Toxins in the 2025-2026 South Australian harmful algal bloom

Since the middle of March 2025, South Australian coasts have been afflicted by a toxic algal bloom of unprecedented size and duration. The effects of the bloom on marine life have been devastating, with untold thousands of dead creatures, from tiny worms to large sharks, washing up on the beaches from Encounter Bay and Kangaroo Island to shores on both sides of Gulf St Vincent. Underwater surveys indicate that mortalities seen on the beaches are only a small fraction of what is happening off-shore.

As the bloom has progressed, various citizen science groups, independent researchers, university researchers and government departments have been working to monitor and understand the genesis, progression and effects of the toxic algal bloom. As a result of my background in zoology, comparative anatomy and physiology, pharmacology, and both cellular and systems neuroscience, it turns out that I am one of the few people around who has significant background knowledge of how the various algal toxins affect different cell types and organ systems is a wide range of marine creatures. Consequently, I have contributed directly to several citizen science projects and have spoken about the toxins at public forums.

Based on the talks I have given at … Click here for more.

The Bilgestruck reimagined

“Fardistantly past due, we throughganged the outpumpers, the alden gatherers saved from longforetimes.“

As climate change progresses apace, the rains rarely stop and the tides continue to rise, surging through our barricades and breakwaters. With our pumps overwhelmed and means of escape increasingly dysfunctional, we speak the language of castaways, surrounded by the wreckage of our imagination. We are the Bilgestruck…

A few years ago, I originally made The BiIgestruck using a very early version of MidJourney AI to create some background elements that I did not have my own material for. At the time, MidJourney seemed like an exciting new way to create original material. However, it is now clear that these AI engines illegally use original work and consume massive amounts of power. Therefore, I have completely remade the video using all my own footage. Even so, the images look somewhat unworldly, which is part of my intention. Each scene has been composited from multiple sources, mostly from around Port Adelaide and the coastline south of Adelaide. The text is in a kind of future-archaic dialect that I invented.

This is The Bilgestruck completely re-imagined from the version first exhibited in Port Adelaide in 2023, curated … Click here for more.

The voices of birds…

Like many people, I am intrigued by bird calls. Where we live in the foothills of the Mount Lofty Ranges, just out of Adelaide, South Australia, we are graced by many types of native birds. However in the forty years we have lived here, the number of species found in the area had dropped dramatically. This decline has been well documented and is due to a combination of habitat destruction, mostly for human housing, and climate change. Nevertheless, most of the time, the air is filled with the calls of birds, some regular residents, others infrequent passers-by. But what are they saying to each other? what are they trying to tell us?

Here are a couple of videos I have made, in which I give voices to the birds in different ways. Both these videos have had many screenings in Australia and around the world.

Magpies

Magpies are regulars in and around our garden The Australian Magpie (Gymnorhina tibicen) has extraordinary vocal ability, trilling and carolling a wide range of calls, often together, and often at night. It not related to the European or North American magpies.

The audio for this piece was developed around a recording I … Click here for more.

2025: Another amazing year for my videos!

2025 has ended up as another amazing year for my videos! Overall, 22 different videos have been shown in some way in 17 countries around the world for a total of nearly 60 screenings. Four videos – Eviction, DEADEYE, WHY-EEELA and The Exclusion Principle –  won awards or were short-listed for awards at international festivals.

The year began on a big note with The Taken Path, a 6-screen installation made in collaboration with Catherine Truman, exhibited at Carrick Hill as part of the 2025 Adelaide Festival. A different single screen version was exhibited later in the year at the ANAT SPECTRA conference in Queensland.

While most of my work is shown internationally, it has been especially gratifying to have videos screened at different short film festivals around Australia this year, since it is rare for local festivals to encompass experimental film as part of a general program. I will continue to support these events, even if my work does not get selected.

Most of the videos deal with the state of the environment in some way or another: climate change, habitat destruction, and the consequential effects on the survival of plants and animals, many of which we … Click here for more.

The Taken Path – an open ended experiment in observation and embodied experience – single screen version


The Carrick Hill estate, nestled on unceded Kaurna land in the foothills of Adelaide, South Australia, presents a conundrum of the delicate connections between humans and the greater environment. Here, pure fantasy and the hard reality of both ancient and present life are encountered at once in a microcosm of the wider world.

At monthly intervals over a year, Catherine Truman and I used an iPhone and professional video camera respectively to record their walks along a defined path that traverses the natural and altered landscapes of Carrick Hill. This speculative, durational project was inspired by a poetic idea: what would we notice if we walked the same path, once a month over the course of a year and recorded the journey?

This repeated action reveals profound shifts of climate and impacts of human industry. If we keep to the path already taken, what happens to our powers of observation? If we walk it many times, does our awareness shift or is it becalmed? What can we learn anew from this repetition?

The control sequences represent the recordings of our walks along the Taken Path. Up hill, to the east, adjacent to some remnant, largely degraded native woodland, stands a … Click here for more.

DEADEYE


“they used to place coins on the eyelids of the dead so they could not follow the lives of the living … surrounded by ocean we find no clear water … in the absence of fire our soft tissues are burning … yet our eyes stay open …”

Beginning in March 2025, large areas of South Australian coastal waters have been devastated by a harmful algal bloom, leading to mass mortalities of uncountable numbers of fish, invertebrates and other marine life. The causes are complex but all arise from the unmitigated effects of anthropogenic climate change.

I made the video from images of fish that have been killed by the bloom and washed up on beaches along the eastern side of Gulf St Vincent. The audio was created from samples taken from videos of living fish, crabs and squid recorded at Seacliff beach, South Australia, in January – February 2025, before the bloom hit. The text is what the fish might say to us, if only they could…

Click here more about the bloom and how its toxins affect fish, people, and other organisms.

Because We Can

“We purify, filter, sift, rectify, unburden… stupefy, impose, stun, devastate, overwhelm… radiate, bewitch…”

But why? Why do we cause so much damage to our own environment, and then spend so much in attempting to recreate it after our own designs? What is it that underlies our desire to transform the natural world into something of our own making?

Botanic Gardens symbolise the tension between the human desire to admire nature and to control it. Almost none of the vegetation in a Botanic Garden is native to the area. Consequently, the original local environment must be skilfully managed and manipulated to provide diverse growth conditions suitable for exotic plants from all over the world. At the same time, the Gardens must be somehow attractive to human visitors. In a dry climate such as South Australia, the fundamental key to meeting both these demands is the controlled supply of water. 

Although a major function of modern botanic gardens is dedicated to preserving and understanding endangered species, many were originally established to celebrate and illustrate the achievements of the colonialist enterprise.

In this video, we see the different ways in which water inhabits the interfaces between the natural and the manufactured. Now and … Click here for more.