THE PAINTED REEF

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 live-aboard dive-vessel – the Jiigurru – cruising off the far north of Queensland, it follows five divers and their crew through days diving the reef below and the 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 actually ever grow old at all...!
Each creature carries one arresting, entirely true fact – delivered not as a lecture but through the endless questions of 'Young Toby', the twelve-year-old youngest member aboard, and answered by a cast the reader comes to know and love: Bazza the grizzled Dive-Master, Priya the half-Indian, half-Australian, dedicated university graduate in marine biology; camera-crazy Cole from Texas, the taciturn Captain BillyBub – himself a half Anglo, half Aboriginal ... plus a nutty cockatoo with 'attitude' and a distinctive vocabulary, called 'Halleluja..!, and finally, a solid pit-bull called Djinn who sings whenevr the big 'fish-fellahs-mans' are in the offing...
True to its 'with a difference' promise, every page asks something back – differences to spot, creatures to find, facts to remember ... so that the coloring becomes a conscious act of 'looking', and that 'looking' becomes a 'seeing' – and then that 'seeing' becomes the ‘knowing’ of it...
Sophisticated enough for an adult reading aloud and whilst also gentle enough for a child at their crayons, The Painted Reef is 'natural history worn lightly': a warm, and funny collection of sea-stories, and an invitation to put the colours back where the reef first found them.
... Because, in the end, 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.

... So – if you enjoyed reading this introductory pages, please feel free to keep an eye out for the final book when it is eventually published – which will not be too far in the distant future...!
... Feel free to check-back – and my sincere that's for making the effort... :())
CA