Jack Ashby

They broke the rules.

They're rebels.

So when was it you first caught sight of a real life platypus in the wild, Jack?

It was on the 23rd of December, 2005.

And I was in Tasmania and we'd been, I was there like, I don't know if I'm alone in this, but I think, I hope a lot of kind of naturalists or nature loving people have these kind of

i won't i will use the word bucket list but i think that may be dismissive a bit more but like there are species you want to see and platypuses since that that undergraduate class had been at the top of my list of i must see the species and um as soon as i got a job that was the target you know raise save enough money to to fly to tasmania and see some platypuses and we'd been there about a week or so and we'd been doing the overland track which is

kind of a six day, five, six day walk across central Tasmania in the middle of summer.

And every night we'd go down to the lakes and rivers that we were camping by to look for platypuses.

But unfortunately it was beautiful weather and the overland track is beautiful.

So many people were on it and they were all swimming.

So we didn't have a chance.

But on the very last night, which was Lake St.

Clair, which is Australia's deepest lake, we'd come out of the snow.

And so it's summer in Tasmania.

I'm sure many people know that it can swing from T-shirt weather to snow.

We came out of the snow down through the rainforest and it became really heavy rainforest rain.

We thought, no one's going to be swimming tonight.

So we went down to the lake and we sat there.

And then...

Actually, my friend Toby Nolan and I had kind of got this scheme of you'd wait for someone to see a platypus and then you'd wait for it to dive and then you'd catch the attention of the other person.