All Hearts on Deck

Over recent years, the efforts of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society to save whales in the Antarctic have often been in the Australian news. What many people do not realise is that the Sea Shepherd organisation, under the leadership of founder, Paul Watson, has been doing this work for thirty years.

In the early 1980s, ACT animal activist, Frankie Seymour, sailed with Watson on the Sea Shepherd, on missions to save grey whales in the Bering Sea, and dolphins in Japan. Her book about the experience, All Hearts on Deck, is now available from the Animal Liberation ACT online shop.

The book is not only an historical record of events.  It also recounts, through some fifty poems, a young woman’s emotional experiences as she leaves home and family to risk her life for animals.  The book also takes time out to articulate several of the internal debates of the environment and animal rights movements.

 About the author 

Since moving to Canberra in 1985, Frankie Seymour has been a well-known figure in both the local and national animal rights movement, serving as president of Animal Liberation Act, on and off, between 1988 and 1994, spearheading the campaign which achieved our (still unimplemented ) legislation prohibiting the battery cage in 1997, serving as our representative on the ACT Government’s Animal Welfare Advisory Committee since 1996, and as the Campaign Representative for Introduced Wild Animals (often mistakenly called “ferals”) on the Animals Australia Executive Committee from 1997 to 2007.

Frankie has also won numerous awards for her poetry and other writing, including first prize in the ACT Playwrights Drama Festival, the Beyond Ben Bulben WB Yeats competition (for a poem about duck rescue), the Sunshine Coast Writers National Competition and the Yellow Moon Literary Award.