NOT many people can say they've worked with Hollywood director James Cameron. Ron Allum is an exception to that rule.
He helped Cameron get to the wreck of the Titanic in 2000 by designing and building specialist equipment for the deep-sea expedition.
Ron has also worked on the Deepsea Challenger, which carried Cameron to the bottom of the Marianas Trench in 2012.
So it makes sense the 70-year-old's work is on display at the James Cameron - Challenging the Deep exhibition at the Australian National Maritime Museum.
Extended until May 5, the exhibition focuses on Cameron's mission to understand what lies at the bottom of our oceans.
Visitors can discover the wrecks of Titanic and German battleship Bismarck, as well as see the design and construction of the Deepsea Challenger, built to withstand water pressure of 1.2 tonnes per square centimetre.
Building the Deepsea Challenger was an engineering feat. The team had to construct a submersible that could cope with the planet's deepest point, the Marianas Trench.
One challenge was designing a special foam that could handle the pressure 11km below the ocean's surface.
"Foam is commercially available but when I tested it, I couldn't use it structurally," Ron explained. "I went about looking at a different process as I knew the current method wasn't suitable."
That year, Ron braved the shops just before Christmas to buy what he believed to be the key to solving this riddle - a Kitchen Aid mixer.
"The lady [shop assistant] looked at me and said 'your partner will be very happy with this'."
After an awkward conversation in which Ron explained the cake mixer was for science and didn't need to be gift wrapped, he spent all Christmas at the factory working on the foam.
It's this sort of ingenuity that interested Cameron, who reportedly said Ron would be the one man he would travel to the moon with, because he would build the space ship to get there.
Which begs the question: why is Ron interested in the depths of the sea instead of space exploration?
"I grew up in the eastern suburbs. In the afternoon, I'd go to Coogee Beach," he said.
Ron was a keen surfer but his arms were "too short for the surfboard".
As luck would have it, Ron found himself invited to go caving with a mate who was keen on geology. This led to an interest in cave diving, which in turn led to ocean diving and exploring the sea.
His efforts in oceanography saw him named Senior Australian of the Year in 2013 and Australian Geographic Society's Adventurer of the Year in 2016.
Now Ron is firmly focused on the future with his Sutherland-based company Ron Allum Deepsea working to create an Australian deepsea submersibles industry.
"The long term objective is to take on younger Australians and mentor them," he said.
The company is already employing younger engineers for future projects.
"No one has come from a background of deepsea submersibles. We're training them up," he said.
"They tend to have new ideas for the projects. Some guys helped resolve issues we had building the Deepsea Challenger."
