An orangutan reached for Natalie’s hand. It was a defining moment for her

Author and environmentalist Natalie Kyriacou, 37, became fascinated with nature as a five-year-old growing up in Viewbank, Melbourne, with family camping trips to Pennyroyal Valley, Lake Hume and Port Fairy igniting, in particular, an early infatuation with frogs. On a sunny Sydney morning, she tells me how, as a five-year-old, she’d chase them with a fierce determination to befriend them. As they kept escaping her muddy clutches, she remembers learning a lesson that followed her into adulthood: we humans aren’t the masters of nature we imagine ourselves to be.

The reign of humans has, Kyriacou points out, been devastating for life on earth. In 2012, in the jungle of Borneo, she tells how she came, unforgettably, face to face with a victim of that devastation. One day, while she was working at the Sepilok Orangutan Rehabilitation Centre, a young orangutan, orphaned and malnourished, came up behind her, stood up and reached for her hand. “He was looking at me, holding my hand and was so gentle, but it was also awful because an orangutan isn’t meant to do that,” she says. “He was acting like a human. His mum had been killed to make way for a palm-oil plantation.”

But Kyriacou says she also met people in Borneo who truly lived alongside nature without the desire to possess it. Back in Australia, she wanted to help instil the same passion she’d witnessed in the island by “engaging young people in wildlife and environmental conservation”. Games such as Angry Birds were exceptionally popular at the time, but offered kids little in the way of impactful education, so, in 2012, Kyriacou created World of the Wild, an app that gamifies the rescue, rehab and care of animals in endangered habitats. Each of the 18 animals featured in the game represents a real-life charity.

The following year, she founded the social enterprise My Green World, which creates educational programs for kids to learn about wildlife conservation. Her work earned her an Order of Australia Medal in 2018.

Now she’s written Nature’s Last Dance ($37), which tells stories of survival and wonder against the backdrop of mass extinction. The same child-like fascination that possessed Kyriacou to chase frogs at five is woven throughout its pages, which transport readers to exotic destinations – from the rugged wilderness of Tasmania and a fortress in Costa Rica, to the forests south of the Congo River.

In these Congo forests, Kyriacou tells us, female bonobos are challenging Darwin’s theory of evolution that has held sway for nearly 170 years. Separating sex from reproduction (like humans), the primates enhance their bonds with each other by rubbing together their, um, clitorises. “Darwin tended to overlook the female of most species,” says Kyriacou, “and so missed things, like the fact that the bonobos have more peaceful and collaborative societies because the [females] play a strengthened role.” Clitoral-rubbing is now thought to be so beneficial to bonobos in fostering social cohesion that the size of the organ has become notably exaggerated.

Kyriacou hopes these stories – of how nature challenges our biases and defies our understanding, all while managing to be frighteningly fragile and surprisingly resilient – will remind us why the natural world is worth fighting for.

But is the battle already lost? Is it too late to reverse the damage humans have inflicted? “I’m deeply concerned,” admits Kyriacou. “But I don’t believe we’re doomed. And I’m nowhere near ready to stop fighting.”

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