Picture yourself back in your university days, living in shared accommodation with a bunch of other students. You may have fond memories of such times: of house parties, of meals involving way too many two-minute noodles of housemates who are great company but are not particularly good at cleaning up. Now imagine one of the guys living in your share house has a genuine passion for animals – lots of animals. He’s got an enormous green tree frog named Freddo, but that’s not all. The back yard and parts of the house are being converted into habitats for an incredible range of creatures, so much so that the humans are starting to leave. Over time, a share house of five blokes ends up becoming the home of one man and his burgeoning menagerie.
If this scenario sounds at all familiar to you, it may be that you were at the University of Melbourne in the mid-1990s and have already met Chris Humfrey, who founded Wild Action Zoo in his back yard during his first year of university. “I was one of those types of house mates who was, you know, ‘interesting’,” Humfrey admitted. All the same, his undeniable love of animals led him to give up the journalism degree he had initially embarked on after high school, realising it was not the course for him. “I knocked on the door of the Dean’s office and said: I’ve got all these animals, I’ve got a passion for it, journalism was the wrong thing for me to do, I want to do zoology,” Humfrey explained. “They let me in – even without all the right subjects and things, so I worked hard and got through that and started Wild Action in 1994. I was doing full time uni as well as creating a small business.”
Fast forward a couple of decades, and Humfrey has – in a sense – moved on from the share house, largely because he needed a bigger back yard for Wild Action Zoo. He now lives on a property in Macedon (Wurundjeri country) outside of Melbourne, with his partner Erin and over two thousand native Australian animals. There are amphibians and reptiles, including the now 45-year-old Freddo the tree frog – who a then three-year-old Humfrey discovered in the public toilets of a park in Coffs Harbour and still describes as one of his best friends – and Hector, a blue tongue lizard who wandered into the back yard when Humfrey was eight. The property is also home to an astonishing variety of birds, from Little Penguins to wedge-tailed eagles, to cassowaries, and an equally mindboggling array of mammals, including koalas, tiger quolls, dingoes and an entire colony of Mountain Pygmy Possums. “It’s a real honour to have all these creatures, and to look after them,” Humfrey said. “We think of them as our animal family.”
It is, perhaps, the ultimate share house – and Humfrey is quick to praise the hard work and patience of his partner Erin, who is also a zoologist. After all, it cannot be particularly easy making a home when there are 67 Mountain Pygmy Possums in your wine cellar. “They’re my pride and joy!” Humfrey said, noting the colony is the largest population in captivity that he is aware of, and the sub-alpine area around Macedon makes it an ideal place to breed them as it does not get too hot over summer. “We’ve kind of cracked the code, Erin and I, with breeding this little critically endangered mammal,” he said. “We’ve worked out they can breed throughout the year, as they’re kept cool all year round at 17 degrees, and we’ve also discovered they don’t need to hibernate, and not hibernating has no ill effects on them. You learn so much when you have them in captivity and can spend your life with them instead of just guessing.”
Humfrey’s enthusiasm for nature and its wonders is infectious and is something he endeavours to bring to every Wild Action Zoo educational incursion he delivers. The program he began providing as a 19-year-old university student “bringing the zoo to you” has evolved into an multi-award winning business enabling 350,000 children a year to get up close to Australian native wildlife, with incursions tailored to suit all levels of preschool, primary and secondary students. “The first time I put out my cards and started advertising, the phone rang off the hook. I was gobsmacked that people would want me to come out and teach kids about animals, and I have clients we still service 28 years later,” Humfrey said. “It really is a conservation message: interaction, touching lightly but experiencing the wonder of animals.”
For many children, a Wild Action Zoo incursion provides their first hands on experience with Australian animals, representing a different reality from the one in which Humfrey himself grew up. “We lived in the eastern suburbs of Melbourne, which was a semi-rural area back then, and there were animals everywhere. My parents were always very encouraging and even then we had a veritable zoo in our back yard,” Humfrey recalled. “It’s not like that any more. I was able to jump over the fence and catch a lizard, and back then it wasn’t illegal, it was just part of what you did as a kid. Plenty of kids these days don’t have that natural experience.” Humfrey acknowledges that times have changed, particularly since habitats have been lost and animals are becoming rarer, but he still encourages his students to immerse themselves in the natural world as much as possible. “Kids do have that inquisitiveness to get outdoors and explore nature,” Humfrey said. “I think it’s vital for children to develop love and empathy for the wild, ultimately wanting to save the natural world.”
