GCWA Monthly Meetings

March Meeting

Guest Speaker - Annette Henderson

Annette Henderson has been writing full-time since 2005. Prior to that, her working life took her to the United Kingdom, Africa, Indonesia and remote Australia. With her husband, Win, she travelled overland from Calcutta to London in a Kombivan, in which they later journeyed from London across the Sahara Desert to Equatorial Africa. Her life changed forever in 1975 when they both took jobs in a mineral camp in remote mountainous forest in Gabon, West Africa. On returning to Australia, she embarked on a career as an anthropologist.Annette is a committed conservationist, a zoo parent of the lowland gorillas at Taronga Zoo and the adoptive parent of a juvenile orangutan in Borneo. Her articles on Australian birds and reptiles have appeared in Wildlife Australia Magazine. Annette and her husband share seven acres of bushland near Brisbane with koalas, wallabies, powerful owls, over 100 species of native birds and theirridgeback cross, Bentleigh. She is a classically trained singer, enjoys regular workouts at a gym, and runs half marathons.

Book: Wild Spirit

How a year in the African rainforest changed an Australian woman’s life.

In June 1975, Australian couple Annette and Win Henderson find themselves stranded in Libreville, Gabon, after travelling halfway across Africa. When a thief robs their Kombivan, they are left penniless - with no way to go back and no way to go on. They are saved by a chance meeting with a local expat, who offers them jobs in a remote mining camp in the mountains, close to the Congo border, in a region never visited by tourists, accessible only by canoe.

At the camp, Annette battles isolation, culture shock and the challenges of a job for which she is ill-prepared. She finds solace and joy in the vast equatorial forest - a world as enthralling as any David Attenborough film - and when she adopts orphaned baby gorilla, Josie, her life changes forever.

Wild Spirit is the intensely moving story of a young Australian woman suddenly immersed in a frontier world, coming face to face not only with the impact of the human population on endangered wildlife, but also with her own quest for meaning.

Review: 'An exceptional piece of work . . . it will be an eye-opening experience, perhaps a life-changing one.' - Colin Groves, Professor of Biological Anthropology, Australian National University

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