For the love of albatrosses! JEANETTE'S TEEN TAKES FLIGHT

Her eco-warrior or daughter is on a mission and Mum's so proud!

- Marilynn Mclachlan

It’s one of the most remote places on the planet – an atoll with three buildings, limited electricity and a satellite phone – and it’s where 18-year-old Charlie Thomas will be living for the next eight months.

“I’m going on a big research vessel,” she says with a grin. “It drops us off and it doesn’t come back.”

“She was born to do this,” declares proud mum, The Breeze radio host Jeanette Thomas. “There’s just no way you’d ever stop anything like this, you just foster it and we’ve done that from the get-go.”

Jeanette shares, “There’s never been any fear of any type of animal or bug. It’s quite the opposite. Charlie wants to love and save everything, and try and make the world a better place.”

Since she finished year 12 in 2018, Charlie has worked at non-profit organisation Sea Cleaners, which removes waste from waterways, as well as giving educational talks at schools. She also visited Hawaii to do clean-ups on the beaches and saw first-hand the massive impact plastic was having on the tourist hot spot’s environment.

“When we got there on the first day, we looked over and there was a big, beautiful, cuddly-looking seal sitting on the beach, and it was surrounded by plastic,” Charlie recalls. “It was so awful, just heartbreaking. It sparked my passion for Hawaii and the wildlife, and I thought, ‘I have to come back and do something more.’”