The message Humfrey shares with the students he encounters is clear, consistent and conservation based. “If you can have empathy, if you can have knowledge, if you can have respect, you’re more likely to save something,” he said. “Not everyone has to be a zoologist or a vet, but everyone needs to be armed with the knowledge that the environment is important, that every animal has a job to do and its own ecological niche – you can’t have your favourites. If you take one ecosystem out of the equation, there will be environmental collapse and decay.”
Conserving Australia’s native wildlife and biodiversity is a passion Humfrey shares with anyone who will listen, including celebrities who come to visit him and his animals at Macedon. “Lots of famous people come up here because they want a private tour without the big crowds,” Humfrey said. The day before I spoke to him, he had hosted Misha Collins from the popular American television show Supernatural. Other celebrity guests have included Hollywood actor Jason Bateman and Bollywood star Shah Rukh Khan. The visitors Humfrey especially enjoys hosting, however, are the participants in his Junior Zookeeper Program, which allows groups of likeminded animal loving kids the opportunity to work alongside Humfrey for an entire day. “There might be ten or twelve kids, and my staff shadow me, but the Junior Zookeepers spend the whole day with me looking after the animals: reading their behaviour, learning about husbandry, classification, handling animals and getting down and dirty – filthy actually – picking up creatures and raking up poo and feeding the animals,” he said. “It’s always a mess, and there’s a lot of chopping food and feeding, and I think sometimes kids realise there is a hard side to looking after animals too.”
Living with two thousand animals has enabled Humfrey to pursue his passion to preserve Australian wildlife, but it is obviously not without its challenges. “The clients are really important to me, but it’s really about the animals,” Humfrey said. “If you’re going to keep animals in captivity there’s got to be a good reason for it; you’re basically playing God. You’re the one who’s responsible for them and it weighs on you. You have sleepless nights, literally hear bumps in the night, and you have all these animals you’re caring for. The staff work eight hours a day, but Erin and I work 24 hours.”
The sheer number of animals Humfrey looks after requires dedication and a massive amount of work. “It’s a big responsibility having so many animals and ensuring they’re all in good condition and healthy, and that they’re managed well,” he said, adding that the bureaucratic obligations are also onerous. “We have to comply with heaps of regulations and there’s a lot of bookwork that people don’t see. Behind the scenes it’s mind-numbingly difficult to keep up with it,” Humfrey explained. “There’s a stud book we have to keep up to date and accurate within 24 hours: if any of these animals has a birth, death or a marriage, the paperwork has to be accurate. If it’s not, you could be fined or lose your licence. It’s a massive responsibility.”
Finding suitably qualified veterinary support for his myriad creatures is also a difficult task, and is compounded by Wild Action Zoo’s location. “We’ve tried to get vets on staff, but we live in a regional area and it’s always hard to get staff who want to move here,” Humfrey said. “The local vets around here have the same problem attracting staff, and we have even trouble getting vets out here to treat.” As a result, Humfrey relies on a network of veterinarians with specialisations who can help him with the many and varied species he cares for: some assist with penguins, some with koalas, some with cassowaries. Humfrey is yet to find one vet who is willing to move to regional Victoria and who can treat all the inhabitants of Wild Action Zoo. “At this point, there’s no particular vet out there who has experience with all those creatures,” he said.
Humfrey evidently takes his responsibilities seriously and, recognising the animals are dependent on him, aims to keep Wild Action Zoo running at consistently high standards. He has noticed, however, a generation gap emerging between himself and new recruits – particularly since many graduates can finish university without a great deal of hands-on experience working with animals. “It’s not just about doing an honest job, but it’s doing it with some ingenuity,” he said. “It’s really hard to explain to different generations, particularly when they were taught differently at school, that when you’ve got animals, you have to be ethical. It’s also really hard to train new team members who don’t have any hands-on experience, who despite having their qualifications may not have the practical skills to handle a cassowary, for example. The hard work and diligence of keeping things clean, the old-fashioned way of husbandry – universities don’t always teach them that.”
Despite the challenges, Humfrey has enjoyed successes throughout his career. In addition to Wild Action Zoo being named Telstra Victorian Business of the Year in 2008, in 2010 Humfrey was the subject of a television series commissioned by the ABC called Chris Humfrey’s Wild Life. Humfrey self-produced another television series in 2017, Chris Humfrey’s Animal Instinct, and sold it around the world, including to airlines including Qantas and Emirates who have included the show as part of their inflight entertainment.
