Erna Walraven on her memoir about zoo-keeping and feminism, ‘Hear Me Roar’
In the early 1980s, when Erna Walraven decided to follow her dreams and become one of the first female zookeepers in Australia, she thought her biggest challenges would be feeding big cats and subduing irate gorillas. In fact, it was her male colleagues who made work miserable, harassing and humiliating her for doing a ‘man’s job’. So, she looked to the animals under her care to prove them wrong.

Despite what Erna’s colleagues seemed to think, the females of the animal world were far from weak and demure. Elephant matriarchs led their herds; female bonobos revelled in sexual exploration; emu mothers abandoned their chicks to the care of their fathers. Her colleagues wouldn’t dare tell a female tiger that hunting was a ‘male’s job’ – why were they so intent on limiting Erna?

In this episode Gregory Dobbs chats to Erna Walraven about the sexist, male-dominated culture that greeted her when she first started working as a zoo-keeper at Taronga Zoo in 1983, the wonders of the animal world and what animals taught her about feminism, and how the culture of zoo-keeping has changed for the better.