Benjamin Cropp was born on 19 January 1936 and is an Australian documentary filmmaker, conservationist and a former Open Australian spearfishing champion.
16 Facts About Ben Cropp
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Formerly a shark hunter, Cropp retired from that trade in 1962 to pursue oceanic documentary filmmaking and conservation efforts.
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Ben Cropp was born on Buka Island near Bougainville Island on 19 January 1936.
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Ben Cropp's father was a Methodist missionary on the island.
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Ben Cropp lived in various places such as Casino, Ballina and Bellingen as his father moved to different parishes.
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Ben Cropp grew up at Lennox Head in New South Wales.
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Ben Cropp had a very religious upbringing, but when he was 18 "broke totally away from that".
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Ben Cropp was Ron Taylor's partner in the making of The Shark Hunters, a 60-minute black and white documentary sold for television screenings in 1961.
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Ben Cropp discovered his first shipwreck in 1963: the Catharine Adamson.
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Ben Cropp became a conservationist after an experience off Montague Island in 1964 where he filmed diver George Meyer riding on the back of a whale shark.
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Ben Cropp had done extensive research on the wreck and planned his own search jointly at the same time as Steve Domm's arrival because of a pre-arranged date with a RAAF plane doing a magnetometer search for both of them.
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Ben Cropp found the Pandora wreck on the Great Barrier Reef just before John Heyer did.
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Ben Cropp's searching techniques include wearing polarised glasses while looking along reef edges for signs of anchors, chain, hulls or timbers.
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In December 2019, Ben Cropp discovered another wreck off Sudbury Reef, near Cairns with his son, Adam.
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Ben Cropp has noted that sometimes part of the hull of a timber vessel has been located 50 miles or more from the site of the vessel's last known whereabouts, owing to buoyancy and drift.
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In 1970, Ben Cropp became an accredited ACS member of the Australian Cinematographers Society and given a Life Membership in 2014.