Transforming Moments

What I really love about regen ag is the opportunity to build something that's going to last longer than I will. As part of one of my core units uh I had to do up a grant application. And I found Nuffield scholarships and I thought yeah that's something that I could do. So, you're looking at the 2023 Nuffield scholar for integrated pest management in beekeeping. Thanks to AgriFutures, I've been travelling the world uh working with some of the world's best beekeepers and really figuring out how Australian beekeepers can deal with varroa mite and how to really get the best out of our industry. Both honey and pollination. Not everyone eats honey, not everyone keeps bees but everybody eats food that's pollinated by bees. It's the most beautiful uh peaceful thing just to be walking out amongst the grass and you can run your hands through the grass seeds and see the bees out pollinating the flowers.

You just feel like you're exactly where you need to be and you get addicted to that feeling it's it's incredible. I started singing and playing one of my original songs for the first time and everyone was really into it and I felt super connected and grateful in that moment for the gift of being a creative person and an artist and I was able to really enjoy my degree from that moment because I remembered why I was there and that was to share music and connect. Once you get up on stage and you perform and something that you've written yourself that you've gone through and experienced emotionally and when you share that with other people and they connect it's just the most amazing process that is like you wouldn't give it up for anything. You feel so safe and at home in the most beautiful way like from what you have and you're sharing it and you just feel like you're exactly where you need to be.

I feel good about contributing to that knowledge um so that we can start moving forward. I had a major transformative moment when I went to Vietnam with a group of 16 students on a New Colombo scholarship program. We went out to investigate a massive mortality event of prawns and on the way out there I was kind of surrounded by these rice fields and I saw all these farmers spraying with pesticides and I started to wonder if that was getting into the water um ways and impacting the prawns so we took a bunch of samples from the water and ultimately what I found was this really nasty pesticide that was banned worldwide. So, it got me thinking about whether this problem was also occurring in Australia and how that impacts our seafood safety. And that initiated a whole new line of research and it's been really quite um informative to fill this gap in knowledge about contamination of our seafood because ultimately the health our health is intrinsically related to the healthiness of our food and the environment in which it's been grown.

Here I am still working every single day as hard as I can to try to create that change that I wish to see in the world. I was um studying in Ermera District in Gleno which is uh in the highlands of Timor-Leste and I was during my undergraduate studies here at Southern Cross Uni and I was um lucky enough to be selected as a part of a New Colombo Plan scholarship. It was such a light bulb moment for me with the work that I do in that, you know, this country is one of the poorest nations in the world. These bees landed outside and I learned later on there's these young boys harvesting this honey from the tops of 50 meter trees and it's super dangerous. They do it at night time with a burning branch and they often share the money that they make from that honey amongst their community and very dangerous and people actually fall to their deaths harvesting this honey and I just thought there's got to be a better way to do this and very naively I thought it would it would be very easy to create solutions to poverty through agriculture but here I am still working every single day as hard as I can to try to create that change that I wish to see in the world.