New book

The Painted Reef is a ‘Coloring-in book with a Difference’.
It hands you fourteen richly drawn creatures of the Great Barrier Reef to colour and, alongside each, the true and often astonishing story of what that creature really is.
Framed as a fortnight aboard the liveaboard dive-vessel Jiigurru, off the far north of Queensland, it follows five divers and their crew through days spent underwater and evenings spent talking it all over.
Dive-by-dive, the reef gives up its wonders: the octopus that rewrites the colour and texture of its own skin in a heartbeat; the parrotfish that grinds the coral into the white sand of your holiday beach; the seahorse fathers who carry and bear their young; the small anemone that may never grow old at all.
Each creature carries one arresting, entirely true fact, delivered not as a lecture but through the endless questions of Toby, the twelve-year-old aboard, and answered by a cast the reader comes to know and love: Bazza the grizzled dive master, Priya the marine specialist, camera-mad Cole, silent Captain BillyBub, a cockatoo called Halleluja..! and a pit-bull called Djinn who run the ship between them.
True to its 'with a difference' promise, every page asks something back – differences to spot, creatures to find, facts to remember – so that colouring becomes looking, and looking becomes seeing – and that then becomes the ‘knowing’..
Sophisticated enough for the adult reading aloud and gentle enough for the child at the crayons, The Painted Reef is natural history worn lightly, a warm and funny sea-story, and an invitation to put the colours back where the reef first found them
Because a thing you have been taught to love is a thing you will want to protect, and the reef made every one of these colours itself, long before we ever arrived to help.
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... So – if you enjoyed reading this introductory pages, please feel free to keep an eye oiut for the final book when it si eventually published...
... And that's for making the effort...