RIP Johnny Phillips

Posted on March 18, 2022 by CAMERONDUECK

Today, March 18, marks one year since we lost our dear friend Johnny. He was a big part of my life in Hong Kong, a sort of big brother figure, and every one of the last 365 days has held some reminder, big or small, of his absence. I’ve picked up the phone to call him for advice on how to fix something on my boat, then set the phone back down with an empty feeling. I’ve seen things online and thought,”Johnny would get a kick out of this.” I’ve given a silent toast to him with every rum and coke. Here’s the man we miss:

Johnny Philips was born on August 3, 1948 to Reg and Olive Phillips. His childhood was spent in Birkenhead, England, near Liverpool, where he grew into a renaissance man. Johnny could build boats, and sail them well enough to win national championships. He was a second dan black belt in taekwando, and wasn’t afraid to use it. We’re told he could play the drums and guitar, although not many of us ever heard him do so. He could grow vegetables, and cook a square meal. He always had an eye for the ladies, and a joke for the boys. But above all, Johnny was a teacher, a storyteller and a friend to many.

Johnny had a long and storied career in theatre as a set construction manager, including jobs at the Royal National Theatre, the BBC, and the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. He also built stage works for some of the best rock acts of the 1960s and 70s.

Johnny came to Hong Kong in 2004, to teach his craft at the Hong Kong Academy of Performing Arts. He was hugely popular with his students, and he has left a great legacy in the many people he patiently taught how to turn wood, weld various metals, work with fibreglass, and a million little tricks to make the job go more smoothly. I can just hear him now, saying something like, “Just add a squirt of washing up liquid and it will work much better.” Johnny was all-knowing when it came to working with these materials. And his students were a very bright light in his life, he talked about them often. The beautiful urn that holds his remains was hand made by one of his students.

This being Johnny, a man of eclectic talents, he also turned his hand to crafting orthopaedic devices, training working dogs, and skippering a 56 foot ketch up and down the coast of Scotland — that skippering job generated a lot of stories for him.

Sailing, or just messing around in boats, was how many of us in Hong Kong came to know Johnny. The pinnacle of his sailing career was winning the British nationals in an A-class catamaran he built with his own hands. Here in Hong Kong, he was a fixture aboard the racing boat Authority. But Johnny wasn’t just sailing. He was teaching knots and silly tricks, fixing bits before they broke, and telling stories — often the same stories, again and again. And Johnny was enthusiastic in drinking a few rums when the sails came down.

Johnny was also a passionate fisherman, taking his boat Fish’n Chips out to the Nine Pins, the oil rigs, the Sokos, anywhere he thought he could find fish. And he’d find them, and catch them, even when no one else on the boat was getting a bite.

That’s the Johnny we all came to know and love. Talented. Teaching. A ready smile and a twinkle in his bright blue eyes. A magical craftsman working in a myriad of materials. Always a fishing story or sailing tale to tell. Johnny was an incredibly private man, despite his love of conversation. A bit ornery, sometimes downright annoying, but a man who left a legacy bigger than himself.

Johnny Phillips left us early in the morning on March 18, 2021, aged 72 years old. He was predeceased by his parents, and his older sister Jane. Left behind to mourn his passing are his wife Lovilla, and a legion of friends around the globe.

Rest in peace, dear Johnny.

Hong Kong Protests

Posted on September 5, 2019 by CAMERONDUECK

The last three months have been insane. Hong Kong, my home, has been torn asunder as we come to grips with how Beijing interprets and disrespects “one country, two systems”. Many of my friends overseas have asked how this is affecting me — thank you for your concern, and here is my answer.

This crisis, protest, revolution, movement — call it what you will — has overshadowed all else in my life, and the lives of many people I know here. I still wake, eat, work and play much like before, but the situation has shaken my sense of optimism, ambition and trust, and it colours every conversation and interaction I have. This conflict began peacefully, but the lack of leadership skills in the Chinese and Hong Kong government has passed the problem off to an undisciplined, cowardly and morally bankrupt police force and the triads they collude with. This has caused it to become a violent one, and protests are growing more dangerous with each clash.

However, the youth of the protestors, and the economic prosperity of Hong Kong (at least for those at the top), can make our uprising seem less important and dramatic than the Arab Spring or the fight undertaken by those that died in the treads of a tank in the Tiananmen Massacre. But it’s the same — we are confronting leaders who refuse to represent or listen to their people, and they resort to underhanded methods to hold onto power. From my limited experience as a Hong Kong citizen, I can testify that being oppressed sucks!

