Gerard Mills (-2017) made an outstanding contribution to the University's agenda of ensuring the sustainability and conservation of our natural environment, through providing an extensive and invaluable photographic resource of flora and fauna species for use by students, staff and the wider community. Gerard had set himself an immense but enjoyable task of photographing the vast diversity of wildlife on USC's Sippy Downs campus.

He viewed it as a ten year odyssey and had walked thousands of kilometres in every direction of USC's 100 hectare campus to, in his words, “find out what's there”.
Three years into his mission, Gerard had taken more than 30,000 photographs of USC's wild creatures and their activities on campus.

Gerard was geo-tagging each photograph to precisely locate where a creature was and when. He worked closely with USC Animal Ecology scientists to scientifically identify the different animals and their species.