.

SPEAKER_03 2:18:12

That would have been when we were sunny down the California coast. Was it? Transparency, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 2:18:16

Yeah, and you'd come back from that, and and we were in California and and we were in a van, and it was Hilton, I remember Hilton, probably Christel Morrow, and you opened up and told that story, which you said like Hilton said, So Yeti, Yeti, was it like so you know when you got I came by that wave and you you were sitting right next to me, and I actually picked up my camera and filmed you talking about it. I I don't know whether that footage still exists, but it was absolutely fascinating. And I remember thinking, if I'd gone through that, I reckon I'd be dead. Just just came like that. I know what Chubb was like, I've seen the wave, been there. But the the to just go down there where you know there's a coral reef there, and I went, David's definitely got some angels.

SPEAKER_05 2:19:01

Well, the funny thing about that story was that when I got chewed up and then spat out of the back of that wave, I was the only one out in the lineup at that stage because every other surfer who had been towed in that morning of the code red swell had been either injured or blasted into the lagoon and were slowly making their way back out. So when I got out there, I was sitting out the back of the wave for only a few minutes, and there was not one other jet ski or surfer out there, which was bizarre, but that's what the story was. The tide was low and it was getting very deadly. And before anyone of the locals could tell us to stop, which they did immediately after my wave. Yeah, you got the last wave. They were like, no, we'll wait for the tide to come in, it's too dangerous. Um I was out there on my own, rode the wave, didn't make it, got sucked over the falls twice, and then literally stood on the reef like it was a pool, and just pushed myself off the reef up to the surface and got spat out the back. I popped up right next to everybody who was watching in the channel. And literally popped up right there like it was a two-foot wave. And my mates from Hawaii were like, ah, whale boy, whale boy, ah, look at that, only you would get spat out without a scratch. And it was this big joke that I'd had good fortune because of the things we were doing at that time, and and that was generally the perspective there in that world with other surfers was if I had moments of good fortune, it was always because we were doing all that stuff in between. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 2:20:32