So we fight back. But how? I unreservedly support the young protestors on the front line. They are so brave, selfless and committed that I have often cried as I stand back at a safe distance and watch them in action. The beauty — and messiness — of this movement is its lack of leadership, and the agreement of all that we will support each other in our different methods of protest. I do not always agree with frontline tactics, but I support them and stand behind them, physically and in spirit.

I’m mad, I want to fight back. I have some “solutions” in mind for our despicable leaders and police force. But I also want peace. Hong Kong is one of the safest cities in the world, and I want it to stay that way. I want the honourable, peaceful side of me to take control of my reaction to this. I want to tap into a relentless, positive spirit, because it’s that kind of a fight, with many chapters yet to come.

I’m a writer, but I have been unable to write coherently about what is happening in Hong Kong. So I have chosen to simply go to protests. I don’t chant, I don’t wave a sign, I don’t often post it on social media. I just lace up my running shoes, bring water, a hat and an umbrella (the symbol of our revolution) — and lately I’ve added a face mask, to further safeguard my future. Then I add one to the number. 1. Just me, and 2 million others. Weekend after weekend.

I have a lot of ideas and questions and angry things to say, but right now it’s enough to say I wear black, and I stand for freedom of speech, a vote, the rule of law and responsible, respectable police. And you, wearing your ridiculous riot gear, a white T-shirt, or big crocodile tears, you don’t put these things first, and therefore you stand in our way. I have an unwavering confidence that we are the righteous, and on the right side of history. So I’ll do what I can, which is take to the streets to say that this city belongs to us, and not to you.

Padlock the door and board the windows
Put the people in the street
“It’s just my job,” he says “I’m sorry.”
And draws a check, goes home to eat
But at night he tells his woman
“I know I hide behind the laws.”
She says, “You’re only taking orders.”
That’s how every empire falls.
(RB Morris)

Please support us as we stand for our democratic ideals in Hong Kong. Trustworthy information is our weapon. Please follow and support the small, resilient independent media outlets reporting from the front line, such as the non-profit Hong Kong Free Press.

Double Haven

Posted on May 20, 2017 by CAMERONDUECK

Read this story as it originally appeared on SCMP.com.

The map showed an idyllic patch of water hemmed in by parkland islands. I could see small coves and passages, the perfect place to explore in a kayak. Its name, Double Haven, completed the tranquil image.

But we weren’t there yet. First we had to cross the lumpy, grey seas of Tolo Channel, our kayaks bobbing in the waves as we waited for a ship to pass. Then we rounded Wong Chuk Kok Tsui, where hikers scrambling along the rocky shore to get to the Devil’s Fist shouted and waved at us as we paddled by.

We landed on Tung Wan for lunch, where my paddling partner, on her first big kayaking trip, slumped down onto a rock, exhausted.

“Is the whole trip going to be like this? With wind and waves? This cold?”

I made reassuring sounds and promised better conditions ahead, but I wasn’t sure myself what to expect. After an hour of shivering on the beach and gulping hot tea from a thermos I cajoled her back into her kayak. We pointed the boats through the narrow gap between Crescent and Double Islands and entered a whole different world.

Double Haven lay spread out before us, unfurled like an old Chinese scroll painting, complete with overlapping hills that disappeared into the blue haze. The water was calm, like an inland lake. The sun came out, turning greys into greens and blues, the light catching the silver flash of a jumping fish.

Double Haven, named Yan Chau Tong in Chinese, is on the northeastern shores of Plover Cove Country Park. Eroded volcanic rock, which is sharp and brittle and often blood red with iron oxide, shelters Double Haven at all points of the compass, saving it from the storms that batter other parts of Hong Kong. At its north end Double Haven becomes Crooked Harbour, but the two protected bodies of water can be explored as one.

Very few Hong Kongers even know of Double Haven, much less visited it. There no roads into the area and ferry connections are infrequent and inconvenient, so most visitors hike in. The area is perhaps best known for Lai Chi Wo, the 300-year old walled Hakka village that is being revitalised and sits inside the Yan Chau Tong Marine Park that was created in 1996.

