About Me
I am a fulltime working Mum, aren’t we all these days?! My son Chase is 6 and is following in my footsteps at becoming a little wilding. During the week I am working hard in corporate roles, and in my freetime I love nature, camping, being outdoors- and having a laugh! I absolutely love animals and try not to take life too seriously. Writing a children’s book is not about making money for me (honestly I’d be stoked just to get back what I spent on the beautiful illustrations) but moreso it’s about getting this story out of my head and into the world with hopes to inspire others to fall in love with the Birds of Paradise as much as I did.
In 2013 I watched a documentary on YouTube called the Birds of Paradise Project. I was already a massive animal lover and I could not get over the cheeky, hilarious dancing birds in Papua New Guinea. How had I never heard of them or seen them before?!
The amazing work that National Geographic photojournalist Tim Laman and Cornell Lab scientist Ed Scholes did to capture those special moments is beyond. I’ll be forever grateful as it was their footage that sparked my imagination, and I could not get this story idea out of my head from that day on.
From cleaning bird cages at a local sanctuary where I volunteered, to waking up at 4.30am to a local Kookaburra outside my window, I would always think of the amazing dancing Birds of Paradise. It wasn’t until after researching and not being able to find any existing children’s fiction books on this topic, that I decided to write down the story that had been etched in my mind for almost 10 years for others to enjoy.
Love for animals
Volunteering was much easier before I had my son, but I’m proud to have some amazing experiences I can tell him about to inspire him to give back…
AACE Safe Haven Mount Larcom / Gladstone Central Queensland- building fences, preparing food for gliders, cleaning out Southern Hairy Nose Wombat pens and scraping up poo and feeding endangered species bridled nail-tail wallaby (Onychogalea fraenata). Once I even got to cuddle a special baby Koala named Greg. The work that this sanctuary does for these endangered species is absolutely heart warming and I was so grateful to give up my time there every chance I could.
Quoin Island Turtle Rehabilitation Centre
Quoin Island Turtle Rehabilitation Centre (QITRC) is located off the coast of Gladstone on Quoin Island and is dedicated to the rescue and rehabilitation of turtles. I became a regular volunteer dedicating my Saturday mornings to deboning squid, prepping food, feeding tanks and recording data for the centre. We would see turtles come in with bellies full of plastic, unable to submerge, turtles with their fins bitten off or their shell cracked open by a boat propeller. It was an extremely rewarding project to be involved with, seeing the rehabilitation and release back to the wild of a sea turtle.
Mon Repos
I was lucky enough to do some volunteer work at the Mon Repos Turtle Centre is dedicated to marine turtle research, protection and education. If I thought deboning squid on Quoin Island was stinky work that was nothing compared to digging out turtle nests! We spent weeks on 24/7 roster shifts walking up and down a secluded area along the beach at Mon Repos closed off to the public. We monitored mother turtles retuning to lay their eggs, marking out the nest locations, digging up the eggs to see how many they’ve laid, gathering babies for measuring, and the stinkiest job- digging up the nests after the eggs have hatched to see how many hatched including counting the rotten eggs! We recorded all that data accurately for the team. Two very memorable moments were running off the beach to avoid lightning striking just offshore (since I had a bit metal rod in my shin at the time) and jumping in for a swim to relieve from the crazy heat and being surprised by little loggerhead babies swimming right past as they’d just hatched nearby….
