The wildlife whisperer

Nush Freedman has spent her life exploring what lies beneath the ocean's surface. And now, with a new season of Shipwreck Hunters Australia, she's hoping to shine a light on the threats facing Ningaloo Reef and the creatures who live there.

- WORDS by TIFFANY DUNK

Nush Freedman has spent her life exploring what lies beneath the ocean's surface. And now, with a new season of Shipwreck Hunters Australia, she's hoping to shine a light on the threats facing Ningaloo Reef and the creatures who live there. ush Freedman was three months old when she first visited Ningaloo Reef. Growing up in Perth, her family would regularly holiday there, drawn back time and again by the beauty of the World Heritage-listed site.

“My parents always said they could never keep me out of the water,” the underwater cinematographer and passionate conservationist tells The Weekly from her home in the region today. “Apparently, when I was three years old, I marched down to the beach and wouldn’t have a bar of the floaties anymore. I’ve always had a passion and obsession for the ocean.”

Learning to dive at 14, she knew she’d found her calling during her first pool lesson. “I remember sitting down there and breathing underwater and I couldn’t believe it. You’re down there and it’s really silent. I could have just sat down there for hours.”

After finishing school, she quit Perth for Ningaloo, where she worked first as a tour guide and then as an underwater photographer working on whale shark boats. But it was meeting fellow diver and camera operator Andre Rerekura in 2018 that she says “opened her eyes” to the possibilities that lay ahead in combining her love of capturing the ocean’s wildlife and diving to see it.