The historic village was our destination for the day, and it was late afternoon by the time our kayaks bumped ashore next to its pier. There was no space for a tent on the beach, and the village square was covered in concrete, so we settled on a tiny patch of grass next to the village gate. We pulled our kayaks up above the high-tide line, hung our dripping clothes from a line and pitched the tent. It was dark by the time we had our cook stove hissing. Soon a villager arrived on his bicycle and we braced ourselves, expecting him to chase us away.

“I’m just checking my nets,” the man said. “It’s okay, you can camp here.”

He waded out into the receding tide, and moments later reappeared with a small fish he had pulled from his net.

“It’s not much, but I’m just fishing to feed myself, so it’s enough,” he said.

Before leaving he warned us to secure our food bags against wild pigs. Sure enough, we saw one trotting along the darkened shore and were jolted awake during the night when a squealing pig ran by our tent, chased by baying village dogs.

The next morning we paddled north to the island of Ap Chau. In the 1960s this island became home to the Taiwan-based True Jesus Church and its followers. Today, the church remains in use but there are only a handful of the island’s 1,000 Tanka residents left.

It was on the peak of Ap Chau where the preciousness of Double Haven’s seclusion hit home. Just two kilometres to the north was Yantian, which in the past two decades has evolved from a small fishing village into one of the world’s busiest container terminals. The roar of engines and clang of metal floated across the water, the acrid smell of diesel exhaust hung in the air. To the northwest was a wall of office and residential towers, where Sha Tau Kok blends seamlessly into the far reaches of the Shenzhen metropolis. To the east, beyond the hills of Crooked Island, was the open waters of Mirs Bay, dotted with cargo ships from around the world. But to south lay a scene largely unchanged for thousands of years; the intricate maze of isolated islands and quiet bays that we’d just paddled through. A tiny refuge in a sea of people and progress.

We paddled two kilometres east to the village of Kat O on Crooked Island, one of the only villages in the area with a permanent population and signs of activity. The village itself is well maintained and interesting to explore, but its main beach, where we landed, faces the industrial eyesore of Yantien, so we ate a quick lunch and continued on our way.

We pointed our kayaks south, back into the protection and quiet of Double Haven. It was hot and still for a winter day, and we took breaks from paddling to trail our hands in the cool water. The marine park teems with life, and the jumping fish were the only thing breaking the smooth surface of the sea. Our course took us along the southern shores of Double Haven and through the narrow Hung Shek Mun gap between Double Island and the mainland. We were on our way home, but it was still a long way to go.

Because Double Haven has so few waves the vegetation grows right down to the high tide line and there are few beaches, resulting in a dearth of camping spots. The weather forecast called for a drastic change of weather, so we needed protection. I scanned the shores, looking for a flat, dry spot to pitch our tent.

As we rounded the southern tip of Double Island and exited Double Haven I spotted the Outward Bound base in Wong Wan. The camp was empty except for a grizzled caretaker, who welcomed us to pitch our tent on the lawn. By the time all our gear was hung to dry, the tent was pitched and our dinner was on the stove the wind had begun to pick up. It was hard to tell at first, as we were still in a protected cove, but across the water we could see white-caps and spumes of spray where the waves were crashing into the shore.
 “There’s going to be a storm,” the caretaker warned. “Tomorrow will be worse.”

He was right. We fell asleep to the sound of our tent fly flapping in the wind, and awoke to a full gale that brought with it a 10-degree drop in temperatures. The final 10 kilometres of our 45 kilometre trip would take us through exposed, open seas, so we waited, hoping the wind would ease. In the afternoon we went as far as to load the kayaks and paddle out to sea, but we were quickly turned back by steep, breaking waves. The camp caretaker gave us a “I told you so” look as we returned to his base and set up our tent for another night.

By the next morning the wind had subsided, but the cold remained. We hurried through breakfast iin case the wind would return and then pushed off from the shore, headed for home. The waves were smaller than they’d been the day before, but they still broke over the decks of our kayaks, reminding us of the haven we’d left behind.

Dinosaurs in the Gobi

Posted on September 14, 2015 by CAMERONDUECK

I’m working with the University of Hong Kong to produce an online course (a Massive Open Online Course — MOOC) about dinosaur ecosystems for the Coursera platform. I spent most of July in the Gobi Desert shooting video for this project, as well as researching a story for the SCMP’s Post Magazine.

Here’s the story, which you can also read on the SCMP website.

