The first time David Hannan picked up an underwater camera, he was 11.
A gift from his father, it came with one condition.
"I remember him saying, 'You take good shots or I'll take it off you,'" Hannan tells Conversations with Sarah Kanowski.
Hannan was determined to hang on to that "beautiful toy" so during a trip to Heron Island, off the coast of Queensland, he went "riding on the backs of mantra rays", trying to capture photos from their point of view.
But it was a different time back them, Hannan recalls, warning it shouldn't be attempted now.
"[The manta ray] will come right up to you, allow you to just softly touch the top of it, and it takes you for a ride and it brings you back to the same spot.
"And they love being scratched — like you scratch your dog — and it rolls over.
"It will come up [and] look you in the eye. They get very, very curious."
Hannan's childhood interest led to a career as a world-renowned underwater photographer. He gained recognition in the late 1980s for filming mass coral spawning on the Great Barrier Reef, and has continued to work around the globe.
He has spent the last few decades trying to capture as much of the reef's beauty as he can.
The curiosity of sea creatures
Loading...When it comes to sea creatures that interact with humans, most people think of dolphins, but Hannan says many ocean animals are eager to play.
He describes coming across an "intelligent" pair of cuttlefish.
"I've started filming one of them and the other cuttlefish came around the back of the camera — it's literally right next to me, watching the shot [and] at me filming its other mate," he says.
Hannan said he put the two cuttlefish on top of his camera. They sat there while he transported them around, then he put them back where he found them.
The next day, he returned to the same location, and the cuttlefish were there again, as if they were waiting for him.
"Well, you've trained them up," Hannan says. "These things are so curious and interactive with you."
Loading...Octopuses are also fast learners. He says they've been known to follow him around, sit on his camera, and seem to want to know what he's doing there.
"They treat you as another octopus," Hannan says.
"You can actually, within about two or three dives, start training them.
"They're quicker to train than a dog. You can point left; they'll go left. Point right; they'll go right."
The secrets of a sleepy shark
Loading...When Hannan started diving as a boy, he would see sharks all the time. He says they never bothered him.
"They were everywhere. They were just part of nature," he says.
His father taught him to spearfish, and Hannan recalls sharks occasionally trying to steal his catch.
"You realise that they're not after you, and they're quite timid," he says.
"And so sharks were something that demystified very, very quickly for me."
These days, he says the most difficult part of filming sharks is finding them, due to overfishing.
But Hannan says he's seen videos of divers interacting with female sharks in a similar way to his manta ray experience.
He warns it shouldn't be attempted, but speaks of footage he's seen where sharks rub up against divers, who then stroke the shark softly over its head.
"You put it to sleep, and it rolls over."
In a documentary that Hannan filmed with his late friend Rob Stewart, the film opens with a scene of Stewart "caressing" a bull shark using the technique.
"It's an amazing thing," he says.
'Let people see what they've lost'
Loading...Hannan says he was around 30 when he began noticing the reef starting to change.
"This was before the big [coral] bleachings that we saw," he says.
"I was noticing the crown-of-thorns [starfish] were running rampant through the reef at that stage.
"They were more deadly than the bleaching is in many ways."
Hannan spent four years on the reef filming the documentary Coral Sea Dreaming, which was released in 1992.
He says it was obvious then that the reef was "in tremendous trouble", which spurred him to keep documenting it.
"What motivates me is to film the beauty," he says.
"I'm trying to [create] a record of the reef for posterity really, that's my aim, because I don't think it's going to be here within maybe a couple of years.
"I think it's important to record that and let people see what they've lost."
But Hannan does have hope. He says coral-seeding experiments, where coral is grown in an aquarium and then put into the ocean, have been promising.
"I think what's going to happen is we're going to lose our beautiful reef, but in the later part of this century we're going to have the means to start reseeding."
He hopes his visual records of the Great Barrier Reef might convince future governments, and the public, to spend the money required to undertake such a project.
Listen to David Hannan's story on the Conversations podcast on ABC Listen.
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2023-11-18 21:03:20Z
CBMibWh0dHBzOi8vd3d3LmFiYy5uZXQuYXUvbmV3cy8yMDIzLTExLTE5L3VuZGVyd2F0ZXItcGhvdG9ncmFwaGVyLWRhdmlkLWhhbm5hbi1zaGFyay1vY3RvcHVzLW1hbnRhLXJheS8xMDMxMDA0MjLSAShodHRwczovL2FtcC5hYmMubmV0LmF1L2FydGljbGUvMTAzMTAwNDIy
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