The story of Gone Buggo

I grew up on a hobby farm in south-east Queensland. Surrounded by nature, immersed in nature, and oblivious to nature. Born to parents who were both brought here from the UK in their teens, I wasn’t raised to understand Australia because neither were they. I never understood or felt a connection to the landscape, but I was set loose upon it with all my youthful enthusiasm. I was given the opportunity to handle an assortment of wild creatures, but never given an appreciation of why they mattered.

As I grew I travelled, hiking and camping my way around the world without realizing how each piece of the puzzle fit together, because for the most part, I didn’t understand it all to be one thing at all. I landed, eventually, in Port Douglas, and before long found myself hosting on a boat on the Great Barrier Reef. Exposed to scientists and science communicators like John Rumney, I began to understand how complex life could be. The reef, visible from space with the naked eye, built by creatures the size of a pin-head, amazed and astounded me daily. I began to understand that I was part of it, and it was part of me, and that the world was both bigger and smaller than I had ever had a chance to understand. Then, in 2016, I watched it flouresce, and fade, and then turn white. Corals I considered to be family starved and died before my very eyes, as the industry I had been proud to be a part of began denying that anything was wrong at all. I was told to lie, to avoid questions, to cherry-pick facts to mislead the general public into thinking that this scientifically significant mass bleaching event was just a bump in the road. I was silenced to protect profit margins while an environment I understood to be important to everyone faded away in real time. So I looked for other ways and other places to speak on nature’s behalf.

In shifting my focus to the rainforest not only did I find different ways to communicate the importance of nature, but I had to learn how to make messages diverse, acceptable to various demographics at once, to speak truth in ways that would inform as many as possible, and offend as few as possible at the same time. I also found an entirely new, complex, and intricately interwoven ecosystem to connect with, and found, as my understanding deepened, just how vast and far-reaching those connections were. I began to speak about all nature as one, and my concern for the state of the world grew, and then two things happened: I became a father, and the world ground to a halt.

Being a new father in the midst of the Covid pandemic was a beautiful nightmare. I had time for my daughter and we could immerse ourselves in nature but at the same time there was no certainty that things would ever be the same again. The future looked bleak, and I had a tiny life to protect, and I felt more responsibility to make the world a better place than ever before. Tourism collapsed as the pandemic continued, and I became a full-time gardener at a luxury resort to secure some semblance of normalcy.

Through this combination of time, social distance, and hands-on access to the rainforest I started photographing tiny creatures on LEGO as a way to document them at a recognizable scale. Every chance I had I was building bigger, more elaborate sets for smaller, more incredible creatures. By the time Katy Perry came to stay at the resort I may have had 40 photos at best, but they were something of a guilty pleasure. I was embarrassed to be an adult photographing children’s toys, but I was proud to have made some incredibly unique art, and although I didn’t know what to do with the photos I also didn’t hesitate to show them to Katy when we found ourselves talking about our shared love of LEGO, and how we keep our similarly-aged daughters safe around it. Katy urged me to get on social media, as my photos were “the coolest thing she’d ever seen” and she wanted to follow me as I made more. I wasn’t going to refuse an offer like that from the princess of pop, so I made an instagram account that night, and when she found out the next day she became my 20^th follower. When she left the resort she came to find me in a garden, and told me to do something with my art because “there’s more to life than digging holes”.

Gone Buggo has become an outlet for all of my interests: nature, wildlife, photography, creativity, pop culture, learning, teaching. On the surface it is a playful love letter to the smaller forms of life which I now understand make our world what it is, but it’s driven by science and conservation. My cute, colourful images inform and enable deep discussions about ecology, biodiversity, and the current anthropogenic extinction crisis we find ourselves within, while optimistically encouraging others to care enough about the unloved and unseen critters that are very rapidly disappearing from our world. It has been a heavy burden to bear, financially and otherwise, building a social media platform which has no exact parallels, no pre-existing foundations to lean on, and it has proven both overwhelming and empowering to speak for the voiceless, to work towards a cultural shift that is both absolutely imperative and deeply resisted, and to forge a new path for what I am certain is best for all life.

When it works well it gives me hope for the future, and when it fails it leaves me broken, but there’s no walking away now. I’m going to make this world a better place or die trying.