It is 44 degrees Celsius on the floor of the Gobi Desert; the air shimmers and dances with the heat. My eyes swim with tedium after hours of staring at the gently undulating ground, trying to spot precious fossil fragments among the countless pebbles.

To my right, within shouting distance, a scientist stoops, picks at something on the ground, then squats down for a closer look. He digs with his hammer, the chink-chink-chink of metal on stone carried away by the hot, dry wind. A small fragment comes free and he gently rubs the dirt away with his hands before putting it in a small plastic bag.

This University of Hong Kong-led expedition is not the first to come looking for remnants of the dinosaurs that lived, 80 million years ago, in the Upper Cretaceous ecosystem of the Erlian Basin, in Inner Mongolia, on China’s northern border. This ground has been searched for fossils repeatedly over the past century, but the earth keeps pushing them up, like presents. Each year, helped by rain, frost and scouring gusts of wind, the soil is eroded and more fossils are exposed.

“When you prospect an area thoroughly you pick up a large proportion of the fossils of interest, and it takes several years of erosion before more things start to come out,” says Dr Corwin Sullivan, a researcher at Beijing’s Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology (IVPP) and one of a dozen people in our team of fossil hunters. Sullivan, whose book From Fish to Human: The March of Vertebrate Life in China was published recently, wears a wide sun hat and a large red backpack as he zig-zags across the desert. “We just need to wait for more erosion to take place here and give us another crop of fossils to harvest.”

Dr Corwin Sullivan

Sometimes the desert gives up larger treasures; a leg bone here, a rib there. When big fossils are found, technicians take over the site, covering the specimen and the ground that holds it in plaster and burlap. Once the cast is dry, they heave it into the back of a truck and take it away for closer study.

No fossil is insignificant: these days, a small piece of bone rich with diagnostic features could be enough to confirm a new species.

China has a very rich and extensive fossil record, one that is just now being explored,” says Sullivan. “The infrastructure and funding for research have expanded so much in China. There’s a bit of a fossil rush going on. There’s probably nowhere else that offers quite the same combination of richness and freshness.”

Fossils recently found in China have greatly illuminated long-held ideas about evolution, particularly on the issue of flight and the hypothesis that birds are living dinosaurs. A small piece, the right piece, perhaps just a centimetre long, could solve questions over what these animals ate and how they walked and evolved.

“One of the most important issues for palaeontology right now is how dinosaurs turned into birds, which was a major evolutionary transition,” says Professor Xu Xing, also of the IVPP and one of China’s most prominent palaeontologists. “In the past 20 years, we’ve found a lot of feathery dinosaurs, as well as bird-like dinosaurs and preserved feathers in China. In terms of important discoveries and influential fossils, and their impact on conventional ideas, China is No1 right now. It has really changed what we think about how dinosaurs evolved.”

Prof Xu

Scientists have also found in China the earliest tyrannosaurs, relatives of the mighty North American movie star Tyrannosaurus rex, and some of the best placoderm fossils ever found, allowing them to learn more about these early, giant fish.

Erlian was prospected as early as 1922, but the current rush began in the late 1990s, when dinosaur fossils began to be discovered across the country, from Shandong to Liaoning, Yunnan, Xinjiang and Tibet. In 1996, scientists found Sinosauropteryx, the first feathered dinosaur, in Liaoning, a poor and heavily industrialised province in the northeast. The rush was on and, by 2007, China had surpassed the United States in the number of dinosaur species discovered.

A lizard in the Gobi Desert

During the Cretaceous Period, which ended about 65 million years ago, Liaoning was filled with lakes and marshes, which, together with volcanic eruptions, created the ideal conditions to preserve fossils. Many that have come from that area display exceptional detail. The limestone layers of the province earlier this year revealed a winged ancestor of the velociraptor that scientists named Zhenyuanlong. The 125-million-year-old animal is one of the closest relatives to modern birds ever found, further closing an important evolutionary knowledge gap.

“Without those discoveries we wouldn’t be able to restructure the transition as well as we have so far,” says Xu.

Sorting through fossils in the IVPP’s warehouse in Beijing.

IN SOME CASES, the flood of new species has been too good to be true. Forgery and misleading restoration have become rampant. This is a particularly troublesome problem among specimens that supposedly came from Liaoning, which has produced thousands of genuine pieces from various time periods.

