Above and Beyond

Canberra women aren’t just changing our city. They’re changing our world.

We meet two Canberra women with a taste for something outside the confines of a nine-to-five workplace, and driven to make a difference.

Anna Haskovec

Event Organiser Turned Refugee Camp Logistician

Anna Haskovec has crammed a lot into 27 years. From rural roots at her parents’ property in Murrumbateman, she’s voyaged on a Sea Shepherd expedition, been a producer’s assistant at the Sydney Opera House, a logistician at a Ugandan refugee camp and is currently transporting tuberculosis treatment via raft to remote communities in Papua New Guinea (PNG).

As you might expect, her journey to these varied career points was not a straight one but it is one built around a desire to help. For Anna, it all started when she took a job repairing Sea Shepherd vessels in Port Melbourne.

“I joined because I wanted to be a part of protecting ocean wildlife,” she explains via email from where she’s currently based in PNG. “The Antarctic waters are a total wild west, there is no law enforcement or fisheries patrols protecting the sanctuaries or endangered species. Antarctica and its sea life deserve protection from us.

“I went on to sail with them and spent three months out at sea. Sailing the Ross Sea was incredible, the seascape was amazing—the depth and complexity of icebergs is honestly unreal, like incredible floating kingdoms made out of 100 shades of blue.”

Back on dry land once more, Anna worked in events management at the Sydney Opera House and for Melbourne’s Federation Square (as well as a stint in Nepal, where she got stuck during the 2015 earthquake). While Anna enjoyed the roles, the refugee crisis in the Mediterranean was reaching epic proportions, so she reached out to German organisation Jugend Rettet.

“Jugend Rettet [is] a German group committed to the fact that everyone at sea deserves rescue,” she explains. “This really resonated with me. As a seafarer you have an obligation to assist vessels in need. You don’t get to ask for their citizenship status before you drag them on-board.”

So Anna booked a one-way ticket, spending the next few months at the forefront of the search and rescue operation in international waters.

“It was pretty scary to be honest... because I knew that were we were headed we were really the end of the line. We operated the SAR search and rescue zone off the coast of Libya on the lookout for people in distress.”

Even though Anna had been through Sea Shepherd’s rigorous training when it came to safety at sea, the stories of the people they helped have stayed with her.

“The people that we were dealing with have been looking for safety for often years,” she says. “They have been escaping wars, crossing deserts being used as slaves in Tripoli and have nothing, not a single possession.

“The one thing I noticed that a lot of them carried were small bits of paper—letters from loved ones, scraps of paper with phone numbers on them. Small enough to be hidden and personal enough to not be of worth to anyone else and not stolen.

“The last rescue that we did I remember one women in particular. I found some new clothes for her from our donations and she took them, gladly discarding her old clothes—literally the last things she owned in the world.

“During this process we didn’t make eye contact or speak at all. But by the end she looked at me and she gave me a small nod. This was, to be honest, the best feeling I’ve ever had in the world. In hindsight she was probably in shock but this little flicker of her really meant a lot to me.”

With all this behind her, it’s unsurprising that Anna chose to apply for a role with the international aid organisation Médecins Sans Frontières/Doctors Without Borders (MSF).

“It happened pretty organically for me,” she says. “My mum has been a donor for years so I had always known about MSF and it just seemed like they were doing the kind of work I wanted to do.

“I really loved their integrity and independence and their ability to respond in emergencies—MSF can deploy a group of people and an inflatable hospital in just a matter of weeks to people in need. I just thought that was incredible and I wanted to be a part of it.”

There's little that separates us as humans, except luck."

Anna jokes that her experience in event management “parallels pretty nicely with working in a refugee camp... I mean [whether] you are a citizen or not, everyone needs toilets, water, good signage and a clear exit route!”.

So she applied for the role of Logistician and she soon found herself in Uganda, working in the Bidi Bidi Refugee Camp, which she explains was a camp for South Sudanese refugees “fleeing violence in their home regions”.

“We built a functioning maternity unit, inpatient ward, nutritional feeding center and outpatient department out of timber, plastic sheeting and a whole lot of determination,” she says.

“Of course, even these mammoth efforts only respond to a small part of the refugee community’s needs. My favourite part of the hospital was always the maternity ward; whenever I would drop in to check on the building or the biomedical equipment I would get to see some very happy new families.”

Having just become an aunt for the first time, Anna believes that there’s little that separates us as humans, except luck.

“We all just want to live happily with our families and have enough money to eat food and drink clean water,” she says. “But we’re luckier then some, which is one of the reasons I wanted to work in contexts like these.”

