Wednesday, September 3, 2008

Save the Koala



I am back in Australia at the moment touring the country to see potential filming locations and meeting with various people from within the industry as I go. Its quite exhausting given the sheer size of the Australia and the limited time frame in which we are trying to do it.

I started the trip with a week of meetings in Sydney, presentations and functions before heading to Perth and Adelaide with my tour of duty leader, Caroline. We managed to spend an average 6 -7 hours driving per day over 2 weeks with only brief breaks for quick photographic snaps of whatever looked particularly interesting. Western and South Australia made me realize very quickly that given all that time traveling by road and air that we barely scratched the surface of those states let alone the entire country.

My favorite part of the journey has been seeing all the amazing pink and grey galahs, cockatoo’s, kangaroo’s, wallabies, emus and camels that make Australia so unique. I was desperate to find a koala on the journey and having had no success spent some time this morning looking up information on how to find a koala.

Unfortunately it will not be an easy task but I did find a great website that made me realize why. It seems they are disappearing at an alarming rate. Given the size of Australia’s land mass is similar the USA, to discover we only have 100,000 koala’s left when we used to have millions of the fluffy little marsupials, is devastating. I had no idea that they were endangered or under that much threat!

So fine friends of mine, I challenge you do something to help the cutest bear in the world. It doesn’t mean anything drastic or giving away your child’s college fund, but it does mean sharing the information and doing something if you can (such as for my Aussie buddies – making sure they talk to kids about this at school and perhaps donate money to Save A Koala raised at a local fete).

Learn more about our adorable koalas at www.savethekoala.com and don’t wait until it is too late to help. How sad it would be for us all if we manage to lose one of our most special animals.

Photo courtesy of: www.savethekoala.com