Driven to act for Nature

Being born in New Zealand is a good start to where my love of the Natural world came from, especially in the 1950s... when you walked everywhere, and recreation was walking and being out in the hills and wild oceans and seas. I grew up in a low income family, before TV - if you can think of that concept - where girls were meant to learn typing and get married and you didn't really need to do anything else.
 

So I was already starting that fight with my parents because I wanted to go to university and girls didn't go to university. That is what lead me to focus most of my late teens and early 20s on women's rights. I had already developed the liking of space, of wildlife, of scenery, of wild space and of wild places. I didn't really do terribly much for the Manapouri, than be there and write a couple of letters because that's what the radio said one should do.

I was a wee bit young and fighting my own battles. I got involved fairly shortly after that in a campaign to remove lead from petrol because of the damage it does to human brains, particularly young kids. But I was much more involved in women's rights and also trying to survive, because I left home at 15. So I had to put myself through two years of high school before I then put myself through university. 

At the time, a friend who lives in Hobart said that his partner was looking at Antarctica and he knew that I had a background of environmental impact assessment, which was very new in those days. 

He asked me to do an environmental impact assessment of Antarctica - which I laughed at. It's like, really? Crazy. Antarctica is the size of the US and Australia and we knew very little about it. 

So he asked me to help with this environmental impact assessment and I didn't know anything about Antarctica, nothing whatsoever. I did know it didn't have polar bears and I knew it was south, that was all.

But I thought why not? What the heck. I wrote a piece for the Griffith Review on this journey. It talks about the passion that I developed when doing this, which led me to turn my life around and become a poorly paid activist for pretty much 40 years. In 1986 I first got a chance to see Antartica for myself. 

Antarctica is so incredibly important. It's a breathing space in human life, in that it's one place which we haven't destroyed, even now, 40 years later. It's one place where we can't just go in and conquer. We have to use every technological advantage we can find to be able to survive in it.

And it brings us down to what we are. Later on I started working on the high seas and that does the same. It brings humans down to realising that we are just a part of this planet. The planet will carry on without us. We will destroy the planet for ourselves, but we won't destroy the planet as a whole.