As you might realise by now, Anna says that she always knew a “9–5” wasn’t the life for her, but is unsure of what the future will hold. For the moment, she’s currently helping MSF tackle the issue of PNG’s “massive” tuberculosis problem, helping the organisation deliver treatment to remote, low density areas.

As for those whose lifestyle prevents them from, say, jumping on a rescue ship in the Mediterranean, Anna says there’s a lot we can do close to home.

“In Australia and in Canberra, a lot of us have the opportunity to make a difference,” she says.

“Whether that’s donating to an organisation you feel passionate about or spending your time with them. You’re totally capable of making a difference in someone’s life, just choose to do it yourself.”

Chloe Breakwell

Globetrotting Veterinarian and Wildlife Conservationist

As children, many of us would have dreamed of being a carer for exotic animals, travelling the world to explore some of our rarest fauna. But one woman who held on to these dreams and then made them a reality is Chloe Breakwell.

After completing her schooling in Canberra, Chloe studied Veterinary Science at the University of Melbourne before taking off across the world. But it all started with a humble house cat.

“As the story commonly goes for people within my profession, I have wanted to be a vet for as long as I remember,” says Chloe. “Funnily enough, initially I think it was my cat Pep who motivated me. Being an only child who moved around a lot, I never felt lonely with him.”

Chloe explains that Pep’s role in her family showed her the extraordinary bond between animals and humans. At age 12, Chloe moved with her family to Lord Howe Island, a tiny but diverse ecosystem in the Pacific, which is where her passion for the exotic began.

“I fell in love with the beauty of our natural environment, and the magnificent creatures within it. I think it was from here that I started to look at the bigger picture and my role within it, and I begun to be driven by a desire to 'do my part' in the world.”

Species are being driven to extinction at the hands of poachers."

As soon as Chloe finished her veterinary studies, she set about this with gusto, working towards what she describes as her overall goal—working in the field of species conservation and environmental health.

Chloe says that, with this in mind, it’s no surprise that she ended up in Africa, learning to work with some of the rarest and most dangerous animals in the world.

“Africa is a continent that is so diverse and unlike anywhere else on this planet,” she says. “Amongst such beauty of the plains, jungles, savannas, mountains, beaches and wildlife you have the horror of poverty, desperation and conflict.

“Species are being driven to extinction at the hands of poachers in a situation that has seen rhino horn become the most valuable commodity on the face of the earth.”

As a result of this, Chloe describes Africa as a hotbed of conservation innovation, with people from all around the world coming together in an attempt to halt the depressing statistics of extinction and poaching that plague the continent. For her, it was the perfect place to learn unique skills for handling these animals, such as darting animals with sedatives from a helicopter and translocating elephants and giraffes.

“A memorable experience would have to be the time I was chased by an angry rhino. She had recently been woken from an anaesthetic in the field, and she had wandered back off into the bush.

"The team and I were walking back to the trucks with our equipment and I was talking with a good friend of mine when we heard hooves and grunting behind us...before I knew it everyone was either up a tree or behind one, and my friend with whom I was talking had taken off at a speed Usain Bolt would be jealous of.

“As I'm not much of a runner nor an agile tree climber, the rhino was quickly gaining ground on me when out of nowhere I remembered an obscure piece of advice I’d once received—‘if a rhino is ever chasing you, take a 90 degree turn either left or right as they are fast but no good at turning’. Very helpful and couldn’t have come at a more perfect time—I quickly managed to get out of her way!”

From that adrenaline-inducing experience to learning to translocate a fully grown male giraffe (you sit on its neck, apparently), it’s no surprise that Chloe has some great stories from over the years, though they’re not all necessarily hair-raising.

If a rhino is ever chasing you, take a 90 degree turn either left or right."

“A sea lion I once worked with in a zoo became famous after chewing the lock off his enclosure one night so he could have a swim around in the big pool,” she laughs.

“He didn't stop there, though, he methodically went around to all the other cages and removed all the locks from them so that all the sea lions were free to have a bit of a party until the keepers found them the next morning!”

While Chloe’s recent travels have included visiting the Charles Darwin research facility in the Galapagos Islands, where she saw giant albatross and met some of the oldest tortoises in the world, she’s currently doing “nothing vet-related” in Germany, where she’s living for the next few months in preparation for her wedding there in July. What she is doing is learning German, which she says is “MUCH harder than vet school!”

As for her next adventure? You’ll just have to wait and see.

You can follow Chloe and her travels on her Instagram at @jungle_doctor.

Words: Beatrice Smith