As a journalist with an environmental science background, I like nothing better than getting out in nature with interesting researchers and local people to write stories, take photographs and video footage, and do radio interviews.

This is exactly what I did when I went on a scientific expedition to map the fauna and flora on the mountaintops of Hinchinbrook Island, in north Queensland, several years ago. I went with the biologists to set up and check traps, spotlight animals, check out the plants and stumble down creeks at midnight looking for frogs.

Even though it teemed with rain most of the time, and I had three leeches in my eyeball after frogging one night, it was one of the best experiences of my life. It also resulted in numerous radio and TV stories and press articles, including a magazine article in GEO.

The biologists on the trip were somewhat wary of having a journalist along, but once they saw how I got stuck in to helping them with their work and getting them useful publicity, I became an accepted member of the team.

On another trip to the Philippines to help with an Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research project aiming to write about the landcare movement there, I felt extraordinarily privileged to be invited into people’s villages and homes to ask them about their personal landcare stories.

This trip, and my liaison with the local Filipino landcare facilitators, resulted in an extraordinary book of people’s landcare stories, and ongoing personal and professional relationships with those involved in Philippines landcare. For example, we produce a regular ezine for the ACIAR-AusAID Landcare project.

One of the most satisfying, and challenging, projects I’ve worked on was a series of 18 fact sheets for the Queensland Department of Natural Resources and Water.

Being involved in just about every aspect of this major project was a learning curve for me. Our brief was to synthesise many complex documents on the social and economic aspects of natural resource management into concise, easy to understand fact sheets for Queensland Catchment Management Authorities. 

For me, the project reinforced the importance of teamwork. All members of the Econnect team worked on writing fact sheets for this project. Our colleague Don Alcock of keytext communication also lent us his fact sheet writing experience. We worked with the graphic designers at See-Saw to design the printed fact sheets and, once they were finalised, to put everything onto a fully searchable CD-ROM.

I found working so closely with See-Saw a great experience, particularly in regard to producing the CD-ROM, which was something I had never been involved with before.

The project was not without its speed bumps, but in the end we were proud of our efforts and our client was happy with the finished product. And I, for one, learnt some new things.