I am trying to renew my dive cert which I did in 1978 or 79 in Geelong, VIC. If I recall correctly all I had at the time was a business card with 'C- CARD' printed on it which is long gone.
There is no record of me on either the FAUI or NAUI databases but I believe these did not become active until the early 1980s so I may have been left off, there is also no record of my dive instructor when I contacted FAUI.
I have had no success contacting my instructor as yet. Are these the only two agencies which were active in VIC at this time? Any help would be appreciated.
Thankyou
Hi construct,
I live in Adelaide and got certified in 1979. My card is similar to yours. If you were trained by a FAUI instructor at the time, you got what can be described as a 'shop card', i.e. a piece of cardboard branded to the shop with the only identification of FAUI being the instructor's number.
In response to your question, I advise the following.
There was an organization with a name something like Diving Instructors Association of Victoria which apparently merged with FAUI sometime during the 1970s. Also, there may have been some BSAC branches. Also, Scuba Divers Federation of Victoria may have a scuba training program like the kindred organizations in SA and WA did. I am not sure if there was a NAUI presence in Australia during the 1970s, although I think there were NAUI instructors in PNG at the time. An organization called NAUI Australia which operated from the mid-1980s to the mid 1990s was started by a number of North American ex-pats living in Australia and who were FAUI instructors.
In respect to records, I was told by the guy whose owns FAUI that its database has records going back to the early 1960s which is before the creation of FAUI in 1972. Presumably, the records before 1972 may be divers certified by the AUF which ran a scuba training system on a national basis from 1962 to about 1975. Up until the late 1970s, FAUI was only concerned with instructor training & certification and did not have a national course system. As a result, training records were held by the store where one did their training. Therefore, most shop records are probably not in the current FAUI database. When a national course system started in the late 70s/early 1980s, one had to do some recertification training to get a national certification card. When the database was accessible online, I was able to locate most of my FAUI certifications received from 1982 onwards but not my original entry-level training.
The NAUI online database would only include certifications from the more recent NAUI Australia organization - I have two certifications from that organization and can find them in the online database. Apparently, a lot of older NAUI records are in hardcopy format - you can find out more about that situation by searching Scubaboard using terms such as 'NAUI database" or "NAUI certification". If you were originally certified by a NAUI instructor, your certification details may be somewhere in the hardcopy records.
