Wildlife rescuer CLAIRE SMITH, Queensland's Local Hero for 2025, is using her Australian of the Year Awards platform to rally community support for an endangered Aussie icon.

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As the founder of Wildlife Rescue Sunshine Coast, I've spent more than two decades rescuing and caring for wildlife.

I've held kangaroo joeys in my arms as they took their last breath. I've carried injured gliders and broken koalas from the roadside, casualties of a world moving too fast and a system that refuses to slow down. And I've watched helplessly as forests are flattened to nothing but dust and fenceposts.

I couldn't watch this story unfold any more without writing a new ending, so I co-founded the environmental organisation Barefoot on the Ground in 2024.

Barefoot on the Ground is not just another wildlife charity. It's everything I know in my bones to be necessary for change: connection, protection and action. Our project is about more than just saving animals - it's about reconnecting people with the land we've forgotten how to listen to and creating a future where wildlife is not something we talk about in the past tense.

Koalas, once abundant, are endangered in Queensland, NSW and the ACT and sliding toward extinction. That's hard fact. According to the Australian Koala Foundation, we may have fewer than 50,000 wild koalas left across our country. In some regions, numbers are so low that they're no longer viable populations. This is known as being "functionally extinct".

And yet, the bulldozers keep coming.

Queensland is one of the worst regions in the world for deforestation. Australia ranks on the Global Deforestation Frontline List with 23 other countries like the Congo and Brazil. Between 2016 and 2024, more than 3 million hectares of bushland was cleared in Queensland alone.

That's about the size of Switzerland.

Even with 2022's official classification of koalas as endangered, land-clearing continues and development rolls on,........

© Canberra Times