Most museums have become adept at spotting forgeries. While many of the institutions’ specimens may be partially, and badly, restored, there’s little doubt about which parts of them are real and worthy of study. The greater danger is being duped by an apparently hot, fresh fossil being offered on the private market.

Museums have long used X-rays to look for density abnormalities that would point to forgery, and chemical-element mapping also helps prove, or disprove, a fossil’s origins. But a new technique is literally shedding light on the problem.

“I’m involved in developing a method that shines laser light onto specimens, causing certain minerals in them to fluoresce,” says HKU palaeontologist Dr Michael Pittman, leader of the Erlian expedition. “The pattern created by the fluorescent minerals is a chemical fingerprint that is unique to every fossil, so potentially forged portions of a specimen can be spotted when part of the fluorescence pattern looks out of place. Excitingly, this method can also reveal fossil details that are invisible under normal light, including skin and feather details.”

Dr Michael Pittman and Dr Jason Ali of HKU

Part of the problem is that many of China’s fossils are dug from the ground by farmers and then sold to museums, other institutes and private dealers. Liaoning’s farmers can often earn more by selling fossils than they can by tilling the soil. Although China has strict laws against private fossil sales, the black market thrives.

“Scientists, universities and institutes face a real dilemma, because if they buy the fossil they are supporting this industry. But if they are offering you a fossil that is new to science, and it possesses anatomical features that fill in big holes in our knowledge, it’s also kind of unethical … to not buy it,” says Pittman.

Even if scientists can prove a specimen is real and unaltered, buying it from an amateur hunter usually means they can’t study the geological layers of rock that hid the fossil – the stratigraphy – and which contain important age and environmental evidence.

Another part of the problem is the speed at which the fossil industry has appeared. Museums and institutes are still developing the expertise and research capacity to deal with the flood of new specimens coming from the field.

A technician prepares a dinosaur fossil at the IVPP.

“It’s just like the Chinese economy, which has grown large very quickly,” says Xu. “There are still many spaces left to be developed. In sciences we have some strengths but, in general, the research level is not that high, in terms of training and methods.”

Professor Tan Lin has watched this evolution from its earliest stages. One of the most accomplished fossil hunters in the Gobi Desert, Tan created the Long Hao Geologic and Paleontological Research Centre, in Hohhot, capital of Inner Mongolia, to house his finds. He is close partners with Xu and a sage adviser to the wave of scientists coming to his corner of China.

Poised but moving slowly due to age, Tan is still drawn to the field. He visits the HKU site in Erlian and, arms pointing to the horizon, discusses with the other scientists where fossils may be found.

Dr Pittman and Prof Tan

“China is a superpower in terms of fossils, both vertebrate and invertebrate, and its fossils span the whole geological time scale,” says Tan. “Not only are the fossils spread over large areas of China, their diversity is also very high.”

Tan has worked in other provinces but he has a soft spot for the Gobi sands, where we spend a week searching for fragments. Erlian’s is an unusual ecosystem with an interesting combination of dinosaurs. For example, scientists have found therizinosaurs from the same family as the T-rex – the theropods – that evolved from carnivores into herbivores. Another of the Gobi’s treasures is the gigantoraptor, a large, beaked theropod that was also secondarily herbivorous or may have been omnivorous.

“In 2007, I was working with Xu in the Erlian area,” says Tan. “We were working together with a Japanese television documentary team. They asked us to dig for something; they needed footage of us digging. We started uncovering bones, larger ones than we had expected, and we became excited. Once the shooting had wrapped up, Xu and I went back to dig some more and we uncovered a gigantoraptor, which we brought back to Hohhot.”

Xu described the specimen in Nature, the prestigious scientific journal.

“That’s why Erlian remains one of my favourite places to hunt for fossils, because of the stories that I’ve lived in that place,” Tan says.

His institute is based on the outskirts of Hohhot, down a rutted road, among small factories and cheap housing. Tan’s finds fill row upon row of rolling shelves. The specimens are numbered and grouped into dusty boxes. A box of claws, fearsomely curved. Leg bones stacked like cordwood. A skull, in the shadows at the back of the shelf, its eyes wide open. All from different animals, places and times.

Searches for specific fossils in the warehouse can take hours. The concrete floors are littered with specimens still wrapped in the plaster that was applied in the field, yet to be opened, cleaned and studied. Photography in the collection rooms is forbidden as they contain many fossils yet to be seen by the outside world.