Surfing and then yeah, doing that work. So see, to me that just totally makes sense. Because you know, it's very easy for humans to go, we're here and animals are over there, you know, and all sorts of stuff. But that that thing about sensing connection, that the moments that you can spend with a wild animal, it's just this beautiful exchange. And it's it's always like the animal kingdom is looking at us, going, Are you are you actually gonna stop betraying us? Are you are you gonna not try and uh limit me with your prisons, your concrete prisons and walls or your corrals? It is a kind of incredible blessing to be able to have found our way to a point where we can step out of ourselves a little bit from just the human paradigm and just go, wow, I'm just sitting here right amongst all these elephants in Thailand, and I, wow, they're accepting me. They could flatten me for all the sins. It's like, you know, whales could swim up to us and just go, we know everything that you lot have done. But whales, and maybe I'll talk a little bit to that, you know, they come from compassion. Their hearts are bigger than their brains, their brains are bigger than us. And a long time ago I had that epiphany about them at the International Whaling Commission in 2000 in Adelaide, my first one. And I'd driven in my$60 Honda Accord with my girlfriend across the Snowy Mountains in winter to Adelaide, and I immediately was running banners, and it was there was a Greenpeace rental crowd that only lasted for a day and a half, it was the first day and a half of the plenary, and then they were disappeared downtown shopping. And it was Richard Jones, who lives here amongst us, the guy who threw actors' blood over the Japanese at an international whaling commission. He was there, but it just basically came down to Trudy and I. I said to her, hey, there's nobody here. This is our job from eight till five, eight till six, whatever it takes. She's okay, and making these banners, and I was desecrating the Japanese flag by painting that red round all in the middle of the thing, and then holding a pail of red paint and pouring it from about height so it splashed outwards, and then writing Japanese map of the Antarctic. And I had these banners like this, and they were really getting stroppy with me. I mean, at that time it was Komatsu. They were saying, You're just you're racist, you hate Japan. And I went, you know what, they got a point. I'm not being racist, but what I better do the other flags. So I went to the library, this is all pre-internet and all that stuff, no mobile phones. And I'm looking up a book to make sure I got the Norwegian flag and it wasn't Sweden or Finland. And the book is acknowledging that Norway is a whaling country, and there was a schematic drawing of a fin whale, and I'm over here checking the flags, okay, that's Norway. What about Iceland? And my girlfriend suddenly says to me, Trudy Godlover, an angel, she is an angel who walks on earth. She says to me, Isn't that interesting how the whale's heart is much bigger than its brain? I don't even look sideways, the top of my head just blows off. Because I'd always been saying in terms of animals since I was young, we shouldn't kill animals that have a bigger brain than us. It's a no-brainer. Like elephants and and silverbacks, and I don't, you know, we why? Why would we do that when we're trying to find life on Mars? You know, if it's Amoebic. And so I just went, oh my god, that's the difference between us and them. Right in that very moment, I love having epiphanies, it's a it's part of my life. There's another word for the for the joy of being a human. You can have epiphanies. And I I just went, that's it. That is our relationship with whales. Their hearts are bigger than their brains, their brains are bigger than our brains. They come from a place of compassion, and we have this overactive brain. We clearly demonstrate with all these wars and you know, greed and and mischief that happens with humans when we've got so many opportunities not to live that way. And and you know, I started to really think about it, and I was like, you know, a whale lays herself down in the sea in neutral buoyancy with this huge heart and the retomerabilia, the miracle net over their lungs, which which they're able to store a whole lot more oxygen in. But they lay themselves in the sea just at the surface, for example, just down floating or down below in neutral buoyancy, and they just go and their heart pumps all this beautiful, pure oxygenated blood straight to their brain. Nothing getting in the way. And that's I don't believe they get cabin fever. I believe that they live in this incredibly advanced place because of their natural environment. That you I'm going, oh, that's right. You know, in the schematic drawing, of course, you see the residual hip bones from from when they were land animals, but you see the four fingers and the thumb inside the flippers. Now, if we want to take war away, I reckon just put all the humans and in hands into flippers. Mittens, actually, not even flippers. Just go, mittens with no flippers, mittens, whatever, no use of your thumb. And I've done cartoons about that. I'm sure you have. My way of doing that was dolphins with hands, machine gunning humans with um flippers, and going, Jesus, they're so intelligent, why don't they fight back? Which is what people say about whales and dolphins. It's just mental. So there they are with their the tai chi yoga masters of the sea rotating in space, communicating at these vast distances, and they have this great long spine where science thinks that memory actually is connected to your spinal cord. So that spine you imagine uh in the old days of the great emperor sperm whales or the great blue whales, and their spines flexing in the deep, like the like how the whole universe, everything around us is made up are because of sound and vibration. That's the foundation of everything. If we ever have if ever we were sent to as kids to a church, it should have been go to the church of the sound and vibration. And everything is there, everything is in all those patterns, somatic patterns, all that stuff. All the knowledge resides in where it all starts from sound and vibration. And those whales are singing across hundreds of miles to each other, you know, in this beautiful global network of whales that we have obviously disrupted. But I just went, that's it. We humans stand upright in gravity with a little heart, pumping, straining the whole time, and half the humans seem to die of heart attacks, pushing blood that's not very well oxygenated because unlike the whales who do a 97% exchange. You remember when we were with those blue whales, when the air came out of their lungs, their lungs rang like a gong. Remember? Gong straight back in. And they only had 3% of that previous air. Right now, you and I, we're we're we're we're running on 12% exchange, if that. So we have all this kind of dead air, and then we're not oxygening our oxygenating our blood the way whales do and dolphins. We are standing in gravity trying to pump an averagely oxygenated blood up to our brain. That you just look at it and you go, if you wanted to improve on the human existence and bring all the best of human qualities, you would bring across all those things wrapped up inside a whale. And in this vast space of a planet called ocean. And you probably just go, Oh, it's a shame about cooking, no. Fuck, we can't do that anymore. That was such a key part of our culture. And I've always said, I reckon dolphins would stand up if they say, What do you what do you think about humans?

