Our Ocean- Our Responsibility Geri's Campaign

My name is Gergo Rugli, I’m from Hungary and I’ve been living in Sydney for the last five years and for the last 4 years I have been calling Bronte my home.

My main passion is ocean photography so as you can imagine I spend most of my free time in or near the ocean, mostly alongside the Bondi to Coogee walk.

Bronte Beach and Tamarama Beach are my favourite locations and I walk there every day. These two beaches are the heart of the walk which attracts thousands of locals and tourists to visit every day. According to official data from Waverley Council, the walk brings 8000 tourists a day which is almost 3 million people a year!

Since I started following Plastic Free Bronte my eyes just kept opening and I started noticing more and more alarming signs of plastic pollution everywhere. Before joining the group I was naively convinced, that surely no one must be using a plastic straw anymore! Now with my newly gained perspective, during short runs alongside the two beaches on weekends, I can count at least around 10 people walking with a plastic cup, plastic lid and plastic straw which quite often end up being littered around the beach.

This made me think. Why didn’t I notice this before? The load of rubbish everywhere along the walk and on the beach? The answer is that, like for many of the millions of people who walk alongside the beach every day, my focus just simply wasn’t there. I was walking around mesmerised by the beauty of nature just like they are, so I didn’t see it.

Although there are thousands of deeply caring ocean lovers who work tirelessly to clean up the mess, it feels like a never-ending nightmare, picking up bags of rubbish daily, doing clean-ups and the following day it’s just like nothing has happened. It is like bucketing water from a sinking boat.

I often wonder why people don’t care about the pollution. Are they bad people? Maybe they aren’t bad people, they just grew immune to it all and don’t see it. Like Neo in the movie Matrix they are living in a dream world, not seeing what is the reality until someone wakes them up.

It would be great to somehow help them to wake them up & see.

I realise that nowadays it is very hard to influence someone and ask them to educate themselves. Everyone is rushing somewhere & no one has time to read and learn.

In our Instagram and Facebook addicted society, everybody is drawn to pictures because the human eye is attracted to the colours and content more than to a lengthy article or a paragraph. So I decided to use pictures as the tool used for capturing the attention & educating instead.

After taking hundreds of photos of rubbish along the Bondi to Bronte walks and designing the posters, we are now collaborating with local businesses and land owners who have let us place a few information boards on their property alongside the coastal walk!