Australian Story: July 14

Tonight’s Australian Story profiles Sean Willmore, founder of The Thin Green Line charity, providing help for wildlife rangers under attack by poachers.

The episode features Dr. Dame Jane Goodall, singer songwriter ‘Gotye’ (Wally De Backer) and Claudia McMurray, adviser to Prince Charles.

“One week I’m meeting with Prince Charles and the Duke of Cambridge – the next week I’m pushing a car out of the bog in Africa and trying to get an email to follow up from those meetings at St James Palace so I’m trying to email royalty from the back of a car stuck in a bog in Uganda,” Sean Willmore, Thin Green Line founder.

“When Sean told me about the condition in which he found so many of the rangers it completely rang a bell because I know – I know that this is the case and it’s always been worrying and to meet somebody who actually wanted to do something about it was for me very exciting,” Dr Dame Jane Goodall, primatologist.

An unlikely friendship between a former wildlife ranger and renowned British conservationist Dame Jane Goodall has become a game changer for the men and women on the front line of the bloody global war against poachers.

Four years ago Sean Willmore dragged himself off his sick bed to drive 90 minutes to Melbourne Zoo on the off chance that he might get a moment to talk to Dame Jane, famous for her groundbreaking work with chimpanzees.

Willmore was a Victorian park ranger who ten years ago founded a charity called The Thin Green Line to provide help for wildlife rangers around the world who were being left dead, or destitute by poachers supported by international crime syndicates.

He realised that it was crucial to ‘protect the protectors’ for their own sake and as a practical way of halting species decline. TGL raised many thousands of dollars and helped rangers and their families all around the world.

But by 2011 Willmore was at a low ebb, short of funds, about to sell his house, and in poor health when in a moment of ‘serendipity’ he drove to the zoo and managed to catch the attention of Dame Jane.

She threw her name and her support behind his efforts. Last year he was one of 100 conservationists to be invited to the Prince of Wales Summit on endangered species at St James Palace, London.

“The Prince of Wales was very taken with the story that Sean was telling and thought that anyone listening would have to be riveted by it and have to be compelled to want to help so having said that I think the first thing is now when the Prince of Wales speaks in other for a about this topic he always mentions the Thin Green,” says Claudia McMurray, Senior Counsellor to the Prince of Wales’s International
Sustainability Unit.

Now other high profile supporters have thrown their weight behind the work of the TGL and he has the ear of Prince William and Prince Charles in their conservation efforts.

An increase in demand for ivory in recent years by the growing middleclass in Asia has led to a startling increase in the numbers of elephants being killed in the wild and organised crime is now involved in the slaughter.

The Thin Green Line estimates at least 1000 park rangers have been killed by poachers during a 10 year period.

But according to Claudia McMurray efforts to better equip, train and support the rangers on the front line, along with other measures, are making a difference, For example she says the rate of slaughter of elephants is now showing a slow decline….

8pm Monday ABC1.