SPEAKER_01 2:28:16

They go, Whoa, fuck, it sounds pretty interesting about how they cook and they have spices and all those different tastes, because all we do is eat fucking fish. Dag in, dug out.

How Actions Ripple Beyond Proof

SPEAKER_00 2:28:27

But you know what I'm saying? The crop the the crossover, if you like, between whales and dolphins is essentially about heart energy. It's essentially about that. When you jump into the sea with a whale, you are already in this massive big aura of compassion surrounding you. And a whale looks across at you and knows everything about humans, about the Yankee whales, about the Japanese Russian whales, whatever, about the pollution, about the atomic bombs, about the poison poured into the sea. You know, everything. But they look at you and go on absolute in the moment presence, being in the moment. And they look at you and go, hi, you cool? And you go, Yeah, I'm absolutely cool. And they go, cool. And they they just have learned how to be a society that does that through the grandeur of their hearts connected to such beautiful big brains. And they've worked out how, because of the sea, because of their hands being in mittens, they've worked out that they can live peaceably on this planet and share it and everything. And we humans are increasing our populations and fighting over land. We fight over land and shelter. Imagine being a whale. Oh, I don't have to fight a bat either. And I remember that singer, Lori Anderson, I think it's her, where she said something along the lines about being a dolphin in captivity. She said the dolphin asked, Why does the sea always end in walls? She said something like that. I'm getting it wrong, but it it affected me at the time because we've been up against captivity as well, right? We humans talk about freedom and we do this dreadful thing. We're just man putting animals in little cages to explain their life upon the open plane. That's from something I wrote years ago. And when you look at what people want in the world, they want freedom. You know, like it's a basic bottom line tenant. They've arrived on this fabulous planet. And why, as humans wanting that thing, do we turn around and and then feel that we can do this to the animal kingdom with no compunction? Just like, yeah, that I can justify that because someone gave me some dollars. And these poor orcas and dolphins and every other kind of animal you want to name, you know, cattle and and this trade in animals that goes on flies absolutely in the face of the very things that we hold as our core values. So yeah, I'm with Paul Watson when he says the animals, animals is who I've committed my life to. It is one of the the things of being human where you have you have these big ideas and you have to accept that sometimes they're gonna just have their moment and then they're not gonna exist anymore, or they're gonna fade out in some way. And you'll have these thoughts ten years later, like, we need to resurrect, you know, like the cross the Pacific. Because for me, I found it fascinating that we could go right across the Pacific through all the Pacific Islands, who were already declaring all their EEZs as whale sanctuaries because the Japanese whale lobby and so forth was blocking the whole idea of a South Pacific whale sanctuary, which is kind of it was for me, it was the beginning of oh, getting lit by IWC itself. The South Pacific wanted that, but we we traveled down to the coast of Chile at the time that Michel Barcherot was the president of Chile. And she did pass through her Chilean government at the same time, around time we were talking this up, she added on 150 nautical miles to the 200 nautical mile EEZ and said, that's it, no whale stuff, you can't even bring a dolphin tooth in this country, we're out completely, because Chile used to be a huge hunting ground in the Yankee whaler days and stuff, and and on. And that led to a story that the rest of the world doesn't know. So I'm gonna tell it. When we were in the Antarctic and we split our our our fleet one lot, we were going after uh from a call from New Zealand a search and rescue about uh an e-perb going off down near Shackleton's hut, and we got involved way down there in a worst storm to hit the Antarctic in 25 years. We we drove through it to get to this place to search for the crew who had drowned and with their boat, the berserk that had gone backwards, I think, still 45 foot, still a catch, had gone backwards. Two people ashore survived. But while we were doing all