My name's Lyn Obern.
For the last 12 years, I've been living in Kangaroo Valley.
I run the Wisdom Wombat Refuge.
(To wombat) Hello, is it time to get up this morning? Hello, how are you?
We raise, rehabilitate wild wombats. They come into care, and we release them back into
the wild.
Ali came into care two and a half weeks ago. A local found this little orphaned wombat.
When Ali came in, she was on four feeds a day, and gradually she's dropped down at three
kilos to three feeds a day - so that's eight-hourly and then by the time she's about five kilos,
she'll drop down to two feeds a day.
I was a registered nurse for 25 years working in community, elderly, mental health, maternity
- you name it.
It seemed a logical transition to go into wildlife, as I was always driving to early-morning
clients when I was nursing and picking up joeys from dead animals.
They come in because their mum's been hit and they're rescued from pouches.
Sometimes they're at heel, which means they're running behind mum, mum gets hit, and then
the joey doesn't know what to do.
We've now got volunteers that come in for the last three years. Prior to that, nine
years of myself - that was hard yakka.
It's not pretty work, you know, you have to get stuck in. There's an awful lot of poos,
bearing in mind every wombat does 80 scats a night, and if you've got 12, that's an awful
lot of poo.
It's dirty, smelly, but the rewards are really so worth it at the end - happy wombats.
My name's Bianca Murphy.
My primary work is an intensive care nurse at Shoalhaven Hospital but it's probably been
two years now that I've been helping here once a week, and these little guys are just
gorgeous.
I think Lyn has done a wonderful job.
This is all-consuming. There's no weekends off. There's no holidays. If there is, it's
a major effort to accommodate them and get helpers in and her life basically revolves
around these wombats and I don't think there's a lot of people that would give up pretty
much everything to do this.
Once we finish cleaning the pens, we usually come in, have a cuppa, catch up with each
other's news, and then have a little play with, if there's little ones indoors.
There's also a necessity to have that closeness as well from their surrogate mother, really,
I suppose you'd call me.
I hate going out on rescues when you see dead wombats at the side of roads or in the middle
of roads and when you pull them off the road, you find that there's a joey that's viable,
that's now, life has changed.
It's very sad to think that it's happening at such an enormous rate.
Sometimes, in the past, we've had 40 in a long weekend just in this area.
Over the 12 years we've been doing this, we probably released between 50 and 60 wombats
successfully back into the wild, as far as we can say successfully.
Releasing is really special. It's a really special moment when you, you know, we have
good releases and bad releases if, you like. Some are really keen to go, and others are
very sort of like nervous.
It's just magic.
(To wombat) Come on, Susie! There you go.
She knows. And it's wonderful when we've had joeys released and they bring their joeys
back two years later with a joey at heel.
It's wonderful to think that they've been out there and actually had another joey.
It's so worth it. Yeah, getting very, very emotional. Yeah, it's very special.