Mr BAYLEY (Clark) – Honourable Speaker, I rise tonight to talk about the good ship Heart. Heart is the central character in Project Interrupt. She is a ship made completely out of plastic. Not just any plastic, Heart was made over two years from marine debris recovered from Tasmania’s coastline: pipes, ropes, buoys, bags, mesh, foam and more.
Heart is the inspiration of adventurer and activist, Samuel McLennan, a project established to highlight the scourge of plastic marine debris. Specifically, Heart is made from debris lost from Lutruwita/Tasmania’s aquaculture and fishing industry. Their journey from Hobart to Sydney is part of a campaign to raise awareness about the volume and impact of marine debris and how we need to take more action to tackle it.
Sam built Heart over two years in a friend’s shed on the Tasman Peninsula. She was choppered from construction site to launch site and hit the water floating. In a media report from the time, Sam said:
The community has really gotten behind this project. It’s incredible. Through this whole 15 months I’ve been talking with a lot of schools and organisations and individuals. It’s been really beautiful to see so many people of so many different ages standing up and talking about how important it is to have a sustainable environment. It has really shown me how many people really do care and that has been special. We have to keep fighting.
I first engaged with Heart on the day she left Hobart. Racing out of Parliament House on 19 April I had hoped to catch Sam, have a chat about the project and wish him well on the journey north but, sadly, I missed the boat – literally. By the time I got to the waterfront there was Heart already chugging down the river. After some wrangling with MAST to get certified and authorised to sail, Sam was permitted to head north as far as Saint Helens to prove up the seaworthiness of Heart and then tackle the notorious Banks Straight and eventually on across Bass Strait.
He is stopping in towns along the way, engaging with schools, local environment groups and community members to start a conversation about marine debris and call for more action. I followed Sam up, and took the opportunity to connect him with Aboriginal rangers working on truwana, Cape Barren Island, and Heart successfully crossed Banks Strait and tied up at the township off the corner on Cape Barren a few weeks ago. ‘Saving the seas in a rubbish boat,’ wrote palawa journalist and photographer, Jillian Mundy, from the Koori Mail, who met him there and wrote a piece for the paper. Selfishly, a stopover on truwana gave me a second chance to catch up with Sam and lend him some support.
I was heading there a couple of weeks ago and teed up a berth to sail from Cape Barren to Flinders to get a sense of the seaworthiness and sacrifice Sam was making in the name of awareness raising. Sadly, foiled again, Sam headed‑off the day I landed, getting ahead of the storm fronts that lashed the state over recent weeks. A few days later, I finally caught up with him at Lady Barron on Flinders Island. As Sam flagged in his comments, community support for this initiative has flowed, and he has had the backup of of a support vessel since Hobart. Since St Helens, he has had two and they were there, bobbing away in the island storms and swell of the Lady Barron Wharf.
It is difficult to anticipate what to expect when you are visiting a 29-foot plastic‑pipe vessel. More contraption than craft, Heart is a blancmange of materials cut, drilled, fitted and tied together with rope. There is sleeping space for two and not much more, but Sam has spent every night aboard, cooks aboard, and has come to do without the comforts the rest of us take for granted.
He is still on Flinders, waiting for a weather window to start the crossing to Victoria. First, it is up the Flinders coast, onto the Sisters, over to Deal Island, then across to Wilsons Prom in Victoria, before hopping his way around the coast and north to Sydney. This is a well-paddled route, especially by kayakers, but a significant voyage not without risk. The reward is the chance to highlight marine debris as one of the environmental challenges the oceans and our coastlines face from industrial fish farming. One conversation at a time, he is not just pointing the finger at aquaculture, we all need to take responsibility for waste.
All drains lead to the sea and Sam’s journey highlights the individual and collective action needed to tackle waste and marine debris. Congratulations to Sam and your team. I acknowledge all your sponsors that have helped you on the water. I encourage anyone listening to check out Project Interrupt. It has a website, an Instagram page, and a Facebook page.
I thank Sam for his action and for having me aboard Heart. To finish, I will read into Hansard, Heart and Sam’s goals. They read:
Goals on the ground (and in the ocean)
To prevent waste from entering the environment and remove the waste that is already there. To develop strong leaders who are committed to creating people and environments that increase health and abundance.
Congratulations and thanks for your action, bon voyage on the way north, thank you.
