SEPTEMBER 18, 2026 INSP GROUNDCOVER NEWS 11 Jane Goodall, force of nature ELIZA JANSSEN The Big Issue Australia A woman is hooting and hollering at the podium of UNESCO’s Paris headquarters. Her white hair is in a cloudlike ponytail, an Africa-shaped pendant hanging around her neck. She translates the primate whoops for her audience of Homo sapiens: “What I’m going to say simply means: ‘This is me. This is Jane.’” Dame Valerie Jane Morris Goodall was 90 years old when she delivered this speech in October 2024. “Who knows how long I have left?” she told The Guardian, around the same time. “Yet there’s so much left to do. As long as my mind and body obey, I’ll keep at it.” Almost exactly a year later, Goodall died in her sleep, partway through a US speaking tour — “keeping at it” to the very last. But even as sadness and gratitude reverberated across the planet in the wake of her death, it was clear that Goodall’s work will never really be over. Its legacy hangs in the air around us: one last pant-hoot-call that continues to echo. There’s so much left to do. Maria Sykes, CEO of the Jane Goodall Institute Australia, says that the first word that comes to mind to describe Goodall is “poise.” “She would tell you she was just Jane from Bournemouth,” Sykes recalls, “but she wasn’t a sweet, white-haired, dithery old lady — she was a force of nature with a great mind, huge principles and just bloody extraordinary drive. She was absolutely unstinting in everything she gave to the cause she believed in, which was animals, people and the environment; the fortunate acronym there being ‘APE’.” Sykes was raised in the UK with a deep passion for animals, surrounded by a menagerie of pets. “I said to Jane when we first met that I grew up a little bit jealous of Doctor Doolittle, being able to talk to animals. And she said, ‘So was I!’” Still, it was only through taking on her mission of global conservation that Sykes realised “how absolutely exceptional and extraordinary” Goodall’s life story really was. “That a young woman in the 1960s would go into an African jungle and start breaking scientific norms, and reinventing what people knew not just of chimps and apes but frankly of themselves… She really redefined what it meant to be human,” Sykes says. Escaping to the wilderness of Tanzania’s Gombe National Park in 1960, accompanied by her ever-supportive mother Vanne, Goodall certainly felt out of her depth. Passionate but inexperienced, and without any academic background, she was mentored by the palaeontologist Louis Leakey to observe the Kasakela chimpanzee community as closely as possible. In a 2004 BBC Horizon interview, Goodall recounted her first impression of Gombe. “I looked up at the hillside with the thick valleys of forest in between and I remember thinking, How will I find the chimps? I felt so tiny, a young girl out on her own in the forest.” For weeks, any of the animals that Goodall spotted would run away from her in fear: “They had never seen a white ape before; they were horrified.” Her first friend was David Greybeard — a male chimp who she spotted dangling a piece of straw into the opening of a termite hill, before withdrawing it and slurping the insects up. Goodall’s observation that chimpanzees made and used tools – like this nifty fishing implement – was one of many revelations that traits believed to be uniquely human were in fact shared by our genetic cousins. Her findings were disregarded at first by the primate ethology establishment: “There were a few who said, ‘Well she must have taught them.’ That would have been very clever of me, I must say.” Refusing to call the chimps by a number, Goodall named members of the community as she got to know them. Each personality revealed a new lesson about their species — and ours. Flo and Gigi, the society’s high-ranking females, proved that chimps expressed love and connection like any human might: kissing, hugging, tickling and comforting their young. The “demonic male” Frodo revealed his species’ darker, more violent side, captured in Goodall’s account of the 1974–78 Gombe Chimpanzee War. “I think the sad part is,” Goodall told the BBC years later, “that having observed that sequence of events in which the larger community completely annihilated the smaller one and then took back the territory … that just made the chimps seem even more like us than I’d ever thought before.” Goodall and her contemporaries Dian Fossey and Biruté Galdikas were pioneering female primatologists, referred to collectively as “the Trito be an asset in the quiet, observational work of gaining the chimp society’s confidence. She reasoned that females may be more socially conditioned or predisposed by evolution than male scientists to exhibit the care and respect necessary for bonding with the potentially volatile animals. “We’re all compulsive doers now, aren’t we?” Sykes says. “If she had not had that patience to sit for many, many months of stillness and nothingness as the apes bid a hasty retreat, we wouldn’t know what we know today.” Due in part to Goodall’s influence, primatology is one of the few scientific fields that is dominated by women mates.” Goodall’s work in particular made waves – although press attention often focused more on her perceived sex appeal than her remarkable research. (‘Chimp Watcher Is Young, Attractive and Dedicated,’ drooled one 1962 headline.) This apparently didn’t bother her as long as it brought more eyes to her mission. When Sykes asked Goodall how she dealt with sexist assertions that she’d only got headlines “because she had good legs,” Goodall retorted, “Well, frankly, if they got me and the chimps an audience, so be it!” In fact, Goodall felt her womanhood today. The Jane Goodall Institute (JGIA) was founded in 1977, a signal of Goodall’s growing passion for global environmentalism — and Australia was near the top of her list. Goodall once told Sykes that if she had to be a chimp in captivity, Sydney’s Taronga Zoo is where she’d hope to spend her days. But both women warn that our country’s defining love of our flora and fauna hides a neglected underbelly of ecological destruction. Australians are I did have good legs. And “a nature-loving, bush-bashing mob as far as the international community is see GOODALL page 13
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