Extraordinary life beneath the waves

Southern Peninsula-based underwater photographer Jules Casey is winning friends for the sea one image at a time. She is on a mission to show the extraordinary beauty of life beneath the waves and secure wide public support for protecting Port Phillip and its beautiful creatures. Her photos and videos have lit up Instagram and won photo competitions around the world.

Jules has more than 130,000 followers on Insta and posts several times a week. After six years of diving and three years of photography, Jules has a bank of amazing images and stories. “I hope to increase awareness and show people how the underwater world needs protection,” she said.

Her work reveals a stunning, alien world on the doorstep of Melbourne with its five million people. Her winning images include:

• A female pale octopus in a discarded plastic pipe off Rye surrounded by her eggs. A shot from this series, Circle of Life, which took weeks of patient diving, won Best of Show at a 2022 Asia Dive Expo competition.

• In mid-April Jules won a category at this year’s show for a bobtailed squid, which she named Dumpling.

• Seahorse Bus, an extraordinary photo of six baby shorthead seahorses ‘riding’ a piece of seagrass under Blairgowrie marina. This won the novice macro category at a big US competition, and Jules was awarded the Rising Star Photographer title.

• Rare footage of a female seahorse transferring her eggs into a male’s pouch, which visibly swells as the action unfolds. He will eventually give birth to their babies.

• The first video she entered in a major competition finished in the top five. It’s a compilation of colourful fish, octopuses, stingrays, sharks and cuttlefish swimming freely but also two stingrays and a spider crab entangled in fishing hooks and lines.

• Images of rubbish and pollution – and rescues, including Jules retrieving a baseball cap from an 11-armed sea star.

“I show the good and the not-so-good, the entanglements and rescues,” she said. “I want people to experience what I see and do. My little videos have attracted a lot of attention. I receive messages of thanks from grandparents who show their grandchildren sea creatures. Teachers show my films to their classes.”

Jules held a high-profile job in the gaming industry for 17 years and then decided on a seachange – she got into the sea. It all started during a holiday in 2016 when she went swimming with the majestic and benign whale sharks of Ningaloo Reef in WA. She learnt to freedive, bought a GoPro to document marine life under the piers of the Peninsula, and later bought a second-hand underwater camera, learning how to use it “on the job”.

“The first prize I won was a live-aboard trip to the Solomon Islands worth $6000. It cost me an extra $10,000 to use the prize but it was an amazing adventure.” This was the Seahorse Bus photo, taken with her first underwater camera, which cost $200.

Port Phillip is home to the big-bellied seahorse and shorthead seahorse, and Victoria’s colourful marine emblem, the weedy seadragon, lives in both bays. “This is the seadragon much admired by world renowned naturalist David Attenborough,” she said. Sir David’s admiration for weedy – “the most wonderful creature” – led him to publicly back the Flinders community’s successful overturning of Parks Victoria’s plans to demolish the old wooden pier at Flinders in 2022. Weedy is a threatened species and its habitat includes the pier.

Jules didn’t study photography but learnt in the water and thinks of herself as an artist more than a photographer. With the cooler weather, she won’t be reducing her diving missions – it will be on with a new wetsuit and into the water. But she is looking forward to a trip to the Maldives soon and after that a visit to Port Lincoln in South Australia to dive with sharks and cuttlefish as a guest of the Rodney Fox Shark Expedition. Fox is one of the world’s most famous great white shark attack survivors who, rather than hating white sharks, became one of their most prominent protectors.

Readers can follow Jules on Instagram at #OneBreathDiver