Carla Eisemberg

“Miss, miss, can I play with your robot?” The question comes from a young local school girl standing in front of our stall at Barunga Festival, 80 kilometres southeast of Katherine in the Northern Territory. She points at our broken robot. We are hot, tired and getting ready to pack up, and explain to her that it is no longer working. She insists she would like to play with it anyway. So we concede. In five minutes, she has fixed it and returns a fully functional robot.

Australia’s unique biodiversity is under siege. The national list of species threatened with extinction is growing, with eight animals and five plants added just last month. Among them is the pig-nosed turtle, a peculiar creature found in catchments of the Northern Territory. Once teeming with life, these seasonal floodplains are now fragmented and degraded from land clearing, water extraction and feral animals.