Habits
Sandra’s been a Bondi Beach local since 2000 and has seen huge changes in that time. The ocean’s been a constant, and the longer she’s lived here the more it’s part of her psyche.
I really get the connection to country and place thing. I think it’s really important whether your culture is attuned to this or not. And strangely Bondi has such a transient population, but the ocean is so compelling, it’s always there.
The idea of creating Happy Fish was born when Sandra put her foot in it at a local screening of a distressing fishing doco The End of the Line. While Sandra bemoaned Council’s environmental inaction, unbeknown to her a Waverley Councillor present challenged her to walk the talk. She’s since learnt to appreciate just how impressive Waverley Council’s environment department is.
“When I fell into Happy Fish, I stumbled through one carelessly open door after another. I was drawn in and blown away by the support from diverse stakeholder groups for what we were proposing. In a lot of ways it makes no sense to me whatsoever, it’s not a logical career move.”
Sandra draws on her background in architecture not as the built artefact and architectural form, but as the critical thinking and lateral problem-solving, coordinating multidisciplinary teams to tackle complex challenges that Happy Fish poses.
“A lot of mistakes created CLARITY, several false starts thankfully never got fins. I do not regret being here, but I am not sure I’d have embarked on this road if I’d known just how complex it would be… It’s ambitious, and I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that what we’re attempting has not really been done before anywhere.”
What keeps her coming back to Happy Fish isn’t just the mission, it’s the people.
“There’s a rare energy here, something consistent and genuine, and I’ve not experienced this before.”
She believes creating the right conditions for people is the foundation for creating the right conditions for everything else.
“It’s the human side—the conversations, the collaboration, the shared momentum—that gives me real satisfaction and creates our base.”
What really excites Sandra is where Happy Fish can develop to serve a regenerative dream of Rewilding the Oceans. For instance using the seafood assessments as the foundation for projects that leave each patch in a better place than it was found; unprecedented levels of connection and agency for everyone from the ocean-to-plate; working with fisheries and local communities to actively promote conditions for ocean regeneration; seafood consumers with the ability to connect to the fisher-farmers, and an ability to police the system to maintain verifiable sustainability, provenance and freshness.
For Sandra, Regenerative is the new era of Sustainability. Sustainability is the status quo, conservation, keeping things as they are. Regenerative is about creating the conditions for something to thrive and regenerate.
“Rather than try to control mother nature, if we allow it to do its thing, we can expect surprising results and hopefully amazing ones.”
