A YOUNG AUSTRALIAN TAKES ACTION FOR RHINOS

During a trip to South Africa with her family in April this year, Holly a 12 year old Australian student, said ‘her heart almost broke’ when she heard there had been a rhino poached while she was visiting the Pilanesberg Game Reserve.

She returned home to Australia determined to take action for rhinos. For one of her classes at school, she was asked to choose her passion, then find a problem presented in that passion, and do something to fix it. Holly chose rhinos.

Read Holly’s blog post about her rhino awareness campaign and how she became a rhino ambassador in her community! Please read Holly’s words and we hope it inspires others to take action to help save rhinos.

A policeman signed Holly’s rhino poster. He told Holly that if people all around the world helped rhinos, it would really make a difference.

My name is Holly, I am 12 years old and I live in NSW Australia.

Rhino poaching has been happening for a while now and my trip to South Africa earlier this year has inspired me to put a stop to it. When I was in South Africa we visited some amazing national parks, one of them being the Pilanesberg Game Reserve. I was having so much fun there but my heart almost broke when I heard there had been a rhino poached the night before, and to make it worse they thought it was poached by someone that was working there at the time. I then realised I had to put a stop to it.

For my school project, we had to do many activities but there were two things I am enjoying the most; they are my action and my individual creative expression. For the action we had to do something that made a difference and made people have emotions and change their thinking on my topic, so I decided to make a cross. Its 1.6m in length and in width 1m. I painted this cross black and at the top put a laminated piece of paper saying 1175 Rhinos poached Africa in 2017 and then in the middle another laminated sheet of paper reading my quote which is

When the air is polluted, once there Is no more life, once we poach all our animals, once our beautiful Rhinos become extinct, I hope that everyone will realise that once you poach and kill a Rhino, you can never take that action back.

Once I had done that I had hammered 1175 nails into the cross and then painted the tops red and so it ended like this. I thoroughly enjoyed making that cross.

The last thing that I really enjoyed doing was my Individual creative expression. For this we had to present an artwork or a speech or something creative that changes the emotions of the people that look at it and that also helps us put a stop to it.  So I printed a grey rhino with its horn still on to show the rhino before its death and future fate (being poached) comes. I then put it in the middle of an even bigger board and with my cross went to local markets hoping to attract some people that might want to help and save the rhinos. I was planning to get the outside board signed with the names of people that want to help to put a stop to rhino poaching.

It took Holly 2 weeks to hammer all 1,175 nails. She was able to complete it during her September school holidays.

I was nervous at first to explain my cross to people and ask if they wanted to sign the board and help stop rhino poaching. A lovely girl came up and signed it first and that made me feel braver and open up more courage to ask different people. Some people were lovely and some others quite rudely said they don’t want to sign it.  The cross is very striking and very dramatic. Some people seemed to have an emotional reaction to the cross. One lady tried to touch every red nail as if she was trying to connect with every rhino that had been killed. Some people didn’t even know about rhino poaching. Eventually I got it signed almost all over and then went to ask a POLICEMAN who very happily signed it, which I was very excited about.

I hope I raised awareness about rhino poaching and that I helped make more people more concerned about what will happen if we don’t do something. If we can save a rhino’s life, our life will be stronger and happier also. This is just part of my story and I would greatly like to thank and would love you to thank her if you know her, this lady being Wendy Hapgood from Wild Tomorrow Fund. Wendy was part of the journey with me, helping me every step of the way.

Thanks

Holly