of that search and rescue thing, the other half with the Bob Barker and that were followed, because the Japanese split their fleet to run around and meet in the Indian Ocean, because it doesn't take that long at the bottom of the world. So a couple of Yushans had gone that way, and uh Nishanmaru had gone that way with one of the Yutians, and Bob Barker was following them, and they were now being squeezed through a narrow corridor because of what Michel Barcher had done back in 2008 in Chile and closed down their access through the Drake's passage, and they were heading for it, and the Bob Barker, it's never this is an unknown story, I swear. The Bob Barker gets a call from the Chilean Navy and this is the Admiral, whatever, you know. This is Ferdinand Elmirez. Uh the uh seash and seaship, this is the Admiral. Where do you locate Anish in my room? Oh, she's right in front of us. We're right on her slipway. Uh Her GPS is this, and the guy goes, Yes, that's how we're reading it. And they're just over the horizon, just 20 22 nautical miles away or whatever out of sight, two warships. And then he says, Uh, okay, thank you very much. You leave it to us, we're taking it from here, and leaves the intercom on for Sea Ship it on the bridge, the Sea Shiped Bridge crew to listen to what went down, where he calls up the Nishan Maru and goes, Uh, Nishan Maru, Nishamaru, this is Almar Cavaris of the Chilean Navy. You are approaching Chilean whale sanctuary border. We are warning you if you cross that, we are two warships who will stop you, escort you back to Santiago, where we will impound your vessel. And you know, at first he's trying to talk to the captain of the captain, go, Radio Silence. And then, oh yes, this is uh Captain Silas, oh Nish and Maru, I have your message. And what happened was they keep going straight towards Drake's passage, they're close, and then to you know, I suppose some sense of pride that they have to show, they go for half an hour and then Nishmaru starts pulling hard to port and makes a beeline straight for Japan with the Yushin. And we and I was the one who got the message actually over in the other in the Ross Sea, where I I answer a phone call because I was on the bridge, and oh hello, I'm a journalist from the Tokyo, uh, from the Japan Times, just wondering about this news that the Japanese whaling fleet has left the Antarctic. I go, uh, it has? And I'm looking across at Paul Watson, going, Paul, you take this call. Paul takes it, and you know, they had left early and we had stopped them killing 863 whales. And these are moments that you just have in your life where you just celebrate and you just go, look at how we worked as a team. Look how we worked as a team. It's possible humans can come together and get a great outcome for good, for a good reason. If anything that should be added to this conversation is it doesn't matter about what you do being unqualifiable or unquantifiable. It doesn't matter. Because you're you're never no you're never not gonna know the ripples that flow out and flow around the world and create the change that you're not even present at. It happens that way. And if you remember in Chile, all those students that turned up and fought so hard, they were being released from prison every night and were back every day because Michelle Barschreux was like, mm-mm mm-mm, we're gonna have a whale sanctuary. Maybe they already had it, the timing was very close. But she was recognizing and knowing about a bunch of crazy Aussie surfers who were traveling all the way down the coast to get to the IWC. And every IWC I've been to, but since South America, Brazil, Panama City, and Chile, they turn up, man, they turn up and they fight and show all that passion. So I just want to add that. Yeah, we don't need to have proof of whether it's quantifiable or qualifiable. We just have our conscience and our intelligence just to go, this needs to be done.

Final Thanks And Where To Connect

SPEAKER_06 2:37:13

Time is precious. Thanks for spending some of yours listening with us today. Our editor this season is the multi-talented Ben Jake Alexander. The soundtrack was composed by Shannon Soul Carroll, with additional tunes by Dave and Ben. We'll be continuing today's conversation on Instagram, where we're at Water People Podcast. And you can subscribe to our very infrequent newsletter to get book recommendations, questions we're pondering, behind the scenes glimpses into recording the podcast, and more via our website, waterpeoplepodcast.com.