Sunday was the third time that I organised Clean-up Lake Burley Griffin Day. I started this event in 2018 with a lot of help from regular users of the lake in our hometown of Canberra, Australia. However, not everyone knows why I started it.

That year, I left my job as CEO at RSPCA ACT. And rather than moving right into another job, I decided to take some time off and travel for a while. It turned into a four month sabbatical that took me around the world from Honolulu to S. America to the US and Finland and then Singapore before heading back to Australia for a few domestic trips.

All along the way, I always found ways to paddle – kayaks, white water rafts, stand ups, surfskis – basically anything that could give me a local experience on the water and a little exercise. And just about everywhere I went, I saw rubbish.

It was during this trip that National Geographic published the iconic front cover below and talked about the issues of plastic in the ocean. I bought the issue at one of the airports. Then, I saw it everywhere first hand in just about every body of water. Needless to say, the article hit me hard.

When I finally returned to Canberra, I had such a sense of duty to do something about this problem. So, after some research I decided that cleaning up Lake Burley Griffin made the most sense as I paddled in it every week. What I had started as an one-off clean and an educational message has now just completed our third year over the weekend.

Will Clean-up Lake Burley Griffin Day have a fourth year? I hope so. I just need a lot more support with the event planning side of it as the mission is still important, but I’m so time poor these days. So, we’ll have to see.

One day, I hope that we don’t need to do clean-ups. In the meantime, I want to send a shout out to everyone who has made this event a reality each year. After all, it truly does take a community to clean-up a lake as big as Lake Burley Griffin.