As part of our* focus on World Heritage protection for takayna, the Tarkine rainforest under threat in North-West Tasmania, our writer Ruby had the chance to interview two incredible supporters of the campaign. Time to get inspired, courtesy of Bob Brown and Rick Ridgeway. (*We are Explorers)

I ride the elevator in Fraiser Suites, Sydney with Dr Bob Brown and Rick Ridgeway to the second floor, where we take a seat in the golden glow of an empty restaurant. I have never conducted an interview like this before and I’m nervous. I look up at their kind faces and down at my pad of scribbled, nonsensical questions. My motorbike helmet is resting on the floor and my windswept hair does a good job of hiding my anxious tics.

Who Are These Men?

Knowing this and more about Rick and Bob made me nervous — I expected hard, straight-down-the-line kind of characters, worn with the weathering of politics and campaigning. However, here before me sat two great-uncles with wisdom in their eyes. If only there were damper, tea, and a little warm fire.

I open the conversation with music, with the sounds and songs we listen to when we’re out in nature, on top of a mountain or sheltered beneath a cave. What ensues is 15 minutes of conversation between Rick and Bob about bird calls.

Rick: “Through my life I’ve tried to learn to increasingly pay attention, to use all my senses. It’s a hard thing to learn how to do. It’s a discipline that you can never get good enough at. You think you’re kind of getting there, and then you listen a little more intensely only to find there is more that you’ve missed. It’s the sound of birds that actually got me started on a lifelong commitment to paying more attention.”

Bob: “There’s a lot of contention about whether our music comes from the birds. The songbirds of the world came out of Australia and spread to the rest of the planet. Wherever you are in Australia you hear these birds talking to each other and setting their territories. It’s endlessly fascinating to me. In Tasmania, there’s the screech of the peregrine falcon – they fly very fast, they’re the fastest bird on Earth! Or the call of the great yellow-tail black cockatoo… EEERA, EEERA! Albums come and go, but birds are a constant.”

In the echo of the second floor, Bob’s “EEERA” disrupts the murmur of voices. It seems out of place in this concrete jungle. After a short pause, the city keeps moving, and Rick picks up the conversation about diving hummingbirds and their “whoop noise” mating calls. He’d hear them from his studio apartment in southern California as a young boy, and realised that those mating calls were happening all around him, constantly. “That was my first understanding of what awareness is really like. I’ve been a committed listener since then”.

So, what next?

Remember sitting in class at school and listening to the stories of global atrocities and thinking, “If I was alive then, I would have done something”? Well, you’re alive now. What you would have done then is what you would have done now. It’s time to act. It’s time to fight for the protection of our wild spaces. If you’re passionate about the Tarkine, here are 8 things you can do right now to protect it.

Readers, we’re standing on the shoulders of environmental conservationist giants like Bob Brown and Rick Ridgeway. Now it’s our turn to provide strong shoulders for future generations to climb onto.

“Everyone in our democracy has a very powerful role to play. Think laterally about the way you can help.” (Dr. Bob Brown)

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We are Explorers