As you probably know by now (I may have blasted it a little over social media!), I was lucky enough to be approached by Sean O’Brien to become involved with 97.3 ABC Illawarra and ABC Open to be interviewed about my bushwalking and photography adventures throughout the Wollongong region. Sean had originally come across me via my Instagram posts.
Sean and I met on a lovely Wednesday morning at the Mt Keira Scout Camp, the perfect location, due to its easy accessibility with all of Sean’s recording equipment. The day started a little later than we anticipated with a car mix up at ABC, which gave me a great opportunity to enjoy the Scout Camp on a rare warm August morning, a work day nonetheless! The Lyrebirds were particularly in form this morning and I was also lucky enough to capture some friendly Brown Cuckoo Doves feeding on some berries.
We started our recording in the chapel setting and used that as our base. If you haven’t been there before, it is a beautiful rainforest location with rustic seating, a stone moss covered pulpit and housed by an extraordinary rainforest canopy mostly created by a magnificent old Fig Tree. We started with our radio interview to get things started, with a few interruptions for a plane going over by – or the Dove’s deciding to poop on my shoulder… it’s nature, you’ve got to expect these things I guess!
After wrapping up the audio side for ABC Illawarra Radio, we started the videoing and determining the best spots to film; we were then joined by an all boys school group which made things a little more rowdier in this quiet setting than we had anticipated! Luckily enough, the kind teachers agreed to move to another spot so we could finish off our recording.
Filming wrapped up relatively quickly after some crawling around on rocks and walking through the rainforest taking photos and discussing what Bushwalkthegong is all about. It was a lovely morning and I was so thankful to Sean for his amazing professionalism. It’s been a fun couple of weeks looking at the final result splashed over ABC networks and hearing feedback from everyone. 15min of fame on my favourite topic has been a wonderful whirlwind, I’m looking forward to see what other opportunities present to Bushwalkthegong in the future.
ABC 24 is yet to broadcast the video on TV on the 18th of October 2016… I’ll keep you posted on the times…
A special thank you to ABC Open, and producer Sean O’Brien for making this all a reality.
