A Life Less Ordinary/ Neville Coleman By Chris Mitchell - ScubaDiver Magazine

 A Life Less Ordinary

By Chris Mitchell

Forty-eight years ago he set out to dive the coast of the Australian continent,  documenting its incredible marine life. Now, Neville Coleman is regarded as one  of the world's leading authorities on Asia-Pacific's underwater world. 

Ever wondered what exotic species you're looking at on any given dive? Chances are Neville Coleman could help.

This 69-year-old Australian has spent much
of his life scuba diving and documenting marine life across Australia and Asia, discovering over 450 new species and cross-referencing over 11,500 species with 100,000 images.   

The self-educated Coleman self-financed a four-year Australian Coastal Marine Expedition from 1969 through 1973, which saw him diving his way around the coast of Australia in order to photograph and assess the continent's largely unknown marine life.
In doing so, Coleman established the first visual identification system of Australian aquatic flora and fauna, and has continued to expand it in the years since, taking in much of the Indo Pacific as well. 

To share his knowledge with a wider audience, Neville has authored and illustrated
65 marine life identification guides, the latest, Nudibranch Encyclopaedia, is his most comprehensive identification volume yet, with 3,000 images. In a sign that despite all his years underwater Coleman hasn't lost touch with the mainstream, he's even published Nudibranchs, Reef Fishes and Reef Life digitaly, for viewing on both iPods and pocket PCs.

He is also working on an autobiographical acount ( "Footsteps in the Sea") as a series of television documentaries of his Australian expedition and his subsequent Asia/Indo Pacific explorations, which explains his conviction that "scuba diving is the greatest adventure activity on the planet."

In 2007, Neville Coleman was inducted into the International Scuba Diving Hall of Fame scubahalloffame.com, in recognition for his significant contributions to scuba education in the field of discovery and publishing of marine life. Coleman's enthusiasm for the ocean and his thirst to share new discoveries remains boundless.

 
Coleman describes this Melibe sp. nudibranch from Mabul
"the most incredible  creature I've ever found"

 
"Your induction into the Hall of Fame is a deserved recognition of your discoveries and your work. As you're a wholly self-taught and self-motivated naturalist, do such plaudits hold much value for you?"

Certainly they do. Especially as it's an overseas award, which  is recognised the world over and therefore on the highest level obtainable. Advancing knowledge of the aquatic world in Australia has in the past been of small consequence as there is little encouragement from government bodies toward those with non-academic backgrounds.

"Did you have any mentors or guides when you were younger, either in person or simply from books?"

When I was about 10 years old I would cut out all sorts of animals from magazines, stamps of creatures, and breakfast cereal box cards and stuck them into the albums. I had albums on mammals, birds, insects, flowers, and a fish album, with critters from all over the world. I also had an old natural history encyclopaedia, which I still have that told of amazing creatures, though the drawings were a bit exaggerated and the natural history details, as we know them today, somewhat of a giggle.
These creatures inspired me, especially the strange fish like the ones I saw in the Solvol [soap] Fish Book of 1950. As a child I was very keen on nature, but there was no nature study at school.

Fifteen years later I met Mr. Jack Ramsay who, as a boy, had built his own camera in the 1920s and took the first bird pictures in Australia. His father had been the Director of the Australian Museum and he was virtually born in the basement. He helped our family along the road of life and showed me his shell collections and natural history collections, and through seeing these I realised that perhaps the impossible dreams of a 10-year-old boy becoming a natural history explorer might not be that impossible.

Unfortunately I had no qualifications, not even a school certificate, as I'd left school early to get a job, I had to help my Mum with the rent as my dad was a violent alcoholic and drank most of the money he earned, or loaned it to his mates.

I was already scuba diving by that time and took all my new discoveries to the Australian Museum. It seemed so extraordinary to me that marine life was not common knowledge "alive." I couldn't understand that one needed a dead, preserved specimen before identification could be made, and that there were only one or two people in the whole of Australia who could tell specific creatures apart in any given group because they were the only experts. In other words, there was no visual ID system for living aquatic creatures in all of Australia.

If ever we were going to be able to conserve our aquatic resources, somebody had to first establish their existence.
 
