 You can see over there is the town of Bermagui so this is the particular town I love coming to the most and then off the coast is Montague Island and that's just a rock that's right on the edge of the continental shelf so when you go out there it changes from the more coastal environment to the more oceanic environment and you get different kind of fish and different kinds of birds and all that kind of stuff it's a fantastic spot. Being in the environment walking, swimming, any of those kinds of things it actually reminds me of why I do the job I do so I'm an environmental scientist and on a day-to-day basis the truth is that means I spend a lot of time staring at a computer but then when I have the opportunity to come to a place like this I'm reminded why a focus on keeping the environment the way we want it to be the way we the way humans want to experience it it's vital to me that I do that so I think there's just a deep thing in me that makes me want to be near the ocean and that's that's what I get when I'm down here. What's special to me about this place is I have been coming here long enough now that the beauty of it which is still present but that kind of the impressive beauty sort of phase into the background a little bit and you start to notice more of the little things and understand much better what's going on in terms of the relationship between soil and trees and the relationship between different kinds of forest and the birds you might see how it changes on any given day when you get to that appreciation of a place like this it makes me begin to better understand the experience that so many people get to have in their own world so indigenous people especially that have such a long history of connection to it to place anyone who's really been attached to place for that period of time to experience that so I think that's quite normal for some people but for city people I grew up in a city I'm an urban person I've most of my life I've lived in cities to have the opportunity to get to know a non- urban environment that way and to see change is I think I think that's really what it is I love most about here. I'm inherently an optimistic person and sometimes I think optimism can be can take you so far that you in fact deny the chance that that some difficult and destructive things can be happening I still think optimism is a really useful trait it's unhelpful to get to a point where you despair about nature I think we need to be positive about the good things we can do but you also have to be realistic about some things that are changing in the world I think 2020 made me see the world a bit more like many of my students were already seeing the world it made me confront a bit more directly how troubling some of these challenges can be and yet at the same time I would come down to a place like this and even though I could see the evidence of the fires and even though I can see how COVID has changed the way people move through this landscape I would still be incredibly renewed and reinvigorated by being here and reminded by reminded how much that connection to a place that you love how important that is in making you feel well good about life and in my case good about what I do