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18/07/2004: "PEOPLE OF THE SEA Pioneers - Hans and Lotte Hass"
Perhaps an inspiration for Valerie Taylor was Lotte Hass (nee Lotte Beirl) who talked her way aboard a diving expedition in 1938 and later married the boss, Dr Hans Hass the Austrian-born underwater adventurer who was a forerunner to Jacques Cousteau.
While Hass experimented with closed circut re-breathers, Cousteau devised a regulator for compressed air and later did very well with the patent and trade mark. The twin hose regulators became known world-wide by the trade mark Aqua-Lung.
Hans Hass was only 19 years of age when he produced the worlds' first underwater documentary "Stalking Beneath the Sea" as the title suggests, a spearfishing adventure.
He was not lazy with his writing and pumped out several fasinating adventure books translated to English from German originals, but it was his feature length documentary Under the Red Sea (1952) which brought fame and revenue.
The magnificient three-masted timber ship Xarifa became the floating research facility for his foundation International Institute for Marine Research, although Cousteau's Calypso was a name easier to remember and pronounce and may have been a factor to assist Captain Jacques-Yves gain a lead which he never lost.
Early Hass documentaries were purchased by ABC for Australia, in the the era of Sea Hunt and later The Aquanauts all of which promoted diving in 1961 very nicely, the Hans Hass material was factual, the other fiction.
Hans and Lotte Hass last visited Australia ten years ago for an underwater festival. During his lecture presentation, he blamed his inability to capture the necessary USA TV sales of his films on the fact "Ve ver on zer losing end of ze var" (We were on the losing end of the war, as compared to the French).
Definately the more handsome, and with a stunning and curvaceous wife, Hans and Lotte inspired many to seek their own adventures with the sea. His mass-produced underwater camera housing for the Rolleiflex 6x6 cm medium format was a masterpiece and remains a collectors item today worth upwards of AUS$1500 without the camera and depending upon condition.
In 1972 Melbourne diver, photographer and businessman Irvin Rockman promoted the Hans Haas Manifesto in Australia, a document of collected signatures urging the banning of conventional spearguns but allowing the use of handspears. It was a vision that the ocean would become a desert and in hindsight a more practical and simple method of protecting the larger breeding stocks (who produce more eggs than the small fish).
In other words we have got it all wrong. Take small fish and leave the bigger ones to breed. The idea is so simple and yet it is still to catch on.*
Note The supporting cast listed on the above historic movie poster went on to bigger things. Al Giddings did the underwater cine camera for Titanic and other major Hollywood films; Stan Waterman's highlight was the first white pointer shark story Blue Water White Death (with Ron and Valerie Taylor) and later TV films; Ernest Brooks** began an underwater photography school at the University of Santa Barbara campus, California.
It was a golden era for many.
