The infectious passion of Doug Gimesy’s wildlife photography

A wombat lies stiff on the roadside with a crude orange cross scrawled in its fur. Unlike crosses that usually mark the dead, this one indicates the wombat has been checked for surviving joeys. The colour pops against the greyish, bushfire-ravaged forest – the wombat had survived the bushfires, only to be struck by a car and dragged to the gutter.

Doug Gimesy, a conservation and wildlife photographer, took this photo while covering the aftermath of Australia’s 2019-2020 bushfire season. In a cafe by Sandringham beach, I ask Doug how he felt traveling to those burnt-out places, and his voice breaks.

“It’s sad,” he says, with emphasis. “I didn’t hear anything. There was no rustling of trees, no birds. It was just sad. I can’t think of another word. I barely saw any remains because things have just vaporised.”

Doug has white hair, laugh lines etched into his tanned face, and contagious energy. He’s a fast talker, and he speaks with intensity. Despite the heavy subject matter, Doug has a ready smile and an easy laugh. It’s easy to be swept into his stories.

About three times during our interview he springs from his seat and calls to Heather Kiley – a conservationist and Doug’s partner of almost 22 years – having her coffee upstairs to double check an answer.

“Hey Heather, how many times have I been to Antarctica? Is it three or four?”

In the seven years Doug has worked as a photographer, he has witnessed and experienced giddy conservation success stories, and the vulnerabilities of Australian wildlife that often end in tragedy: unending lines of car-mangled kangaroos, wheelbarrows full of dead flying foxes on scorching days, and the gamut of trauma that comes with them.

But he’s never seen anything like the aftermath of last summer’s bushfires. Australians are still coming to terms with their legacy: 33 lives lost, almost 2,000 houses razed, and more than one billion animals dead.

Doug, working alone, explored the wreckage three weeks after the bushfires hit, and conditions were still dangerous. He recalls going off the main road and a huge gumtree fell a little way ahead of him. Now, he often carries a portable radio with him and a personal distress beacon, just in case.

He showed me a bleak photo on his phone of what remains of a rainforest with a gully gurgling through. Doug wanted to get a shot of the forest from the river. It looked like a shallow puddle of sludge, so he stepped into it.

“It went up to my thigh. It’s just a mud pit.”

I wonder how he’s able to confront such tragic scenes so often.

“You know, I learnt a new phrase the other day: vicarious trauma. I believe I’ve seen a lot of second responders suffering from it.”

Vicarious trauma is when you’re repeatedly exposed to other people’s trauma, their stories or traumatic events.

“But I’ve added to that definition – ‘and being repeatedly exposed to the trauma of wildlife and the environment’,” he says, and then adds that he sees a counsellor.

“People from overseas who visit don’t know wildlife comes out at night. It would be like having no flags at the beach where there’s a rip.”

Doug has photographed koalas rescued from the fires, only to hear they’ve died when he calls to check in. It’s why wildlife carers often don’t name an animal if they don’t think it’ll survive or if they’re going to euthanise it, Doug tells me. And it’s why he pushes the point most conservation issues are animal welfare issues, because in catastrophic events like the bushfires, animals don’t just die; they suffer too.

“If we know a billion animals burnt to death, we can probably surmise another billion are suffering first, second or third degree burns, infections, trauma, and dying these slow horrible deaths. That’s a moral issue.”

It’s similar to the trauma involved with road kill, something Doug brings up often after working on a photography series in 2016 on Kangaroo Island to campaign for more appropriate speed limits.

“If you clip an animal with a car, we know at least half don’t die straight away. They hop to the edge of the road and die slowly. It’s trauma, and it’s also trauma to the person who hits it, to the person who finds it, to the person who looks after it.

“I feel like I should be standing on a soap box,” Doug says, laughing.

Doug explains how vicarious trauma is different to compassion fatigue or burn-out, though he says he can burn out when he’s in the field and working long, long hours – a testament many of his colleagues in wildlife photography can empathise with. Bushfires don’t go away when you’ve had enough, and animals don’t emerge from their hide-outs when you’re ready.

It took, for example, 120 hours for Doug to get the perfect photo of little blue penguins in St Kilda: four hours per night for 30 nights. And it took two years before then to develop a relationship with researchers so he could have that access. But one shot still eludes him: little penguins with the backdrop of Melbourne’s New Year’s Eve fireworks.

“I still haven’t got the perfect shot, I’ve tried for four years. But the odds of it happening are virtually negligible,” he says. “Bah and Humbug to New Years Eve, and all that.”

In fact, Doug says when he was younger his ambition was to capture all 17 penguin species (so far he’s photographed “probably 14”). Now, Doug’s ambition is something that’s harder to quantify: changing people’s behaviour by changing their attitudes.

Sadly, his Kangaroo Island road-kill campaign didn’t change any road rules. He calls it a “total failure”, because while there were discussions about putting up recommended speed limits, nothing came of it. Still, it’s likely the powerful photographs, which circled the world, made many people think twice about speeding at times when nocturnal animals hop or crawl across the road.

“People from overseas who visit don't know wildlife comes out at night. It would be like having no flags at the beach where there’s a rip.”

The success of another campaign Doug led in 2017 was more clear cut, leading to a state-wide ban on yabby traps in Victorian waterways, which was enforced in July last year. Yabby Traps are deadly for platypuses, which get caught in the nets and drown.

But I first saw Doug’s photography after his series on grey-headed flying foxes – puppy-faced bats that congregate in the thousands at Yarra Bend Park during the day, and launch from the canopy for breakfast in the evening.

Stephen Brend is Parks Victoria’s grey-headed flying fox project officer, who’s worked with Doug since 2017. He explains how flying foxes are still considered a pest, but Doug’s photography is helping shift that perception.

