MELBOURNE ZOO

Back in the 1970s, Australia’s oldest zoo was still fixated on its collections: the more types of animals the better. Today it’s all about conservation.

“Many zoos talk about conservation as something far away. We pull no punches; we say go home and think about your choices as consumers,” says zoo CEO Jenny Gray.

Melbourne was the first zoo in the world to be certified carbon neutral, and one of the first to employ an animal welfare officer. Keepers tend to animals’ needs, and no visitor gets to gawk at the residents without also learning about such things as habitat destruction.

But no visitor is left in despair.

One large, leafy exhibit educates gorilla visitors about recycling their mobile phones to reduce the demand for coltan; another features a “zoopermarket”, where supermarket items are scanned to see if they use sustainable palm oil. For more than 2.5 million annual zoo visitors, such messages are everywhere.

It’s all part of a meticulous strategy engineered by the charismatic Gray and her team. Gray’s a former civil engineer and banker who in 2008 took on the directorship of Zoos Victoria, which includes Healesville Sanctuary and Werribee Open Range Zoo. It was a moribund organisation staffed by passionate people hungry for change.

Gray harnessed their fervour to fight extinction and redefined the zoo’s mission: it was to be a “zoo-based conservation organisation”. Her resolve was hardened with the extinction of one of Australia’s tiniest bats, the 40mm-long Christmas Island pipistrelle – its last calls recorded in Christmas Island rainforests in August 2009 by a rescue team including Zoos Victoria members. “No more extinctions on our watch” became Gray’s rallying cry.

That promise is being fulfilled. Emergency breeding programs by the zoo and its partners have staved off the extinction of species including the mainland eastern barred bandicoot, the helmeted honeyeater, the Baw Baw frog, and even Hong Kong’s tiny Romer’s tree frog. When the building of the new airport in the 1990s consumed much of the frog’s habitat, Chris Banks at Zoos Victoria answered the desperate call from naturalists to help save the species.

In July 2019, Zoos Victoria unveiled its new five-year Wildlife Conservation Master Plan, which pledges to stop 27 endangered Australian species following the Christmas Island pipistrelle into the endless dark of extinction.

They include Leadbeater’s possum, the Tasmanian devil, corroboree frogs and the Lord Howe Island stick insect.