About me-
Exploring the very small
““The delight one experiences in such times bewilders the mind, — if the eye attempts to follow the flight of a gaudy butter-fly, it is arrested by some strange tree or fruit; if watching an insect one forgets it in the stranger flower it is crawling over, — if turning to admire the splendour of the scenery, the individual character of the foreground fixes the attention. The mind is a chaos of delight out of which a world of future & more quiet pleasure will arise.”
Charles Darwin, 28th February, 1832”
Over my life so far I've been a musician, juggler and archaeologist. A poet, artist and chef. Now I'm a writer and macro-photographer as well as working as a copy editor for FAO, working on scientific reports and publications. It’s an ideal job for a pedantic human like myself who loves soil and soil animals.
Life has been rather interesting so far. And that's a very good thing. My name is Andy Murray. I get hilariously associated with a certain tennis player all the time.
I'm a happy sceptic, a teasing, unbelieving iconoclast. I find the belief in ghosts, Reiki, unicorns and homeopathy equally silly. I occasionally read scientific papers and identification keys for fun. Kneeling in mud is an every day lifestyle choice.
My photos have been featured in many books, including The Fundamentals of Soil Ecology, Daly and Doyen’s Introduction to Insect Biology and Diversity and the Global Soil Biodiversity Atlas as well as numerous magazine articles and exhibitions.
For years, I travelled the world, studying and photographing Collembola, my greatest passion. I've been frozen, boiled, bitten and stung. I've spent nearly every day out taking photographs, from being cold, wet and stinking from lying in alpine bogs, to being wet and sweating in 100% humidity heat carrying 15kg of equipment and three litres of water, miles out into the tropical rainforest. It always seems to involve getting wet, whatever I do.
But after all of it, even with the daily bites from leeches, black flies, midges and mosquitoes and the careful avoidance of scorpions, spiders, snakes, and more leeches, I must say, I've had the time of my life. So far.
(The photo at the top of the page was taken on a walk through a controversial logging coupe in the Blue Tier area of NE Tasmania. )