“The big threat to the flying foxes, at least in Melbourne, is public perception. People don’t like them, they’ve got bad press. There are so many negative images: disease, vampires, Halloween. Part of their conservation story is taking them out of this.

“This is where Doug comes in. I cannot think of a better person who can capture and tell the story than Doug. You don’t get to be an award-winning photographer for nothing,” Stephen says (and assures me Doug paid him $700 for the compliment).

Flying-foxes are officially considered “vulnerable”: they get tangled in fruit tree netting, barbed wire and powerlines. But perhaps their biggest threat is heat stress. If it gets too hot, they drop from their trees in the thousands.

Stephen Brend walks by a wheelbarrow full of dead flying foxes. Photo: Doug Gimesy

In December last year, 4,500 flying foxes died over three days after record-breaking temperatures, all in Yarra Bend Park. This wasn’t the first mass-death incident, and Doug has tried to help save them ever since he took his first photo of a bat and offered it to Fly By Night Bat Clinic, where he learned about their threats.

“Opinions don’t change the world, behaviour does. And changing an attitude can change behaviour,” Doug says.

“That’s why one of my favourite photos is the grey-headed flying fox with the young hanging off. I want people to have that response and think, ‘oh my god, I didn’t realise they’re mums, or that they breastfeed, or that they’re so cute, I now care about them’, versus ‘those are the bloody things that steal my fruit’.”

One time, while in my brief stint working at the Herald Sun, I called someone to get a quick quote. He answered the phone breathlessly, and when I introduced myself, he interrupted to tell me he was on his way to take his daughter to the hospital. She had just hit her head on the corner of a table and was bleeding.

“Of course, it’s no problem, I’ll contact someone else,” was my response. But for a moment, I wanted to say: “well, while I’ve got you on the phone, I just need two minutes of your time.”

I told this story to Doug, and he nodded empathetically. Doug, whose artwork can be photojournalistic, knows what it’s like to have his ethics tested for the sake of an impactful shot.

“I didn’t hear anything. There was no rustling of trees, no birds. It was just sad. ”

But his photography career is grounded in ethics. He has a masters degree in bioethics, and a page on his website dedicated to it. On the website, he writes: “Sometimes there is a lot to consider, your ego can get involved, there is pressure from clients at the time of shooting, but I find what can really help is simply asking ‘What would a good person do?’.”

Still, knowing what the right action to take when you have only milliseconds to make a decision can be trying. Doug confronted this in Kangaroo Island for his road trauma series.

“I was on this corner photographing three kangaroos on the side of the road, and a car was coming.

“My first thought was, oh my god they’re going to hit the kangaroo. My next thought was, what would be the best lens? And then I thought, can you imagine if it went through the window of the car? That would be such a powerful image to get people to slow down. This all happened in a quarter of a second.

“And then I thought, what are you thinking! It’s important to pull yourself up on it, but unfortunately a lot of people don’t.”

Doug says he’s always disagreed with the acts and omissions doctrine, the idea acting is morally worse than doing nothing. The catholic church has traditionally used this doctrine for euthanasia, saying it’s better to let someone die on their own by removing a person’s life support, rather than ending their life outright.

Photojournalists, however, usually have a no-interference policy to capture the truth of a scene. For wildlife photographers, it means capturing the life and death cycle of animals, predator and prey, cliff and penguin. Doug’s policy when it comes to interference is to step in when the animal is suffering from a human-made issue, like fruit tree netting.

“I’ve never agreed that not doing something is morally justifiable,” he says. “There’s no reason you can’t take the photo and then help.”

When Doug started taking photos of bats tangled in netting, he wasn’t vaccinated and didn’t have the right training, so could do nothing but abandon them after getting the shot. Now, Doug is a certified bat rescuer, and tells me there have even been times when he hasn’t taken the photo because the animals are in so much distress.

“I couldn’t go to these situations and think, well I’m done.”

For his grey-headed flying fox photography, Doug has been celebrated all around the world. His photo, Breakfast for Bats, was among 20 that National Geographic editors picked out of 10 million YourShot photos. It also featured in the National Portrait Gallery.

But he says the proudest recognition so far in his career is winning the Wildscreen Photo Story award, for his flying fox series, Rescuing the Night Gardeners. He was up against BBC photographers and other big players in the wildlife photography world.

True to form, he used his speech in front of hundreds of people – producers from National Geographic, BBC, Disney, and more – as an opportunity to change behaviour, and he spoke about the importance of language. Before photography, Doug worked in pharmaceutical marketing for 20 years, a career that honed his science communication skills.

He said we need to stop using passive language to mask how humans are responsible for destroying wildlife. Don’t call it “habitat loss”, we didn’t misplace any habitats, it was no accident. Call it “habitat destruction”. Don’t call it “extinction”, call it “extermination”.

“Having won the award was great, but it’s also probably the most influential thing I’ve done,” he says.

“The great thing about photography, is that it forces you to focus and be in the moment. You start looking at things and you realise just how magnificent they are. I don’t have a favourite animal, and I don’t have a least favourite. The only species I don’t like sometimes are homosapiens.”

Signs of hope: regrowth begins shortly after bushfires ploughed through Australia. Photo: Doug Gimesy

I switch off the recording, and then remember to ask if he has any final thoughts to share. He asks me to write that if everyone picked up one piece of rubbish, once a day or even once a week, the world would be a vastly different place. There, Doug.

I leave, and head to the beach. It’s just about empty, but for a young family playing in the sand, two fishermen wearing obligatory bucket hats, and a couple of dozen yachts scattered along the horizon, their colourful sails all billowing westward. I spot a plastic wrapper in the sand, and bin it on my way out.

If you’d like to make a donation in support of wildlife in Victoria, Doug Gimesy has nominated: