At peace with her imminent death, Shona Chisholm is leaving a legacy for Tidbinbilla Nature Reserve, to open people's eyes to the Australian bush's beauty and help the environment's grim future.
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Having overcome cancer about 17 years ago, the 75-year-old mother of three now suffers from a related illness that is terminal and confines her mobility to a wheelchair, a far cry from the long bush walks she made every week with friends into Namadgi National Park and Tidbinbilla.
Mrs Chisholm's legacy includes a brochure for ACT Parks and Conservation Service containing powerful quotes from world leaders including Mahatma Gandhi, Albert Einstein and Nelson Mandela. A much-loved conservation volunteer interpreter, Mrs Chisholm says the words, which appear on a bridge running through Tidbinbilla's wetlands, express how she feels about the bush. The brochure will be available for visitors to Tidbinbilla.
Her daughter Ngaire Kinnera says her mother's acute spiritual connection to the bush, which is not religious, deeply nourishes her, a thought the late biologist and writer Rachel Carson, who is among those quoted on the wetlands bridge, wrote: "Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts."
Mrs Chisholm came to Canberra from Dunedin, New Zealand, in 1961. At her home in Dunedin, nearby bushland spread out with tracks where the neighbourhood kids walked. She recalls birds following them, feeding off the insects they disturbed. "We knew where vines were, that we could swing right across a gully and back. We had such freedom in places like that."
Later in the ACT, with one of her children then a four-week-old baby in a sling in Tidbinbilla, Mrs Chisholm rekindled that connection to nature. Seeing platypus, brolgas, antechinus and wedge-tailed eagles, and walking up to Hanging Rock which Aboriginals had used for a sanctuary, has sustained and deepened her commitment to conservation.
"I love the rain in the bush," she said. "I was sitting there for an hour or so and this little skink came around my boots, mouthed at my little metal tags. I was so still it moved around me and came back and started looking up my trouser leg. And I thought, no, I really don't want you to do that. So I slowly bent down and pulled my trouser leg in and he came and sat on my knee."
Mrs Chisholm says people lose track of what is in the bush and can lose sight of the the value of the environment and will continue to exploit it and throw away all sorts of things that have come from the ground's resources. "I cannot tell you how sad that is for me, to know I am going to leave this Earth and it is still going to be exploited."
She said for most of Tidbinbilla's 25,000 years of human occupation, Aborigines gave a great example of nurturing the land. When Europeans arrived and saw Aborigines having feasted on bogong moths in the mountains, they remarked how glossy their skin looked from all that protein they had consumed.
Mrs Chisholm told documentary producer Richard Snashall during an interview for ACT Parks Service on her legacy, "People have been asking me, Shona, do you want to have your name put to things?
"Apparently they like me and want me to be around for a bit longer. I don't have a need for that, I want to just keep doing this sort of thing, passing this message on. I am not going to be in this world for more than a few more months, and if I can leave a legacy like this, I will be the happiest little sand girl you could imagine."
