Interpretive Consultants Ecotourism

In my last year of studying Zoology at the Adelaide University many of my friends, who had also studied marine ecology with me, started to travel to Queensland to do voluntary work with the National Parks and Wildlife Service. They came back with great stories of volunteering for the turtle tagging project run by Col Limpus, in Bundaberg.

In January 1988 I decided to go up there too. I took a penpal with me, a girl I had been writing to since I was 14, who lived in Japan. Her name was Mayumi Kubo. Col took a great interest in her as the Japanese people had not yet taken turtle protection seriously enough, according to him, and still used some Turtle shell products. He thought he could covert her into an ambassador.

The majority of my three weeks at Bundaberg were spent learning about tourism, turtle conservation, and how to educate people about environmental issues. Col took particular care to make sure that I would be able to communicate with the public, and that perhaps maybe Mayumi and I could be part of his education plan. This turned out to be fantastic for me, because I loved talking to groups of people and, sometimes got out of my duty to count turtles and measure their Shells, which all other volunteers had to do!

I also went on some guided reef tours on Heron Island the next year that I spent on the turtle conservation program, spending even more time with Tourists, and learning about the reef animals. This is what sparked the idea in me that I could create an eco-tourism business.

I came back to Adelaide in March 1989 and began to plan out how I could adapt what I had learnt in Queensland to the South Australian Environment. With the sales and marketing experience I had gained selling Avon products as a teenager, the influence I had from watching endless David Attenborough documentaries, the experiences on The Great Barrier Reef, and a double major in Zoology with Botany, I figured I had the perfect combination of skills to launch myself into my first “Start-Up”.