Peter Gee's launch of Simon Grove's
'The Seashells of Tasmanian: a Comprehensive Guide'

Fullers Bookshop, Hobart — March 2011

ABC personality, Peter Gee launched Simon Grove’s ‘The Seashells of Tasmania: A Comprehensive Guide’ at Fullers Bookshop in Hobart on Sunday 1st March 2011.

‘The only reason I’m here’ said Gee ‘is that I have an interest most people in this room would share, and that’s an interest in the seashell. Every single person I’ve mentioned this book to has said, what a fantastic idea! I don’t think they see the commercial potential in it, they see the gap in the market that Simon has filled so very ably. At some stage in their lives, most people have been entranced by the seashell. I think in my case - and for a lot of you - it stems back to one of the first visits to the sea when our father or our mother has picked up a shell from the beach and said, put that to your ear and see what you think you can hear ; and got a big kick out of the wild child-like amazement when this little person says ‘I can hear the sea’.

‘Take it home with you and see whether you can still hear it when you get home’, and of course you still can.

‘Up until now,’ Gee continued, ‘my scientific and academic knowledge of seashells has almost been entirely informed by a Monty Python sketch. I don’t know how many of you here would remember it but it’s the one where John Cleese knocks on the door of this bizarre couple - who are dressed as ballroom dancers for some reason - and asks them if they’re interested in a documentary on molluscs. They weren’t that interested until he told them it was for free. So, oh yes come in come in, (there was nothing else on the tellie); so he brings in a cardboard cutout television and sits it down and comes and stands behind it and starts rabbiting on about gastropods and the like…. The couple soon get ery bored with this and are just about to turn him off when he changes topic to the sex life of the gastropod, and from then on they just sit enraptured for the rest of the programme, shaking hands with him as he leaves and thanking him for a very wonderful programme.

‘Now Simon doesn’t have to resort to the sex life of shells, but it’s not a subject he shies away from. Some of these beautiful photographs in here will show you – a whelk, I think it is - guarding its offspring. Again, I didn’t know that was what they were, we’ve all seen those on the beach, you’ll have to look at the book, with parental guidance, a little later on….

Peter Gee ended by acknowledging Simon’s dream of bringing the writing of a book about the seashells of Tasmania to fruition, ‘a testament to the love and the work and the knowledge spanning a number of years that has gone into this particular publication. It’s a great pleasure for me to recommend it one hundred percent whole-heartedly, there’s not a shack in Tasmania that should not have this book….’

Simon responded with a show and tell, ‘or since I’ve had a glass of champagne, it might be a toe and shell’.

‘Peter has alluded to the fact that it’s been a number of years in the making, yesterday I rummaged through my memorabilia box and decided it’s been about thirty-five years in the making.

‘It all began when my grannie gave me a little bag of shells from Polynesia in my stocking one Christmas. I’ve still got one of the shells from the stocking today, it’s not that special but it set me off. By the time I was eight I was already hooked on shells, by the time I was nine I was taking my first step to publishing a book on shells. Here it is ‘Sea shells’ – very imaginative title - this is from a primary school project. But I’m really quite embarrassed, in fact I’m mortified because I made a one of publisher’s major boo-boos when publishing a book on shells, I got the pictures the wrong way round. Shells are meant to coil right, you know. See what that one’s doing?

‘Maybe somebody transposed the transparency Simon….’
‘Maybe it was just a rare freak.’

Whatever it was, it was a cardinal sin to a conchologist,’ Simon responded.

‘That was volume one, and here it is. Volumes two, three, four and five followed quickly after. Two and four are out of print….’

‘About the same time, I did actually get my first proper shell book, which is this one here. And I was a pedant even in those days, because the first thing I did was look through it to find the errors in it. Here’s one with the shells the wrong way round; and I was affronted enough to write to the author, and I’ve still got his reply, dated 17th January 1975, he was very humble, he said I’m sure your parents meant well anyway when they gave you the book.

‘Something else in this book, it didn’t have the umbilicated cowry. This is an umbilicated cowry, it’s one of Tasmania’s very special shells. It’s mainly a deepwater species, there’s mainly one or two places you can find them. It’s a very special cowry. Funnily enough, it was one of the last species I tried to illustrate in my series of books – volume five - on the last page; a line drawing, no name on it or anything. I think that’s one of the reasons why this book has come about because it’s got the umbliciated cowry in and it’s comprehensive at last….

‘The reason I’ve got this pack of bluetac here that I’m showing you is that from the ages of nine to eleven I used in my school holidays to work at the local museum. I helped another volunteer who whenever we displayed the shells with bits of bluetac would always call it bluegum. I credit that with coming full circle because I now live in a suburb that’s named after a seashell – Taroona – and I can look out the front window and look at beautiful bluegums.

‘Another of my memorabilia is this cutting from the local newspaper which shows me at the age of nine with my shell nusuem. It says “Open to the public, all you have to do is knock at the door and come and have a look”. Only reason I’m showing this is that I still have these shells today.

‘They used to pay me in shells at the museum. They were never going to pay me in real money, but cowry’s for a long time in many cultures were used as money and they paid me in cowrys, and other shells. Amongst these were Tasmanian species, here’s one of those called The Painted Lady, it’s one of the ones I really coveted and it’s great to be able to have owned one at that age; and again, it set my mind thinking about all those wonderful places out there where you get those wonderful shells.

‘Going into fast forward now, and I did study marine biology at uni. But I also studied conservation biology, and it’s really the conservation biology that’s taken over my professional life. I’ve worked largely in the terrestrial field and that’s really what’s ended up taking me firstly to the tropics to work in forest conservation and forestry. In those months leading up to arriving in Australia for the first time, I kept having this recurrent dream. It was a beautiful dream, it was like I was flying over the north tip of Australia, over a beautiful sandy beach. For those who’ve seen the ‘Where the bloody hell are you’ ad, it was just like that - except it wasn’t Lara Bingle I saw on the beach, it was some beautiful tropical shells : this is the place I wanted to be.

‘Three years in the tropics and then I came to Tasmania to take up in what in many ways is a dream job as a conservation biologist. I managed to maintain my interest in shells but when I tried to identify Tasmanian shells I was finding on the beach, I was stumped because there were Margaret Richmond’s books - which were great, they dated up to the 1980s, fantastic books - and a 1921 publication by W.L. May … which was a fantastic book in its time, but if you try to identify species from these little line drawings….

‘I persevered and didn’t do too badly, but soon felt it needed updating. The first thing some of us did in conjunction with the Queen Victoria Museum five or six years ago was produce A Systematic List of the marine molluscs of Tasmania. That still wasn’t quite doing it for me so next I embarked on a website, A guide to the seashells and other marine molluscs of Tasmania, as comprehensive as I could get it but that still wasn’t quite doing it, people were asking ‘What about the book?’ What you can see here is the culmination about thinking of shells, thinking about what should and shouldn’t be in a book, and I hope it meets with your satisfaction…. ‘