When Cooktown's Larissa Hale heard she had been entered in Prince William's second annual Earthshot Prize Awards, she was stunned.
"I didn't enter, I wasn't even aware that I was nominated," she says, admitting she didn't know much about the royal prize, which aims to search out and fund cutting-edge solutions to save our planet.
Hale later found out that her colleagues at The Great Barrier Reef Foundation had put her ground-breaking Indigenous women rangers' program forward.
All of a sudden, the Yuku Baja Muliku woman from Cape York, Queensland, was having conversations with the Earthshot team at Kensington Palace and the BBC so they could come and film her rangers managing and protecting Australia's most important marine treasure: the Great Barrier Reef.
"It was quite a process," Hale laughs.
But there would be much more to come. A couple of months ago she was told she had been chosen from more than 1,000 nominations as one of 15 finalists.
The council of judges included Sir David Attenborough, Cate Blanchett and Prince William and Hale's was the only Australian entry selected. The Queensland Indigenous Women Ranger Network could win £1 million (more than $1.7 million).
"We've only been running since 2018 and when I look at the other Earthshot Prize nominations I think, Oh my gosh, these are absolutely amazing — we're just starting out," she says.
Looking after country
Hale is up against Dutch and Portuguese entries in a prize category that asks for solutions to "revive our oceans".
Even though she is wide-eyed at the opposition, her team's unique work, which combines 60,000 years of Indigenous knowledge with savvy digital technologies, is a very strong contender.
Hale was asked to keep the news that she'd made the final a secret until today's big reveal by Prince William. "My direct team in Cooktown will be pretty excited because they've gone through all the filming with the BBC and they know I'm nominated for the Earthshot Prize, but they don't know I'm a finalist," she says.
The Queensland Indigenous Women Ranger Network is just one of many community leadership hats Hale wears as she follows her ancestors' call to be a custodian of her land.
"We had our land hand-back in 2006 and at the time we weren't sure what we were going to do. My grandfather asked me not to give up on our family's country on Archer Point, and I promised him I wouldn't," she says.
"In 2007, I moved home while I had my third child and started up Yuku Baja Muliku Indigenous Land and Sea Ranger Program. I was working between two jobs, with my husband working as a ranger ... on country with me."
The couple "learned on the job", Hale says, managing the land and sea, preparing for fires, dealing with feral cattle and pigs — "whatever needed to be done, we did to look after country".
Soon she began trying to recruit more women, challenging assumptions that only men could work outdoors. "It's so much more fun working out in the field," she says. "I love being out on the boat."
Combining ancient knowledge with modern technology
When Hale first started as a ranger coordinator some 15 years ago, she was the only woman in the room. "We really need women in the field, especially with traditional land and sea management," she says.
"We have women's areas and cultural practices that need to be kept separate from men's business. But also women have a definite, unique connection with country."
In 2018, Hale noticed more women were getting involved, so she decided to set up a network to encourage their engagement.
"We had about 34 ladies at the time who came to the initial forum and discussion about how we could try and get more women involved," she says. "Now we've got 124 ladies involved in the program."
Ancient knowledge combines with new technology in their work, with female-operated drones used to gather data.
"We learned how to use drones at Archer Point for fire management. We would set them up before the fire, during the fire and after the fire to monitor how the fire is going and what the scar is at the end," she says.
"Now we use it on the reef to monitor the coral. We'll go up and take a photo at high tide and then at low tide to see how clear the water is at certain times of the year, but also how much coral coverage we have, to see whether we've had a dieback at all."
They use the data they collect to educate people about coral bleaching and dieback, Hale says, and then work with the government and reef organisations to implement coral sanctuaries and regrowth projects.
"First Nations knowledge is extremely important. I'm working on a climate change project at the moment with some scientists from [James Cook University] and they are finding it very interesting because they've never sat down and spoken to traditional owners or First Nations people before on their thoughts about climate change or what we notice," she says.
"Our Elders have been saying for a long time that something's wrong, because our trees aren't fruiting at the time they're supposed to — everything has shifted 30 degrees or so. It's really nice to see that they're listening, that traditional owners' science and Western science are working together at last."
Harnessing human ingenuity and optimism
Prince William's Earthshot Prize — which takes its inspiration from President John F Kennedy's Moonshot — has big aspirations. Moonshot put a man on the moon; Earthshot wants to solve our greatest environmental challenges and arrest climate change.
It's a legacy 10-year project for the new Prince of Wales, who has taken on the mantle of eco-warrior as he hopes to answer his generation's call to action.
By 2030, the prize will have handed out £50million to create simple, ambitious solutions for a more sustainable future.
"The innovators, leaders and visionaries that make up our 2022 Earthshot finalists prove there are many reasons to be optimistic about the future of our planet," Prince William says. "Seemingly impossible goals are within reach if we only harness the limitless power of innovation, human ingenuity and urgent optimism."
Hale has never met a member of the royal family, although her mother, Irene Bowyer, proudly remembers presenting Queen Elizabeth II with flowers as a 10-year-old, when the monarch was visiting Cooktown.
"I'm not surprised that Prince William founded Earthshot because I have seen some of the different things that he has been involved with around the world and also because of his father's work," Hale says of King Charles, whose commitment to environmental conservation impresses her.
"You'd find that a lot of governments don't seem to recognise climate change as an issue or that we have environmental issues around the world that need support. [The Royal Family] did notice. That's what I liked."
The Earthshot winners will be announced at a ceremony in Boston on Friday, December 2 and aired around the world on BBC. Finalists, including Hale, will take part via a livestream from their home countries.
"The million pounds would really support the project moving forward and help us grow," Hale says with crossed fingers. "Because we're mostly state funded, we're only allowed to stay within Queensland.
"I think it would be amazing if the model we're using at the moment could be carried across Australia, if not further."
