Minidokumentarer:
20 years on: The influence of Steve Irwin lives on
It has been 20 years since Steve Irwin, the Australian conservationist, tragically died. Yet his influence can still be seen in the work of people dedicated to protecting wildlife around the world. One of them is Ellisha Martion, founder of Big Desert Dingo Research.
“I grew up watching him, and I think his influence sits underneath a lot of what I do now.”
Today, Ellisha Martion works to protect Australia’s dingoes. She works with Wilkerr, the Wergaia word for dingo and the name used for the dingo population of the Big Desert and surrounding region. She walks hundreds of kilometres through the Australian bush to collect data from camera monitoring and genetic samples in the Big Desert and Wyperfeld region of northwestern Victoria.
He showed that animals do not have to be universally loved to deserve protection
“He made wildlife feel exciting, important and worth defending. More than that, he showed that animals do not have to be universally loved to deserve protection.”
For Ellisha Martion, dingoes are among Australia’s most misunderstood native animals. They are often labelled pests or “wild dogs”, which she believes makes meaningful conservation more difficult.
Ellisha Martion has no formal education in wildlife biology. She started with one camera because she cared about what was happening to the dingoes and wanted to understand more. Since then, her work has grown into long-term monitoring, genetic sampling and research collaborations.
This evidence has also contributed to the nomination of Wilkerr for threatened species assessment under Australia’s federal Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act.
“Steve [Irwin] made conservation feel like something you could participate in, not something that belonged only to experts.”