Back from the Brink
Our time at Scotia Wildlife Sanctuary
22.09.2008 - 14.10.2008
35 °C
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Scotia - Back from the brink
on adamandmeg's travel map.
The Australian Wildlife Conservancy owns a wildlife sanctuary about half way between Broken Hill and Wentworth in Western NSW. There, they are fighting on the front line of Wild Life conservation and are literally bringing critically endangered species back from the brink of extinction. We were lucky enough to work there for a month in October 2008. This was a tremendous privilege as we got the chance to work with endangered mammals.
We feel like we have been around the world a couple of times or maybe more after leaving Melbourne. We spent a lovely three days with Viv and her girls, Jessica and Olivia. It was an action packed few days one of which we had the girls for the whole day. Exhausting affair even with Olivia napping twice and Jessica almost able to amuse herself with her favourite toy (a trampoline spring in an ice-cream container called Captain Hook). Anyway, we had a lovely time chatting and catching up and marveling at how much the girls had grown.
After Puckapunyal it was off to Bec and Aly's new pad for the Grand Final. We stayed for six days re-acquainting ourselves with Canberra and more importantly the new Canberra Centre - awesome, love a big shopping centre. We had a great time hanging out with Bec and Aly and the cats. We even headed to RMC for old times sake.
After Canberra we had a night in Wagga with Peta and Bwett. We had a fantastic dinner avec magheuritas at Montezumas and then we 'got ourselves a convoy' to the Scotia turn off for the next day. After having a good chat to Peta and Bwett about our impending employment and the possibility of using scary power tools we felt much better about the job in general.

Our arrival at Scotia was hassle free as we set up our relatively luxurious accommodation. We have a whole corner of one of the buildings complete with massive kitchen / living area, bedroom, bathroom, sunroom and verandah. Fantastic!! Our first few days we spent cruising around with Tony who has worked here for a couple of years. We learnt a lot and realised that there were plenty of fences, compounds and gates and that we would get lost consistently over the next two days. The parts of Scotia that we are working in are called stage one and stage two. Stage one and two have been declared free of feral animals which was an enormous job. In these areas there are a number of endangered species being managed for release or for insurance. It is pretty cool. On our first few days here we went out with the ecologist and helped with bagging, checking and releasing woylies (a cute little hopping mammal) into stage two. We have also bee entrusted with feeding the bilbys and the bridled nailtail wallabies. The wallabies all wait around for feed time and they are just lovely. We have taken some good snaps of these little guys. Our main job over the last four days has been building pens for the wallabies - a few of them are getting relocated and the pens are for any potentially sick ones that get trapped. Hopefully they won't have to use our work of art at all!! The pens are almost finished but there has been dramas and blood, sweat and tears already. Adam did bang in a star picket upside down which is quite a big effort. Ian, who is sort of supervising us, really only comes up to laugh which is fine by us!

We did manage to get a trip into Mildura - or the Big Smoke as we now call it - to pick up a vehicle and some other stuff. Very exciting trip which also included ten minutes in Coles for a power shop.
So we have been pretty busy here working up to ten hours a day. At least we won't get bored! We also have four days off starting tomorrow which we will hopefully spend with Peta and Brett in Broken Hill. We will most definitely need a resupply of interesting food. The day our cashews ran out was a sad day indeed!!!!
Anyway, that's all from us for now. We are both well and still loving it up here!!
Posted by adamandmeg 19.12.2008 4:10 PM Archived in Australia Comments (0)








