PROTECT AND SERVE
MEET KATE GRAROCK, THE WOMAN WITH THE WORLD’S MOST ADVENTUROUS JOB: GETTING HELICOPTERED IN TO REMOTE AREAS OF AUSTRALIA AND FINDING ANIMAL SPECIES UNKNOWN TO SCIENCE
This conservation scientist has the world’s most fun (and essential) job.
an outdoorsy childhood spent camping and fourwheel-driving with her family, plus some solo hiking (“When I was about 14, my mum used to drop me off at one end of the Grampians, drive to the other end and hike to meet me”) meant Kate Grarock has always been confident in the bush. But before making a career out of her love for nature, she took a detour to the high seas.
“I got really sick in Year 12 and never finished it, and joining the navy seemed like a way out of my small country town in South Australia,” she says. “My first navy job was on Lady Musgrave Island on the Great Barrier Reef – we had to put a big ruler in the water, a tide pole. I remember sticking my head under the water and it blew my mind. All the fish, the coral…” After five years in the navy, mapping the ocean as a hydrographic surveyor, that passion for nature won out, and Grarock left to study environmental science, following up with a PHD.
All that study paid off: she’s now an expedition leader for Australian nature discovery program Bush Blitz, which involves organising trips to remote areas with teams of up to 30 scientists from museums, botanic gardens, universities and the CSIRO. “For taxonomists [scientists who categorise different species], it can be hard to get out into the field because you need so much money to get to these remote locations. Because this program’s so big, we can get helicopters and take them out to these places you couldn’t get to even after three days of hiking. Since 2010, we’ve discovered more than 1,700 new species in Australia, so it’s a unique project that’s pretty cool to be part of.”
And it’s a project that’s desperately needed. Australia has the world’s worst rate of mammal extinction, and the recent bushfire crisis hasn’t helped: early data suggests more than 100 threatened animal and plant species have lost at least half their habitat, meaning they’re far more likely to become extinct. And that’s just the species we know about. “It’s estimated something like 75 per cent of Australia’s biodiversity is unknown to science,” says Grarock. “And if we don’t know it’s there, we don’t know how to protect it.”
But the job isn’t all choppers and camping and swimming with whale sharks (although some of it is): Grarock’s role also involves a lot of logistics. “I’m coordinating it all, working out where we need food drops, where we get water from, when we need to be picked up – it’s very satisfying.” She gets to do some discovery of her own, too: “I went out with the spider team to a desert in Victoria a few months ago. I pointed one out and said, ‘Is this anything interesting?’ and the expert said, ‘My God, I think that’s a new species.’ But what’s shocking is how often that happens. Every trip we find something new – even just at base camp, there’ll be a beetle under your tent that’s totally new.”
Protection is a crucial part of scientists’ work, particularly now. “A lot of the bushfires have been in places we’ve already visited, so we’ve got that baseline data of what used to be there,” says Grarock. “The Threatened Species Commissioner has been looking at data and trying to identify which threatened species had habitat ranges in the areas that have burnt. So our data has been very helpful.”
It’s not just the practicalities of what has been lost and what fresh work there is to do that are occupying Grarock’s mind. “With a billion animals lost, as a conservation scientist, there’s a lot of grief involved with that. You feel this sorrow, and sometimes you think, what’s the point? But there’s never been a more important time to be a conservation scientist. Now is when we can really help with the recovery. On Kangaroo Island, for example, a lot of the endangered glossy black cockatoos’ habitat was destroyed. But had we not done all that work in the past to build their numbers, they probably would have been completely wiped out by these fires. So there are positives in there that we need to grip onto. Still, it’s really hit hard.”
The Bush Blitz project is a partnership between the federal government, BHP and the not-for-profit Earthwatch Australia, which must occasionally make for awkward conversations around the campfire. But Grarock is clear about the recent fires and what they mean: “The one thing I’m hoping is that they’re a wake-up call for all of us. Now we’re actually experiencing the consequences of climate change and I think it’s a good kick up the backside for all of us. We need to demand more and to do more ourselves.”
“WITH A billion ANIMALS LOST, THERE’S A LOT OF grief INVOLVED”