Diving with Mick Baron and Karen Gowlett-Holmes: Guardians of Tasmania’s Marine Life

PT Hirschfield chats to business partners Karen Gowlett-Holmes and Mick Baron, who reflect on their extensive ocean careers and their advocacy for Tasmania’s fragile marine environments

Many who’ve explored Tasmania’s temperate waters will be familiar with the work of acclaimed marine zoologist Karen Gowlett-Holmes and her business partner Mick Baron. They’re co-owners of Eaglehawk Dive Centre, committed to helping local, interstate and overseas divers explore the wonders of their local waters.

Guardians of Tasmania’s Temperate Waters

Mick and Karen are also the focus of ‘Reviving Giants’, a short 2024 film about the courageous quest to save Tassie’s precious and precarious giant kelp forests. Recently, they’ve begun offering a popular, PADI-ratified Giant Forest Restoration Diver course.

Mick Baron – A Lifetime Beneath Tasmanian Seas

Skipper Mick Baron is as iconic as the Candlestick rock formation looming high overhead the surface of the water his dive customers are swimming beneath. Mick was born in 1954 and has been diving around Tassie for the past 50 years. He was in the water most days from age ten, swimming and spearing. Within a few years he’d ‘matured away from killing stuff and bought a little box camera’.

Mick was gifted a scuba tank in the early 1970s: ‘So off I go on my own, just plugging away in the shallows, taking pictures’. He completed his FAUI C-Card course, enabling him to get a tank fill in Hobart where he’d moved for university. After his mate bought a boat, ‘we were out diving every weekend’.

Mick eventually got a job as a Fisheries Observer, at sea for weeks at a time on factory trawlers, Japanese and Taiwanese fishing boats, collecting data on species caught.

But his passion since the late-1980s was taking underwater footage of marine life: ‘You get your camera, twin set of gear, a drysuit and dive to 40m. The colours and life here in Tassie are incredible’. He’s also dived in Norway, British Columbia, Canada, Chuuk, Shetland Islands, Ireland, Argentina, Palau, Solomon Islands, Antarctica and Scapa Flow, Scotland, where he enjoyed solo diving on battleship wrecks.

As well as delivering divers to explore some of Australia’s most exceptional temperate dive sites, he’s an advocate for the reclamation of the state’s majestic kelp forests.

Witnessing the Collapse of Tasmania’s Kelp Forests

Mick laments how much has been lost within his own lifetime. Between December 2015 and March 2016, giant kelp forests were reduced from a lush underwater paradise to a virtual wasteland. ‘We used to have thousands of acres of kelp up and down the coast, so thick at the surface you couldn’t drive a boat through it. It was a natural nursery for all the animals. Not just bigger fish, but all the little stuff they eat. I’ve seen it disappear.’

Mick Baron and Karen Gowlett-Holmes place this loss squarely on the shoulders of climate change, requiring urgent human intervention. Under the banner of Eaglehawk Dive Centre, they’ve collaborated with Tasmania’s Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies (IMAS) to develop and deliver methods of kelp restoration in Fortescue Bay.

Mick co-launched a dive business in 1991. He first met Karen the following year, when he was working on a Japanese boat and she was on a Norwegian boat as Collections Manager of Invertebrates at the South Australian Museum. Their work paths crossed again at a pub in Port Lincoln. Karen came to live at Eaglehawk, and by 2007, she and Mick had become full business partners at Eaglehawk Dive Centre.

Karen Gowlett-Holmes – Scientist, Diver, Educator

Marine educator Karen Gowlett-Holmes was inducted into the Women Divers Hall of Fame in 2021. She’s globally renowned as an authority on benthic marine invertebrates, having had hundreds of them officially described, with more than a dozen species named after her.

Karen was recognised as a ‘Master of Photography’ within the Australian Institute of Professional Photographers for her pioneering underwater imagery. She began her dive career in 1976, commencing as a Divemaster and commercial diver in the then very much male-dominated industry. She’d always had a keen interest in the ocean: ‘I started fishing with my father when I was two. Shells and invertebrates in rock pools fascinated me more than what fish did’.

Building Knowledge Beneath the Surface

Diving from age 15, Karen studied marine zoology, botany and geology at the University of Adelaide: ‘We had lecturers who didn’t want women to do field work. When I graduated, it was difficult for women to get employment. I did a lot of contract work, including volunteer work for the Fisheries department’.

Later, she worked with CSIRO Marine and Atmospheric Research. In the early 1990s, she spent three-and-a-half months in Antarctica doing biodiversity survey work on the mainland. To date, she’s published over 40 scientific papers, books, chapters and popular articles.

Karen’s book ‘A Field Guide to the Marine Invertebrates of South Australia’ was published in 2008. She’s currently working on a similar volume for Tasmania and Victoria. She reflects: ‘Going to university teaches you methods of how to observe, how to collate and how to study. But there are a lot of very gifted amateurs who work in taxonomy. When people are passionate about things, they can become experts in a field without having to go down the university track’.

Much of Karen’s early work was within the framework of Fisheries: ‘’How do marine communities work and interact with each other and with Fisheries? What’s the importance of species that create structures on the bottom and how fish interact with them?’

‘That’s important to finding and conserving fish and other commercial species, so you can continue to fish and take things out without having an impact on what can occur in the future’.

Why Marine Parks Matter More Than Ever

Karen believes it’s possible to have sustainable fisheries, with marine parks playing a vital role:

‘The big advantage of well-planned marine parks is that species can breed sufficient numbers to then be able to spill over outside that area’.

‘Marine parks provide for species to have refuge, sensible regulations and pockets of resilience where species can recover. Otherwise, they can become extinct. Here in the southern environment, we’ve put names on barely 30% of the species here, so we’ve got things going extinct before we even know they exist.

‘If you have an ecosystem that’s healthy and balanced, it’s far more able to sustain itself, and has a far better chance of surviving when challenged with climate change and other factors’.

You can explore Tasmania’s lush underwater world and sign up for the Giant Kelp Forest Restoration Diver course with Eaglehawk Dive Centre: eaglehawkdive.com.au

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