I first visited the Butterfly House at Melbourne Zoo in 1988 with my nana and my mum. Mum said that I said, “I want to work here when I grow up.” I was seven at the time. I got this butterfly toy – a bit of wire and a butterfly made of feathers – and that was my prized possession for years. I just loved this butterfly on a stick! I had it all through my 20s.

I come from a family of animal lovers. My dad would always show us all the bugs in the garden. I remember him finding a praying mantis in Port Macquarie and just feeling that childhood wonder of “Oh my god, what is that thing?” It was just so beautiful. On my mum’s side, my nana and my gramps quite liked rescuing things, so there was often a rescue cat or dog or ducks around. They had a hobby farm in Korumburra – there was Peach Blossom the cow, pigs, ducks and chickens. We went to the farm every school holidays and I just loved it. My sister and I would look after the animals and make up songs about them in the paddocks.

When I was at school I always liked the subjects around animals, like biology. I studied conservation ecology at Deakin University and loved every aspect of it, especially urban ecology, thinking about what survives in our cities and towns.

I decided to go travelling and was working in pubs in London, as every good Australian should. I ended up working in a pub across the road from London Zoo and I thought, “Oh, I might start volunteering there.” I felt like I was really behind, because everyone I went to school with was already volunteering. I was about 23.

I volunteered for a year, then I got a job pretty quickly as a keeper. Bugs ended up being my favourite place to work. It was a building in the middle of Regent’s Park, in the middle of London, and we were doing legitimate conservation work. We were breeding partula snails and releasing British field crickets into the wild.

They were building a butterfly house that was only meant to be there for a year, but it’s still there 20 years later. I got to work with species from all over the world. I felt so fortunate. People who work with invertebrates just love them. We know they’re not the most popular animals – not everyone loves bugs. So if you’re dedicated to them, you really love them and want to do that work forever. The loyalty of keepers is quite unique to invertebrates.

I was at London Zoo for five or six years, then a job came up at Melbourne Zoo as the invertebrates keeper. I loved London, but a chance to work at the Butterfly House was pretty big. I’ve been at Melbourne Zoo for 15 years now and I’m the Manager of Birds, Invertebrates and Pookila.

We’ve done a lot of work on the Butterfly House over the years and we breed everything that goes in the house. The horticulture teams fill it with plants and the butterflies lay their eggs on them, then we bring them back-of-house to hatch into caterpillars. We release about 60 new butterflies in the house every day and over 22,000 per year.

We have two different people who would work across butterflies every day. One person would be in the Butterfly House, and the other person’s whole day is just looking after caterpillars.

To read the rest of this story and learn more about butterfly keeping, nab a copy of issue 130 at the frankie shop or visit one of our lovely stockists. For future issues, subscribe here.