I can cuddle tigers

Foreword:

Yes, and I can also walk with cheetahs, dance with a dolphin, swim with seals, snorkel with sharks. I can go up in a glider for my 70th birthday, in a helicopter over Kings Canyon, or drift in a balloon south of Alice Springs. I can fly in a Cessna over the Buccaneer Archipelago, Mt Cook or Uluru. I can eat a witchety grub in Alice, crocodile steak in Kakadu, braised impala in Africa, buffalo stew in Katmandu, or eugaries on Fraser Island! Mind you, I draw the line at bungy jumping or hang gliding! I have been to the UK, Italy, Africa (twice), India, Nepal, Turkey and South West USA. I have camped on a coral cay, in Kakadu, the Pilbara, the Kimberleys, and Moreton Island; cruised in a small(ish) boat around the Kimberley Coast. The wildflowers in the south west of WA have left me gasping. I have almost fallen to my knees in the Hammersley Gorge at the palpable presence of God, and the crumpling and crimping of the rock walls, which you can feel still happening. In Botswana I have wept in the presence of four young cheetahs, so close we could hear them purring. It's a wonderful, marvellous world, and I have maybe five million photographs to prove it! To misquote Ansell Adams, "I take photographs because I love what I see". For the privilege of being able to experience these things I am eternally, humbly, grateful. Cynthia O'Gorman

"Teach us to appreciate our kinship with all the wild things, and spare us the unbearable loneliness of their vanishing". Chief Manitoba