Hooked, long before the hook.
About Tom
The kid with jars in his bag
Long before I had a hook for a hand, I was hooked on nature. I was born without my right hand, but it never once stopped me turning over logs to see what was living underneath, chasing lizards through the backyard, or catching every bug I could get my hands on. When I later got my prosthetic hook, it didn't start anything new — it just gave the business its name.
I was the kid who turned up to school with jars of huntsman spiders, wood cockroaches, snails, ants, centipedes and frogs, much to my teachers' horror, not to mention the blue-tongue lizard that regularly turned up loose in my backpack. Mum was always too scared to go through my bag.
As I got older, my fascination moved toward the creatures most people find harder to love: red-bellied black snakes, diamond pythons, and for a good while I had a posse of young, free-flying, hand-raised magpies calling my parents' back veranda home. It was never just the animals, either. I've always loved plants. My family still tells stories of me as a kid taking cuttings and popping them in pots, willing them to grow. These days I'm an avid gardener, still trying to build the perfect home for wildlife — or as I'd put it now, habitat.
Central to my ethos is the belief that we are not separate from nature — we are nature. This shapes how I source food for my family: I hunt feral animals ethically and humanely, using the meat to feed my family, the fur and fibre for practical use, and returning anything else to the land — nourishing my garden or supporting wildlife rehabilitation, including sky burials for our local wedge-tailed eagles. Nothing goes to waste.
I'm also conscious that no diet is free of death or environmental cost — even a vegan diet involves land clearing, habitat loss, and animal deaths through cropping and harvest. My aim isn't to claim a bloodless alternative, but to take responsibility for the impact my food has, minimise it where I can, and make sure any death that does occur serves a purpose rather than going to waste.
I don't think I've ever really grown up. I'm still climbing trees, rolling over old logs, and heading into the bush looking for what's actually there. I followed that same obsession into my career as an ecologist, and eventually into Hooked On Nature, because I wanted to share it with as many people as I could.
The mission is simple: get people back into nature, hooked on unlocking the stories in the wildlife, plants and fungi around them.
Because kids do have business touching nature — getting dirty, getting curious, getting close — and grown-ups never stopped needing that either. The more time people spend with the nature already in their garden, their roadside reserve, or their local national park, the better they'll understand it, and the more naturally they'll want to look after it.