LOCAL LIFE
ONE OF THE HILLS FINEST ...
Sue and the other members of Hills Yarning showed their support of the Uluru Statement by adding their hand prints to the document . by Lorna Gordon
Sue Martin is a woman with a passion for our beautiful land , the environment and the creatures and plants which thrive there . She is known for her work at CHEN ( Cattai Hills Environmental Network ) which has been massively involved in locating and tracking the local platypus population in the Hills .
Sue has taken her love for our country a step further and is now involved in local Reconciliation group , Hills Yarning , who want all of us to embrace our First Nations people and walk beside them to learn from the elders on how to enjoy and care for the land we share .
She was educated at St Benedict ’ s whose ethos was that of the Good Samaritan , one which encourages people to look out for each other . After she finished school , she headed off to university to study an agricultural science degree with a focus on regenerative farming .
Working on farms wasn ’ t particularly easy when you live in Sydney so she took a slightly different path and used her degree to work in catchment management , looking after the Hawkesbury and Nepean Rivers Sue worked on educating people about the need to look after the river , and set up the early stages of the riverbank program .
Knowing how necessary this work was , when she got the opportunity to move into a role as a policy officer she took it and travelled to educate different councils around sustainability , a movement which was beginning to gain traction by the mid-2000s .
Sue then moved to work with Earthcare Australia , an advisory agency to the Catholic Church which was founded in 2002 . The agency educates people to see the link between humanity and their local ecology and this link helps you to see the direct relationship you have with nature and the power you have to act and help .
As I mentioned earlier , Sue is also involved in CHEN which she helped to set up in 2016 . She was awarded Environmental Citizen of the Year for her work in this area . The CHEN project has gone from strength to strength with four PhD students now being part of the Bluey project which monitors the local platypus population . They are now working toward their next exciting phase of protecting our local wildlife , which is to identify the koala population locally , which currently has around 50 sightings .
I asked how she went from working on the environment to becoming involved in Hills Yarning and Sue just laughed .
“ I know I should let other people take on these things , but I like to get involved . We run a social justice program at St Madeleine ’ s , and I became aware of Hills Yarning through that . Hills Yarning was formed when a group of faith communities and civil societies decided
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6 ISSUE 107 // MAY 2024 theindependentmagazine . com . au THE HILLS INDEPENDENT