“I lived in Brisbane till the end of Year 6 and we moved to Sydney where I went to high school. I left school at the end of Year 10 and studied Veterinary Nursing and Zoo keeping. The zoo keeping part of my studies was done at Taronga. I have always related to animals and I’ve always been interested in animal behaviour. In vet nursing I was more into surgery than medicine. It always made more sense to me..this is broken so you fix it.
I ended up human nursing back in the day where you studied in the hospital. I got married and had children so vet nursing was years in the past. I moved up here to the Northern Rivers in 1983. I lived in Ballina for a while and after a few years I moved to Back Creek which is between Bentley and Kyogle where I stayed for 16 years and raised my 4 children. I also had dairy goats and supplied raw goats milk to the area for many years. I started the first goat dairy industry. When I first started there were no regulations, you know, people dropping cigarette ash into the buckets when they milked their goats, all sorts of dodgy stuff going on. It was good because it established that we could have raw goats milk and have certification on it. That was a fantastic lifestyle with young kids growing up. As much as we loved it, it wasn’t a great money maker so I went back to health work..
After a while I found that I didn’t want to work in health any more so I studied computer programming. I ended up doing computer database programming which I still do today and I have been teaching at the community College. This is the first year I haven’t taught. I never thought I would ever be teaching material but I loved working with adults.
I lived in Lismore for 7 years. The marriage had split up and the kids had almost all left the nest and I met the most amazing man, Chris Jeffery. It was like a fairytale. All of my dreams had come true. We bought this property together 8 1/2 years ago and a year to the day after moving here we got married on our property. It was so beautiful. A year later he started having trouble speaking and swallowing and he was diagnosed with Motor Neurone disease which is the worst disease in the world. The fairytale became a nightmare as I watched the most amazing man just deteriorate. He was a cafe owner. His whole life revolved around talking and laughing and food and coffee. He owned the cafe in the Star Court Arcade and he ran New Italy for about 7 years prior to that. He was Bulba onset so he lost his speech and swallowing first and that is about as cruel as you can imagine.
He loved his tractor and our rolling parklands on this property. I had to put blinkers on and ignore the work on the farm so I could look after him. I lost him and a couple of months after he died I went for a walk on our property and about 2,000 Koala food trees had self sown. There are 600 different Eucalypt species and Koalas in different areas eat different trees. There are primary and secondary trees. The forest Red Gum are primary trees. I am on 14 acres and we knew there were Koalas when we moved here as it’s part of the natural corridor. The Koalas from Lismore can move right through here and on down to Woodburn.
We moved here in 2010. In 2011 we got some funding from Lismore City Council and we planted another 400 trees. In 2012 we planted another 300 trees. Now we have about 3,000 self sown trees. That was big game changer for me as when I lost Chris I didn’t know what I was going to do . The idea of looking after the property was daunting. It took about 35 hours just to slash in the summer.
I wrote a Landcare application for funding and I look back now and can’t believe I got it. I was probably successful because I had paid a professional to do a Property Management Plan. She divided the property into 4 zones. There is a rainforest pocket. The western zone is different from the gully that runs into the pond. They list all the vegetation on the property. The map lists all the good, all the weeds, everything. I’ve had a conservation agreement put on the property too now which gets attached to the title of the property so that agreement sticks for the long term. I have 2 funded projects running here at the moment. One by the Lismore City Council which is to clear the western side of Japanese sunflower and we’ve planted 200 native shrubs. The other is a 3 year project and one part of that is we put 22 nesting boxes out on the property for the Little Lorikeet which a vulnerable species and the Squirrel Glider which is also vulnerable. We’ve only done one checking of the boxes so far but there was a Squirrel Glider in a box which was exciting. We are also putting in Micro Bat boxes. We have identified 14 vulnerable species on the property.
All the Koalas on my property have names. Every day I go out and cover the whole property and identify who is where. I use nose pattern recognition to identify them. It’s the only way that I know of that is reliable. Whenever there is a new Koala my FB followers name the Koala. One of the most recent ones was difficult to photograph so they named her Shyla as she was shy. Bullet was named for showing his ammunition. Sometimes it’s hard to tell the sex. The males have a scent gland on their chest which can be very obvious.
I count the sightings daily. Every day is different but at the moment I have about 130 sightings a month. In 2016 I didn’t see a Joey on the property the whole year. This year all 4 of the breeding females have had joeys and most of the time all 4 of them are on the property. The highest number of adult sightings own one day is 8 which is a lot of Koalas. There is one alpha male and he covers a big territory. He’s very busy rubbing his scent gland on all the trees..mine, mine mine!! We have one little female called Miss Princess because she is the perfect, cute Koala. She looks like a little toy and she’s very pretty. Her Joey is named Dewdrop. I do a calendar every year and we have a beautiful book too now. (see link)
The equation is really simple..more trees! Because we are not going to get that from the government the equation becomes complex. Unfortunately prime Koala land is where humans want to live. The East Coast of Australia is all Koala territory. It’s a bit of a losing battle. The word is that they will be extinct by 2050. The Gold Coast have lost 80% of their Koala population. The way I look at is the Koala is the cutest and most iconic and if we can’t save the Koala what hope has a Micro bat or a less cute Australian animal have. The Ballina bypass went straight through a huge Koala colony which is dooming. Part of the complexity is we deal with cars, with dogs and with disease and that’s why we need places like The Friends of the Koala. I volunteer thereon the weekends. We have to have these places but what we actually need is habitat. We can work our butts off rehabilitating a Koala, release them after months of care and 3 days later we find them hit by a car and killed or they drown in someones pool. We have to take them back where we found them because they are so territorial.
The Koalas down south don’t really get Chlamidia and we are not sure why. The one that we have the most trouble with is the one they get in the eyes and in the bladder. It’s just awful. When it’s in the bladder the walls of the bladder gets thicker and thicker so they dribble urine all the time and it’s burning, burning badly which ulcerates the skin and travels up into the kidneys. It’s shocking. One of the problems with koalas is they are such quite animals so you don’t see their suffering and it’s really hard to catch a koala. They have so many down south they cull them as there are not enough trees. They have so many that they literally just starve to death in the trees.
I consider myself lucky because if it’s not that long and they’re gone then how lucky am I that I get to see them everyday and observe their behaviour. I photograph them, video them, I record a lot of things about them. People may not be able to do that in the not too distant future.”