Sorting through fossils in the IVPP’s warehouse

“There are still more discoveries to be made in our collection. We’re just a small institute and we don’t have many researchers, so we still have a lot of work to do,” Tan says.

The backlog in Tan’s collection is not uncommon, with most of China’s major institutes and museums holding large collections of unstudied specimens. They are predicted to yield discoveries regarding the environment these animals lived in, how they aged and grew, and the evolutionary relationships between them.

“Every time you move along the shelves you see something that could be a new species or a better example of something that has already been found,” Pittman says, after spending three days in Tan’s treasure trove.

Our expedition adds to the pile of fossils that need further study, even though they are only small fragments. Some pieces reveal the presence of animals that were not known to be in the Erlian Basin, such as alvarezsaur theropods.

ON ONE OF OUR LAST DAYS in the desert, team members present Pittman with their latest finds. Two small, elongated fossils put a sparkle in his eye and cause his voice to rise an octave in excitement.

“We’ve found two jaw elements from theropod dinosaurs. They’re very different, which is interesting because it implies that they used to feed in slightly different ways and do slightly different things within the ecosystem,” Pittman says. “It’s an exciting discovery.”

The fossils are wrapped up and tucked away for further study, joining thousands of others pulled from Chinese soil. After millions of years buried in the ground these animals will have to wait a little bit longer to divulge their secrets.

Here be monsters

China has many museums and parks dedicated to dinosaurs. Some of them are filled with gaudy displays of dubious origin; others contain authentic and important specimens presented according to international standards. Here are a few of the best.

Paleozoological Museum of China This museum is located in western Beijing (Xizhimen), next to the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology, which is home to many of China’s top palaeontologists. Its galleries present a wide range of dinosaur specimens accompanied by solid scientific information. The museum also shows a popular 3D film about dinosaurs. (www.paleozoo.cn).

Shandong Tianyu Museum of Natural History Excavations have been conducted in Shandong province since the late 1950s. Professor Zheng Xiaoting, who amassed his wealth from gold mining, has built the largest collection of complete dinosaur fossils in the world. The museum collection includes fossils of feathered dinosaurs, early birds and the Tsintaosaurus, a crested duck-billed dinosaur. (www.tynhm.com).

Zigong Dinosaur Museum
The museum sits over a large dinosaur-bone bed in Sichuan province’s Dashanpu Formation, which has helped fill a gap in Jurassic history. The site was discovered by a gas company that was building a plant outside the city of Zigong in 1972, and now attracts up to seven million visitors a year. (www.zdm.cn).

Palaeontological Museum of Liaoning
China’s largest palaeontological museum is located on the campus of Shenyang Normal University. Its collections include feathered dinosaurs, the earliest mammal with hair, the oldest known gliding lizard and eight giant dinosaurs from Liaoning, including the 15-metre-long Liaoningotitan. (www.pmol.org.cn).

Beijing Museum of Natural History
The collections at China’s leading natural history museum include palaeontology, ornithology, mammals and invertebrates, and a major collection of dinosaur fossils and mounted skeletons. It’s also fun for children, with a Dinosaur Park populated by models of the beasts, many of which move.

Junking in Hong Kong

Posted on August 20, 2014 by CAMERONDUECK

I spent last Sunday on the water, where I prefer to spend most of my weekends if I have the choice. Sailing, kayaking, or, in this case, on a junk boat with a group of friends.

Hong Kong junk boats can be chartered by the day, or sometimes corporations own them for employee use (this was a lot more popular before the many financial crisis’!) They are no longer the traditional junk boats with sails that the name suggests, although that’s where the name came from. These days they’re big, heavy motor yachts, with large aft decks, a small cabin/head below, and a large open top deck. Sometimes they come with full galleys. Perfect for friends to jump off of into the sea, dance in the sun (if the boat is not rolling!), drink, flirt and enjoy Hong Kong’s natural beauty.

Just watch this video I made and you’ll know what I mean.

Boy Racers

Posted on July 16, 2014 by CAMERONDUECK

I recently spent a day at the race tracks in Zhuhai, which is just across the border from Hong Kong. I was invited by Torben, a good friend of mine, who has been distracted away from his long-running passion of yacht racing to take up car racing. Here’s the story I wrote about the experience for The Peak magazine. Click on the image to download the pdf of the story.