"Would you say the "Australian Coastal Marine Expedition" was the defining event in your life, one from which everything else has flowed?"

The decision to go ahead with the expedition, even after the two underwater photographers who were to accompany me pulled out at the last minute, was the second most important decision of my life.

The first was to become a scuba diver, after I had been badly scared by a shark on the Great Barrier Reef while searching for shells at low tide. 

My idea to complete an underwater photographic fauna survey of the Australian continent as a "one man and one girl" expedition without any previous experience, credentials, photographic experience, knowledge of Australia, insurance, institutional or business backing was to all  the experts, (who thought it was impossible), a joke.

I couldn't understand why nobody had the vision to see how important aquatic visual identification would become in the future. 

I guess on paper the expedition didn't shape up as much.
How can a boy's dream of being an explorer compete with the common sense of those who knew better? It seemed everybody knew I wouldn't return alive, so there wasn't much point in supporting the expedition.
That's what gave every discovery  I made so much value. Every day I put my life on the line; you don't get to be much closer to your spirit than that.

I think since then some scientists have appreciated my dedication and today I have some of the most truly appreciated references any layperson could wish for from the Australian scientific community, as well as becoming a Research Associate of the Australian Museum and Honourary Consultant to the Queensland Museum.

I worked in a printing factory from the age of 15 until I was 29, putting in as much overtime as I could as a tradesman to save for the expedition, and sold my sports car to buy the 1952 Land Rover and a four-metre boat with a nine horsepower outboard. The Australian Rope Manufacturers donated some anchor and
dredge rope. The Australian Commonwealth grant system donated
$250 for four new tires, and Smith's Crisps donated 10 bags of chips and 20 tins of dried vegetables. The entire expedition covered 64,000 km and cost me over AU$48,000.

Coleman got his first camera in 1968 and realised
collecting images was the wave of the future

"Have you witnessed radical changes at various dive destinations you've returned to over the years? What do you think is the Big Picture view?"

I have seen lots of changes but as we have no base line studies available, everybody is guessing. We are only just discovering what we have, so who can make any judgment on what used to be?
Nature is very resilient and everything changes every minute with the seasons, the weather, the time, nothing is ever the same from one minute to another.

Very few humans have any understanding of the sea and its inhabitants. We are but children in the wilderness of ignorance, making assumptions based on 40 years of human knowledge on a marine environment millions of years in the making. 

Of course humans change things, mostly because of greed, ignorance, or survival. Because we have the technology to take everything, we do!

Coleman discovered his first ever nudibranch (Ceratosoma amoenum)
in the kelp forests of Sydney Harbour

Ceratosoma amoenum, the first nudibranch Coleman ever photographed (in 1968 )
inspired a lifetime of discovery.

"Is it fair to say that despite the large amount of species you've discovered and others that have been catalogued, there is still a huge backlog of work to be done in understanding these creatures? Do we need more marine biologists?"

There is a gigantic backlog of marine life awaiting descriptions in museums. There are no longer even taxonomists in the various departments of Australian museums as there are no jobs because there is no funding from the government. Today's museums have to pay their own way; they are no longer fully supported by the
government. Very few marine taxonomists have been trained in Australia over the last 40 years because there haven't been any jobs for them.

We are behind the eight ball. That is why my original Australasian Marine Photographic Index and World of Water Image Bank should prove so beneficial to the future of the diving industry. Divers are now the only hope the "World of Water" has. Unless we all work together to establish base line studies of our dive sites, it will never happen.

Marine science does not have the business interest, the skills, the motivation, or the opportunity to go photograph the entire marine fauna of the Asia/Indo Pacific. This is because they must have funds to perform any duties, and there are no funds. We as the diving industry must wake up and look after our own back yards, and establish real programmes of discovery for the new age of scuba divers to participate in.

Because everybody is an explorer and "learning, is the greatest adventure." 

Of Colemans more than 450 discovered species, some of his most famous include the Coleman's shrimp (Periclimenes colemani), and Coleman's pygmy seahorse
(Hippocampus colemani), found in just three metres of water at Erscott's Hole inside the lagoon at Lord Howe Island, almost under the boat mooring. (photo: Neville Coleman)

Copyright Neville Coleman