When a green change brings a giant leap in career

I moved to the Illawarra in search of space and a garden. With two growing boys and four bicycles, our three-metre-wide terrace in Sydney’s inner city was feeling cramped.

Bush, beach, buses and trains ticked the boxes for my husband and I for a new location, and we moved a day before the school year. 

I was a writer. I’d worked for magazines Choice and Reader’s Digest, but more recently was writing non-fiction books, and enjoying the process, but not the gap between projects and the pay. 

We went camping with other families, sometimes to national parks, with and without tents. We bushwalked and beachcombed. I thought of further study, but wasn’t keen on following up my law degrees.

With exposure to a more natural world, I sensed something shift in my mind, but it was the enthusiasm I felt when attempting to identify a small jelly-like creature sparkling on the sand that finally made me circle back to my high-school love of biology. (It was Glaucus atlanticus, AKA the silver sea slug. These ocean surface dwellers are occasionally blown ashore after big winds).

I enrolled at the University of Wollongong and from the first lecture in cell and molecular biology, I felt at home. 

Things went well. Fast-track almost two decades and I completed a degree in conservation biology, delved into the DNA of the hairy geebung with an honours project and studied the ecology of urban moss for a PhD. 

Biology took me to Fowlers Gap, digging ditches in the heat of 40^oC to survey lizards and small mammals; to the farmland of Grenfell, catching geckoes in the night; to Booderee National Park tracking the endangered southern brown bandicoots after translocation. (It also took me back to the classroom, eventually as lecturer in many of the subjects I'd lapped up as a mature-age student just years before.)

Moss led me around Wollongong, from Windang to Helensburgh, checking out pavement crevices, car park edges and small green spaces. It also took me to Antarctica! In 2020, squeezed between the Black Summer fires and the pandemic, I spent four weeks in a tent on King George Island assisting soil scientists from Brazil.

It turns out writing is well regarded in science, and I continue to enjoy it. Stay tuned for articles on urban moss, nature in the city, and especially walks and talks with members of our community. I’m a plant advocate, keen to reverse plant blindness – the tendency to ignore plants around us. I’d love to hear your ideas about how we can live well with flora and fauna in our city. There’s much to learn!