Peter Canty

Guest Lecturer

Peter spent his early years on a dairy farm.  Growing up in the country helped feed his youthful curiosity and desire for adventure by spending time immersed in nature.  This led him to a career with the South Australian National Parks and Wildlife Service where he worked in a team dedicated to wildlife research and biological surveys.  His interests included working on reptiles and endangered marsupials but he increasingly developed a passion for botany.  He retired 43 years later culminating in his last decade managing the State Herbarium of South Australia.

Peter also showed some talent for drawing and painting as a child, but his career gave him access to cameras, and photography became his new creative outlet.  Not only did he master technical photography for his work, with his photos of plants and animals appearing in many publications, he also used his camera to be creative, with a particular interest in abstract images.  These have also appeared in exhibitions and been published in a variety of media.

Being out in the natural world not only fed Peter’s scientific and artistic curiosity, it also fed his need for exploration and adventure.  Once he could afford it, he headed out into the wider world with a rucksack and cameras, visiting most of Australia’s wildest landscapes including South West Tasmania and the Kimberley but also going beyond to places like the Alaskan and Canadian arctic, the deserts of the western United States and Chile, the Amazon basin, Patagonia and even Antarctica.

Since retirement, Peter has been asked to repeat vegetation surveys he undertook in the 1990s in the Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara Lands, an area of around 10% of South Australia in the State’s north-west, encompassing the northern Great Victoria Desert and the State’s highest mountains. Managed by Traditional Owners and indigenous rangers, Peter is helping collect new data to assist in land management and to train the rangers, and to share and document traditional and western ecological knowledge with a new cohort of Traditional Owners.

He was also invited to become a Guest Lecturer in 2022 by Coral, initially in recognition of his involvement in pioneering biological surveys of South Australia’s offshore islands, many of which are visited as part of Coral’s southern Australian cruises.

Peter now lives on a bush block in the Adelaide Hills in an underground house, reflecting his care for the environment and the need to work with nature rather than against it.