Jump Cut to the Arctic

Posted on March 19, 2014 by CAMERONDUECK

I’m very pleased that the young curators at JUMP CUT Independent Film Festival in Hong Kong have chosen to show my documentary, The New Northwest Passage!

The New Northwest Passage
Wednesday, April 16, 7pm (Contact the festival for tickets)
The Hive 21/F, 23 Luard Rd, Wanchai

It’s a cool new pop-up festival happening in April using some very innovative spaces around Hong Kong, presented by Hong Kong Youth Arts Foundation and aimed at nurturing the next generation of independent filmmakers and consumers.

This festival is run entirely by the JUMP CUT youth committee, comprising passionate and determined young film-lovers selected through a recruitment process. With guidance from staff at YAF and experts from the industry, this team is given the thrilling but challenging task of running a festival. From curating the programme and selecting films to inviting guest speakers, writing reviews and organising scriptwriting and storyboarding workshops for other young people, the JUMP CUT youth committee experiences all the magic that happens behind the scenes.

By exposing young people to non-mainstream film culture and creating an intimate community of like-minded people, the youth committee is a place where ideas, experiences and emotions are shared, and where team members inspire one another.

Happy (in Hong Kong)

Posted on January 10, 2014 by CAMERONDUECK

I had the great privilege of helping my friend Hélène Franchineau shoot a Hong Kong version of the extremely infectious song and video “Happy” by Pharrell Williams. Check it out the HK style of Happy on YouTube below or right here on Vimeo!

Even the Wall Street Journal was impressed…here’s what they said on their Asia Scene Blog.

HK Film Screening & Lecture, June 3 & 4

Posted on May 28, 2013 by CAMERONDUECK

The Royal Geographical Society in Hong Kong is hosting a lecture by me on Monday, June 3, and a screening of my documentary The New Northwest Passage on Tuesday, June 4.

Monday, June 3: Lecture on The New Northwest Passage

Drinks Reception and Book Signing 6.30 pm Lecture 7.30 pm

HK$100 for members and HK$150 for non-members.

Location: Auditorium. 1/F Duke of Windsor Social Services Building, 15 Hennessy Road, Wanchai (please note that this building is 5 minutes from Admiralty MTR or Pacific Place, next to the HK Police HQ)

Tuesday, June 4 (7:30pm): Screening of the film The New Northwest Passage
Q&A with the director following the screening. Edwin Lee, film editor, will also be present.
Location: SCOPE Admiralty Learning Center, City University of HK, 8/F, United Centre, 95 Queensway, Admiralty
Contact the RGS for further details on both events.Tel: (852) 2583 9700

In 2009 the 40-foot yacht Silent Sound set off to sail the infamous Northwest Passage. These waters are normally locked in ice, but due to climate change it is now possible to sail here for a few weeks each summer. However, it remains an epic yachting challenge, and fewer people have sailed this passage than have climbed Mt Everest.

The crew dropped anchor in Inuit villages where they joined hunters in stalking their game and experienced the last vestiges of an ancient nomadic culture. Each person they met destroyed another stereotype about the Inuit and their way of life.

This film shows how the crew came face-to-face with the realities of climate change and it’s impact on a remote and fragile culture. They helped scientists tag a southern fox caught on an Arctic island and learn about the Inuit way of life from an old woman skinning seals on the beach. They met elders who told them about the struggle to maintain Inuit culture. They experienced first hand how climate change is opening the Canadian Arctic to create The New Northwest Passage.

About The Royal Geographical Society in Hong Kong

The Royal Geographical Society in Hong Kong is a chapter of the highly esteemed UK society. It provides a forum where members can regularly meet and listen to leading local and international speakers from the world of geography and related sciences, exploration, travel, research, the environment and conservation.

Previous speakers include the Polar explorers Sir Ranulph Fiennes and Robert Swan, mountaineers Sir Chris Bonington and Doug Scott, primate expert Dame Jane Goodall, the botanist Professor David Bellamy, leading environmentalist Sir Crispin Tickell, former space shuttle pilot Dr James van Hoften, moon walker Commander Dave Scott, Hong Kong explorer Wong How Man, round-the-world yachtsmen Sir Robin Knox-Johnston, Sir Chay Blythe and yachtswoman Tracy Edwards and the authors Simon Winchester, William Dalrymple, Paul French, Jan Morris and Mark Tully.

Cameron Dueck

– Writer –

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