Evening of Adventure | Sydney Thursday 25 June 2026

May 8

The Australia & New Zealand Chapter of the Explorers Club (ANZEC) is proud to announce the next ANZEC Evening of Adventure in Sydney.

This intimate evening is open to all members and non-members and will include stimulating presentations from two ANZEC members, internationally recognised venom biologist Prof. Bryan Fry and Dr. Vanessa Pirotta, one of Australia’s most recognised wildlife (whale) scientist and a leading voice in science communication.

Bites, blood, and bombs: A journey through the toxic world in extreme environments by Professor Bryan Fry

Professor Bryan Fry is an internationally recognised venom biologist whose work sits at the intersection point of expedition science, toxinology, and real-world medical impact. He has led field research across more than 40 countries, including Antarctica, and published more than 300 scientific papers, including in top-tier journals such as Nature. His career has been shaped by extreme environments and extreme biology, from discovering new aspects of venom evolution and function to translating venom mechanisms into therapeutic opportunities.

Across decades of high-risk fieldwork, he has accumulated an unusual ledger of lived experience - envenomations, broken bones, and hard-won recoveries - that has forged a rare perspective on resilience, scientific scepticism, and the cost of curiosity. He has been featured in over 200 television documentaries, most recently in the Pole to Pole series hosted by actor Will Smith.

In this Explorers Club talk, Professor Fry traces resilience as a field-tested skill rather than an abstract virtue. He begins with surviving spinal meningitis as a toddler, then follows the arc through formative years of nomadic exploration, multiple life-threatening envenomations that serendipitously drove scientific breakthroughs, and a catastrophic spinal injury from breaking his back in three places, that revealed the hidden endocrine consequences of prolonged opioid pain management.
The talk then expands outward from the personal to the planetary, showing how endocrine disruption became a research lens for investigating oil spill contamination in Indigenous Amazonian territories by using anacondas as sentinel species, and how toxic legacies such as WWII unexploded ordnance can quietly enter food chains.

His research also explores the occupational hygiene hazards to explosive ordnance disposal personnel from mixed-metals and energetic-chemicals. Blending dark humour, expedition realism, and translational science, the presentation closes with practical takeaways on risk systems, health surveillance, and community-centred pathways from discovery to mitigation.

Connected pathways: an exploration of humpback whale connectivity in Oceania by Dr. Vanessa Pirotta

Dr. Vanessa Pirotta is one of Australia’s most recognised wildlife (whale) scientists and a leading voice in science communication. Known for blending cutting-edge technology with conservation, her work spans both marine (whales) and terrestrial (illegal wildlife traffic detection) environments—bringing the natural world closer through innovation and storytelling. Vanessa’s work is deeply community-driven. She leads an international whale research program in the Kingdom of Tonga called the Tongan Whale Tourism Project and locally, she runs Wild Sydney Harbour, a citizen science initiative exploring marine life in collaboration with the Gamay Rangers—local First Nations rangers—blending Indigenous Knowledge with scientific research to better understand marine mammals in Sydney’s blue backyard.

A trailblazer in making science accessible, Vanessa has been named one of the Top 100 Women of Influence by the Australian Financial Review and awarded the National Academies Eric and Wendy Schmidt Awards for Excellence in Science Communications. Vanessa brings the magic of the ocean across generations in her children’s/adult books. A lecturer at Macquarie University (Sydney, Australia), she’s championing the next generation through her science and teaching. She’s a regular on the media, advocating for science and environmental awareness everyday.