Australian Story: Apr 23

Risk-taker, investigator and troublemaker.

Next week Australian Story profiles Lyn White, the animal activist who captured footage of Australian cattle inside Indonesian abattoirs for Four Corners.

Lyn White triggered one of the biggest outpourings of public protest in decades when she showed the ABC TV’s Four Corners disturbing images of Australian cattle being mistreated in Indonesia. The response to the program’s Logie-winning edition, Bloody Business was unprecedented.

Not everybody saw eye-to-eye with White. Cattle producers hit with a suspension were suffering and their passions were equally strong.

White first featured on Australian Story ten years ago. Back then she was a former police officer embarking on a new career. No-one could have guessed the controversy and the headlines that would follow as she became a leader in her field.

It’s not a role that White could have ever envisaged for herself. She says she was a shy girl from Adelaide with a strong sense of right and wrong, but an equally low sense of self-esteem.

When she joined the police force she was so lacking in confidence that White says, ‘I actually managed to get the nickname of Hermie, short for Hermit.’

The time in the police force was her making. It gave her a strong sense of self and she learned the skills that would later be used to such powerful effect in her new career.

Her former police partner, Sergeant Andrew ‘Aussie’ Ausserlechner talks of her abilities, ‘she’s got some sort of charisma and I reckon she’s able to just sort of get her way into places where perhaps Joe Average can’t.’

Going where most fear to tread and armed only with a small camera, White has ignited a fiery debate about the future of Australia’s live cattle trade with Indonesia, after her evidence of gross mistreatment by abattoir workers was made public.

White’s achievements in putting the live export issue on the map are a decade in the making. During that time she has been responsible for a dozen major media exposés and has developed a fearsome reputation.

The ‘father’ of Australia’s animal welfare movement Peter Singer says, ‘I think she probably is the most effective animal campaigner that I’ve seen in my 40 years in the movement.’

Standing before massive rallies in Sydney and Melbourne last year, White knew that she had finally hit a nerve. Australians were repulsed by the images they saw and through letters to the editor, talkback radio, social media and emails to politicians they were making their feelings known.

Her determination to expose the goings on in foreign abattoirs overrides any consideration of the enormous personal risks she takes.

60 Minutes producer, Howard Sacre who first broadcast her footage in 2004 says, ‘It just blows me away how gutsy she is because she’s taking huge risks. She gets into these places with a hidden camera with men with big knives and axes who don’t know her. I mean she could disappear in an instant.’

Since last year’s investigation White has become a regular visitor to Parliament House where politicians are now paying attention. She is determined to end the live export trade and is gearing up for a new campaign against battery cages, which are now outlawed by the EU.

Singer Missy Higgins is by her side as an Animals Australia ambassador. Higgins was ‘thrilled’ to meet White because, ‘I admired her so much. There are not many people who can singlehandedly say that they’ve made such a difference in one area.’

8pm Monday ABC1.