With a childhood filled with Attenborough documentaries and holidays in wild and wonderful places, it was only natural that I ended up an ecologist. After majoring in marine biology, zoology and history at the the University of Melbourne, I continued into honours and then ongoing research into temperate fish ecology on both natural and artificial reefs in Victoria. I then spent a few years in central Australia as an environmental consultant before returning to the University of Melbourne for a PhD project investigating extinction risk in the freshwater fishes of the Kimberley.