Paula Boer

Paula lives on 500 acres of natural bush in the Snowy Mountains region of Australia with her old rescue dog Cal. A year after her husband’s death from cancer, the January 2020 bushfire totally devastated her land and killed her horses. She has subsequently established the property as a wildlife sanctuary and added a biodiversity covenant to the title to protect it from development in-perpetuity. From recording the recovery of the flora and fauna following the bushfire, Paula became the top contributor on iNaturalist for the Environment Recovery Project which went on to win a prestigious Australian Museum Eureka Award for Innovation in Citizen Science. Paula also catalogued her observations into a hardback book, Bushfire Recovery at Badja, incorporating over 1,300 of her photographs covering 400 species.

Paula has always loved to travel and spent a year overlanding around South America and six months crossing Africa. She has visited all 7 continents, with the Antarctica Climate Expedition (ACE) being the most recent highlight. Paula prefers wildernesses and wildlife to cities and people, and particularly likes the ‘less loved’ creatures such as spiders and snakes. She is a member of her local wildlife rescue organisation, houses orphaned wombats prior to release, is the local snake catcher, and euthaniser for injured wildlife.

A former computer consultant, Paula became an author when she retired, writing a range of short stories and magazine articles about wildlife and horses. She also loves speculative fiction and has had 10 novels published. Paula has recently turned her hand to memoir and looks forward to incorporating her experiences in Antarctica, and now the Arctic, to raise awareness of the state of the planet and humanity’s impact on the environment.