Madison Stewart
DON’T CALL Madison Stewart a conservationist or an environmentalist. In fact, don’t try to pigeonhole this committed and courageous young woman at all. She sees herself simply as an individual taking action in defence of something she loves that’s in desperate need of protection.
The subject of Madison’s activism is guaranteed to strike fear in the hearts of many, and addressing a whole gamut of misconceptions around sharks, the ocean’s top predators, is on her agenda.
Despite her youth, the 24-year-old is an undersea veteran. She grew up sailing around the Great Barrier Reef on her parents’ yacht and spent her early life snorkelling and freediving while patiently ticking off the years to the day when she could gain her scuba diving certification, aged 12. Already fascinated by sharks, Madison was now able to observe them in their own domain. “I got to know the sharks… I could recognise them by sight and
I got to know their personalities,” Madison says.“Other people had dogs around them growing up. I had sharks.”
But within a couple of years, she saw a dramatic decline in shark numbers on the reef. “One day I went in the water and couldn’t find my sharks anywhere, sharks I’d spent my childhood with,” she recalls. “They’d been caught and killed in a legal shark fishery.” It was a watershed moment for Madison.
She left school at 14 to be homeschooled so she could spend more time in the ocean. She taught herself to shoot underwater video to document sharks in their own world and share her sense of wonder, and outrage, with others. She launched a YouTube channel and built a significant following for her documentaries where she targets issues like inadequate protection for vulnerable shark species, the global shark fin industry and the cruelty and futility of some shark attack mitigation strategies.
In 2014 Madison was the subject of the inspirational documentary Shark Girl, which introduced her to a global audience. In 2017 she appears as an “Ocean Guardian”, alongside the likes of ocean advocate Valerie Taylor, in the new cinematic documentary release Blue that explores a range of threats to the world’s marine environments, including the unsustainability of the global shark fishery.The catastrophic scale of the ocean’s environmental problems depicted in Blue makes for sobering viewing. But ultimately the film exhorts viewers to get involved and includes practical steps to empower them to do so. It closely echoes Madison’s philosophy that the power of the individual to make a difference by their own direct action should never be underestimated.