Our African tree change: the Aussie family saving giraffes
The Fennessy family moved from Melbourne to Namibia to help save giraffes from extinction. Samantha Trenoweth reports on how they are bringing up two resilient children on the savanna.
Dust clouds rise as a giraffe’s hooves pound the African savanna. A tranquilliser gun is fired and the giraffe comes down, all 1000 kilos of him. Julian Fennessy moves in. One good kick from any of the giraffe’s hooves could decapitate him, but that’s not going to happen – not today. Julian dodges the struggling legs, straddles the immense neck, covers the giraffe’s eyes with a towel to calm him and whispers, “You’ll be right, mate”. Julian is a giraffe whisperer, an Aussie biologist and a man on a mission to save the world’s tallest land animal from extinction.
Last December, the world learnt that giraffes are in peril – numbers have plummeted by 40 per cent in just 30 years. This came as a shock, even to members of the scientific and conservation communities, because giraffes are among the world’s least studied creatures. If Julian and his wife, Stephanie, had not spent the past 15 years stubbornly tracking, tackling and observing them, giraffes may have slipped unnoticed towards extinction.
The pair’s commitment to the cause has not been without sacrifices and dangers. For instance, when they moved with son Luca from Melbourne to Nairobi in Kenya in 2007, they found themselves bang in the middle of an armed uprising.
“The election result was disputed and there was constant rioting,” Julian recalls. “We lived about 200 metres from State House and people regularly tried to break into our compound. I remember one day, I was outside switching on the electric fence while Steph and Luca lay on the ground with bullets flying over their heads.”
Right at that moment, Stephanie says, she was tempted to hop on the first flight home but the Fennessys persevered. Three months and some of former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan’s finest diplomacy later, the violence subsided and their work carried on.
These days, the family (plus daughter Molly) lives in Windhoek, Namibia, and, says Stephanie, “Life here is probably not too different from life in an Australian country town. Windhoek is a small city. We have good friends, the weather is good and our kids go to a Catholic primary school. They can’t go to school by bike – we have to drive them – and school starts at seven. They’re the major differences.”
Together, Julian and Stephanie steer the Giraffe Conservation Foundation (GCF). Saving giraffes became the family business because, Stephanie says, “I realised that I could either not be involved with giraffes and never see Julian or I could get involved, share the burden and also spend more time together. So now we’re both working full-time with the GCF and, if possible, we travel together and take the kids along, too.”
The pair met in 1999, while on a work project in a remote corner of north-western Namibia. Stephanie was an environmental engineer who had grown up in a tiny village in Germany and was on her first work assignment in Africa. “It was a life-changing experience,” she says. “I had never camped in my life.
I had never driven a fourwheel-drive and, suddenly, I was driving by myself in this remote wilderness for days at a time. I was going from village to village. I would explain my proposed route to Julian and my boss, and say, ‘Okay, we will meet again in six days and if I’m not there after seven, then you come and look for me because probably my old car has broken down’.”
Julian had been travelling back and forth between
Africa and Australia for decades. At 16, he’d been whisked away from the “posh” Xavier College for boys in Melbourne and sent on a Rotary exchange to an interracial high school in Johannesburg, South Africa – no family, no friends, no backstops. It altered his understanding of himself and his place in the world completely.
Julian remained in South Africa for a year and while he was away, his father, who had been battling cancer, became increasingly ill and died.
Julian was heartbroken and had
It was a life-changing experience. I was driving by myself in this wilderness for days at a time.
never felt more alone, but, he says, “it put a lot of things into perspective. It shaped me. I think, with good support all around, you can grow up pretty quickly in a situation like that.”
Julian had always imagined he would become a stockbroker, but in retrospect, he says, “I hadn’t thought very much about life. In South Africa, I realised that I didn’t want to spend my life behind a desk because who knows how long you have to live?”
He also discovered the African wilderness and so began a fascination with nature that led to university degrees in biology and wildlife ecology, and finally took Julian back to Africa and the giraffes.
Last year, the Fennessys collaborated with the Uganda Wildlife Authority to relocate large numbers of the endangered Rothschild’s giraffe.
The giraffe’s traditional range in Murchison Falls National Park is also home to three-quarters of Uganda’s oil deposits. Mining and poaching were both threatening the giraffes there, so the decision was made to move some of their number to a more remote location across the Nile. It was a painstaking process – capturing individual giraffes, wooing them gently into a truck and then onto a barge to be floated across the wide, brown river – but all the animals arrived safely and there are plans to transfer another group later this year.
“Molly and Luca came with us,” says Stephanie. “They missed two weeks of school, but they gave a presentation in their respective classes when we came back. The day before the presentation, I asked Molly whether we should talk through what had happened so she would be prepared. She looked at me in utter disbelief and said, ‘Mum, I know how to translocate a giraffe’.”
Not all Julian’s expeditions are so family-friendly. Not long ago, he was travelling through Gambella National Park, one of the remotest parks in Africa, in western Ethiopia, near the border with war-torn South Sudan. No one had ever studied the giraffes there and Julian wanted to collect DNA samples and attach satellite trackers. He spent days surveying the area by helicopter before spotting a herd on the very edge of the park.
“As we came close to them,” he recalls, “we saw a group of men turn, look up, point their AK47s at us and start shooting. We had no windows on the helicopter, so bullets were flying all around us.”
The pilot moved fast and flew the team to safety, but it was a close call. It has been estimated that, over the past 10 years, 1000 park rangers have been killed by poachers in Africa. Stephanie remembers that figure whenever Julian is tracking giraffes through remote and dangerous wilderness. She has also instituted some rules about phoning home.
“I received a phone call at 11 o’clock that night telling me that poachers had tried to shoot down the helicopter,” she says. “Then, the next day, Julian forgot to ring. I was literally making plans for how I would go about life as a widow with two kids. So now we have some guidelines about phone calls.”
Has it been worth it?
“Absolutely,” they both insist. The battery of genetic and statistical information Julian has collected has increased our understanding of giraffes a hundredfold and it was largely as a result of the Fennessys’ scientific work and lobbying that, last year, giraffes moved from the Least Concern category to Vulnerable To Extinction on the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s Red
List of Threatened Species..
“Giraffes have already disappeared in seven countries in Africa,” says Julian. “It’s not going to happen again – not on my watch.”
Giraffes have disappeared in seven countries in Africa.