Chapter 1
I adjust my laptop and stare at the screen, open to Facebook. The cursor of my mouse hovers over the button: Join Group.
No, she’ll never accept me. I return to my new obsession of scrolling through the comments on Stella’s latest post, reading and liking as I go.
As I lie on my bed, a burst of perfume from the brilliant yellow wattle blossoms outside oats in through my bedroom window. Autumn hasn’t got the message that summer’s party is over. I hear the roaring start of our neighbour’s lawnmower and the squawks from a crackle of white cockatoos in our back tree. I learnt that more than one cockatoo is called a crackle from my bird-watching best friend, Lucy. Groups of birds have the weirdest names: king parrots are a ‘company’ and owls a ‘parliament’. Inspired by Lucy, I can now identify many bird calls, like the uty melodies of the Australian magpie and the screeching of the rainbow lorikeet.
I sit up, cross my legs, lean my back against the wall then click back to the group’s main page. Activists Unite is a private group on Facebook run by Stella Morris, a journalist and animal activist with multiple social media platforms. Stella is admired worldwide and followed by millions. She’s constantly travelling, speaking, writing and publishing books. She gets interviewed on CNN, BBC and even Al Jazeera when world news breaks on an animal issue. But unlike some, she’s not all about self-promotion; she regularly shares other people’s accomplishments, supporting and encouraging their advocacy. She’s currently on a world tour, delivering eighty speeches in twenty days in ten different countries. Today she’s speaking in Beijing and has posted a petition against bear bile farming, an industry that cages bears and removes their digestive fluid so it can be used in traditional medicine. Stella is living the kind of life I aspire to, although I think I’m too shy to command a stage like she does.
I add a comment below the post: Thanks for this, then delete the last two words. I want to sound more articulate. Thanks for informing me about this, Stella, I write instead, tagging her name as always. Occasionally she pops into the comments and replies to people, but never to me. I’m just one person among a squillion fans.
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