During the COVID pandemic, Humfrey also turned his hand to writing children’s books aimed at fostering a love of and respect for Australian wildlife. The first was called Amazing Australian Animals and was released in 2021, and he has just finished writing Coolest Creepy Crawlies and is working on a third book about ocean-dwelling and rockpool creatures. “It’s done in a fun and playful way,” Humfrey said. “We anthropomorphise animals to make it more relatable for kids, but it’s digestible and captures the imagination of kids who aren’t so interested in animals or the environment – they could be gamers or have never been exposed to the environment – and it provides that hook that gets them excited about it.” The books also feature QR codes which allow readers to unlock additional content featuring Humfrey and his animals. “I’d never used a QR code before COVID!” Humfrey admitted. “But I thought it was cool technology we could incorporate into the book. Kids aren’t always interested in reading books these days and have so many devices, so we thought we could bring both worlds together and have books you can scan with your device to access bonus content.”
Lockdowns and other restrictions during the pandemic also forced Humfrey to pivot his business model, which had been primarily based on face-to-face incursions. “We had to rely on our media skills, and we created an online platform we called Zoo Zooms,” he said. “It was exhausting, because it basically involved running around the property and doing a private zoo tour but making it curriculum based. It enabled us to talk to kids about hand rearing a Little Penguin, or showing them our Mountain Pygmy Possum colony, all while keeping it sharp and snappy to keep students engaged and then doing a question-and-answer session at the end.”
Humfrey is justifiably proud of keeping Wild Action Zoo going through what has been a very difficult period for many Australians, but he is even more delighted by the success of one project was able to undertake during the COVID lockdowns, counting it as a career highlight. “I hand reared three Little Penguins from egg, incubated them correctly, hatched them out and raised them to adults,” Humfrey said. “It’s taken ten years of blood, sweat and tears, and I finally cracked to code of how to raise a Little Penguin next to my bed at night with my partner, stinking the bedroom out with pilchard fish milkshakes, graphing the growth – all that. It’s one of the proudest of moments of my life, to see those creatures grown up from little fluffballs and metamorphose into dapper little birds with blue tuxedos.”
Although Humfrey does not get much time away from Wild Action Zoo, he still makes time to indulge in another of his passions: kayaking. “I started kayaking when I was a kid just so I could get up close to animals,” he said. “It’s a whole different world when you’re out there on a creek, or river, or the ocean, and the animals don’t see you as a predator because you’re in a boat, they see you as a novelty.” Humfrey’s competitive kayaking career, however, has not involved too much floating around looking for creatures: he represented Australia at numerous World Championships in extreme wild water kayaking, faced a difficult decision at age 18 when he had to choose between representing Australia at the Olympic Games in kayaking and starting Wild Action Zoo, and the sport remains a big part of his life. “It’s my magic, it’s my church, it’s my stress relief, it keeps me fit and I still love it to this day. I’m still very competitive and still race, I still think I’ll get out there and have another crack at getting to another World Cup or something,” Humfrey said. “It’s a big mental health thing as well.”
Whether Humfrey ends up at another kayaking World Championships is anyone’s guess, but after working so hard to keep Wild Action Zoo afloat during the pandemic, he is looking forward to taking a deep breath or two. “I like pushing myself, but you have to enjoy what you’ve actually achieved,” he said. “It’s all about passion, and conviction and delivering. You work hard, and it has nothing to do with luck.”
Humfrey remains committed to being a voice for Australian native species and to promoting their conservation and protection and would like to see veterinarians play a larger role in this area as well, particularly given their higher level of training and skill in dealing with animals. “Vets are the people the general public think of as the ‘go-to people’ when wildlife is injured, but a lot of times the animals are just sent off to wildlife carers, who are often not vets,” Humfrey said. “There’s a big difference in their level of knowledge. It would be great if vets had more wildlife components in the training at university, so they apply that in their practice.”
Whatever the future holds, Humfrey wants to continue sharing his passion for Australian native creatures and for connecting people with nature. He is not sure how much longer he will have Freddo, his green tree frog, around for, but is grateful that his “best mate” is still fit and healthy at 45 years old, and that he has a couple of thousand other creatures who call Wild Action Zoo home. “I still get a kick out of it after all these years,” Humfrey said, and it remains something he is eager to share. “There’s something healing and spiritual about nature and getting outdoors and teaching people that connection can make them much happier people. You just have to teach people the skills and the wonderment to get out there and do it.”
JAI HUMEL