Our African Tree Change

The Fennessy family moved from Melbourne to Namibia to help save giraffes from extinction. Samantha Trenoweth reports on how they are bringing up two resilient children on the savanna.

- Samantha Trenoweth

Dust clouds rise as a giraffe’s hooves pound the African savanna. A tranquilliser gun is fired and the giraffe comes down, all 1000 kilos of him. Julian Fennessy moves in. One good kick from any of the giraffe’s hooves could decapitate him, but that’s not going to happen – not today. Julian dodges the struggling legs, straddles the immense neck, covers the giraffe’s eyes with a towel to calm him and whispers, “You’ll be right, mate”. Julian is a giraffe whisperer, an Aussie biologist and a man on a mission to save the world’s tallest land animal from extinction.

Last December, the world learnt that giraffes are in peril – numbers have plummeted by 40 per cent in just 30 years. This came as a shock, even to members of the scientific and conservation communities, because giraffes are among the world’s least studied creatures. If Julian and his wife, Stephanie, had not spent the past 15 years stubbornly tracking, tackling and observing them, giraffes may have slipped unnoticed towards extinction.

The pair’s commitment to the cause has not been without sacrifices and dangers. For instance, when they moved with son Luca from Melbourne to Nairobi in Kenya in 2007, they found themselves bang in the middle of an armed uprising.

“The election result was disputed and there was constant rioting,” Julian recalls. “We lived about 200 metres from State House and people regularly tried to break into our compound. I remember one day, I was outside switching on the electric fence while Steph and Luca lay on the ground with bullets flying over their heads.”

Right at that moment, Stephanie says, she was tempted to hop on the first flight home but the Fennessys persevered. Three months and some of former UN Secretary-General KofiAnnan’s finest diplomacy later, the violence subsided and their work carried on.