Sportdiving Magazine

Discover the pioneering days of spearfishing and scuba diving, read about the sports early spearmen and women and the founding fathers of scuba diving in Australia. This book takes you month by month from 1917 to 1997, through the good and bad times, the discoveries, the tragedies, the undersea explorations, as well as instructor organizations, diving achievers, and a number of important events which together comprise the history of underwater diving in Australia. Within the pages of this book is a large section dealing with the Chronicle of Sport Diving, events reported as though they had recently happened, recapturing all the important occurrences that took place during 80 years since Alex Wickham first speared fish in Sydney Harbour. Special features include newspaper reports of early spearfishing, the establishment of the first spearfishing association in 1948 and the appearance of the first home-made scuba regulator. There are thrilling and sometimes tragic stories of shark attacks. A woman skin diver was lost at sea for nearly three days and nights, and survived. There is the story of Australias first and so far only world champion spearfisherman and that of two scuba divers who swam with a white pointer shark for half an hour in open water, yet were not attacked by the beast, the devastating deaths of four scuba divers in a sinkhole at Mt. Gambier, the rapid advance of underwater technology in Australia and much more. This is the only book of its kind dealing with the history of spearfishing and scuba diving in this country. For some, it will bring back old memories, for others a readable and authoritative history of spearfishing and scuba diving in Australia. For every diver, man or woman, it cannot fail to stir emotions as it recaptures exciting and historical events. At the end of the Second World War, a Frenchman, Michel Calluaud brought plans of the Gagnan-Cousteau regulator to Australia and he built one of the first in the world here. Australians could then use this equipment for work and pleasure and it has furthered their knowledge of life in the sea. As we push beyond the boundary of seashores and venture further under water we begin to discover many things that were once beyond our grasp and it is the aqualung that has enabled us to journey beyond the confinements of land. THE HISTORY OF SPEARFISHING AND SCUBA DIVING IN AUSTRALIA not only deals with the scuba diving, but also, as the title suggests, with a wealth of information concerning spearfishing and related underwater activities.

Over the last decade, the study of shark biology has benefited from the development, refinement, and rapid expansion of novel techniques and advances in technology. These have given new insight into the fields of shark genetics, feeding, foraging, bioenergetics, imaging, age and growth, movement, migration, habitat preference, and habitat use. This pioneering book, written by experts in shark biology, examines technologies such as autonomous vehicle tracking, underwater video approaches, molecular genetics techniques, and accelerometry, among many others. Each detailed chapter offers new insights and promises for future studies of elasmobranch biology, provides an overview of appropriate uses of each technique, and can be readily extended to other aquatic fish and marine mammals and reptiles. Including chapter authors who were pioneers in developing some of the technologies discussed in the book, this book serves as the first single-source reference with in-depth coverage of techniques appropriate for the laboratory and field study of sharks, skates, and rays. It concludes with a unique section on Citizen Science and its application to studies of shark biology. This is a must-read for any marine biologist or scientist working in the field of shark biology, as well as marine biology students and graduates.

Author Jeffrey Cox conducts a thorough and compelling investigation of the Java Sea Campaign, the first major sea battle of the Pacific War, which inflicted huge costs on the Allies and set the stage for Japan's rout across the Pacific and Indian oceans. Few events have ever shaken a country in the way that the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor affected the United States. The Japanese forces then continued to overwhelm the Allies, attacking Malaya with its fortress of Singapore, and taking resource-rich islands in the Pacific in their own blitzkrieg offensive. Allied losses in these early months after America's entry into the war were great, and among the most devastating were those suffered during the Java Sea Campaign, where a small group of Americans, British, Dutch, and Australians were isolated in the Far East – directly in the path of the Japanese onslaught. It would be the first major sea battle of World War II in the Pacific.