About
The book, and the person behind it
About me
I've spent my working life switching between computers and the bush — and this site is what happened when the two finally met.
I started out as a product manager, then a software developer, then spent a decade managing projects in the technology industry: startups and large online publishers in Sydney, and a stretch in university IT after a move to Adelaide. Somewhere along the way I traded the desk for a ute. I ran a native-gardening business, managed bushfire-prevention work for councils and utilities, and, once I'd landed on the Sunshine Coast, went back to project management with an ecological consultancy, delivering biodiversity-offset projects across New South Wales.
I live in Yandina, where every morning I look out at Mount Ninderry. I'm interested in how AI can add to the world rather than replace jobs, in the overlap of technology, education and ecology, and most of all in making good information free, accessible and fun to learn. Everything on this site was built in that spirit, the book included.
The book
This is an ecology book about one stretch of subtropical Queensland coast, an attempt to make its landscape readable to anyone curious enough to look. The Sunshine Coast packs reef, estuary, heath, swamp, forest and rainforest into a short, steep run from the sea to the range, and lays it out in an order so clear it makes an almost perfect classroom for how the living world is put together. Hardly anyone uses it as one, which is a pity: a landscape is easier to look after once you understand it.
Country
The Sunshine Coast is Kabi Kabi (Gubbi Gubbi) Country. The Kabi Kabi people are the Traditional Owners and continuing custodians of this land and its waters — a connection recognised in the Federal Court's 2024 determination of their native title, and reaching back many thousands of years before that. We pay our respects to Kabi Kabi Elders past and present.
This is an ecology book. It makes no claim to tell that Country's cultural story, which belongs with the Kabi Kabi people themselves; where it touches on the long human history of the landscape, it draws only on the published record.
How it was made
This book was written with the help of AI, used for drafting and for gathering the published research, with me directing the work, checking every fact against its source, and doing the editing. I mention it plainly because a reader is entitled to know, and because without these tools it would probably never have been written: a natural history of one stretch of coast, for one region's readers, is not the kind of book that pays its way through a publisher.
The method turned out to be a story in itself. How the book was written →
Get in touch
Whether it's a question about the coast, a correction, or a piece of work you think I could help with, send an email. I read everything.