When he was 16 years old, Corey Tutt told his careers adviser that he wanted to be a zoo-keeper or a zoologist. “That was my ultimate goal – to be the Aboriginal equivalent of Harry Butler,” Tutt told The Brilliant, invoking the beloved Australian naturalist, best known for hosting ABC’s In the Wild.
The career adviser told Tutt to forget it. “I was told, ‘Look, kids like you don’t really go to university. If you don’t get a trade, you’re probably going to end up dying at a young age, because that’s what happens to kids like you.’”
It was shocking presumption and couldn’t have been more wrong. Today, 28-year-old Tutt has Young Australian of the Year for NSW 2020 on his resumé. He’s the CSIRO Indigenous STEM Champion 2019, the AMP Tomorrow Maker 2019 and the ABC Trailblazer 2019, all awarded in recognition of his work as the founder and CEO of DeadlyScience.
Single-handedly launched by Tutt in 2018, DeadlyScience is a non-profit organisation that provides science resources, mentoring and training to more than 100 remote and regional schools in Australia, with a particular focus on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities.
It’s the result of a formidable challenge that Tutt has set for himself – to remove the barriers that he’s faced as a young Australian.
Rocky Beginnings
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people have built a connection with Australia’s natural world for more than 60,000 years as custodians of the oldest continuous culture on Earth. They were Australia’s first scientists, pioneering innovations in farming and aquaculture and forming a deep understanding of endemic plant and animal species.
The experience of colonisation was devastating. Many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children living in Australia today are dealing with the effects, including the loss of land and connections to Country and frequent racism and discrimination.
Tutt had a difficult childhood. Growing up in the early 2000’s, he moved fairly often, which meant he was constantly adjusting to new schools and trying to catch up to his more established classmates.
At 16, he left high school to work at the Roo Gully Wildlife Sanctuary in Western Australia. “I had nine kangaroo joeys to feed and an emu – that was tough,” says Tutt, adding that he didn’t know how to properly take care of himself, let alone several orphaned animals.
But help came in the form of the Australian Indigenous Mentoring Experience (AIME) in the form of Ben Gallen and Paul Sinclair who were Tutt’s mentors, which supports Indigenous students through high school and university. Inspired by the mentorship he’d received, Tutt studied captive animal care at TAFE and landed a job at Shoalhaven Zoo at the age of 18.
Everything was on track – until his close friend died by suicide.
Devastated, Tutt said he had to get away. “I saw an ad in the paper for an alpaca handler, and I answered it because I thought, ‘I’m feeding a 4-metre crocodile at the moment and picking up tiger snakes – how bad can an alpaca be?’”
Animal Work
He soon found out, when a struggling alpaca broke his cheek bone when he was trying to shear it. But Tutt kept it up, shearing alpacas for up to 16 hours a day in hot sheds across Australia. “I didn’t give up, and that was the moment I realised I was actually a resilient person,” he says.
Tutt also worked as an animal attendant for the RSPCA.
“I was working at the animal shelter, learning animal behaviour, and that was my unofficial science degree,” he says. “I loved the ‘problem dogs’. I would always take them on. I got every single one adopted.”
He qualified as an animal technician at TAFE, and became an apprentice at Australian BioResources, a Moss Vale, NSW-based organisation that breeds mice for research purposes.
“I learned about Punnett squares, I learned about genetics. I got a scrapbook and every time I came across a new mouse strain, I would write as much information about it as possible,” says Tutt.
In 2016 Tutt joined the University of Sydney as an animal technician where he shared a desire to encourage Aboriginal kids into all things STEM. In 2019 he left that role and be became a research assistant at the University of Sydney’s Matilda Centre for Research in Mental Health and Substance Use.
It all sparked a desire in Tutt to encourage other Aboriginal kids to pursue science.
The biggest barrier
Tutt volunteered for AIME in his spare time at the university. “Education is freedom, and if I can give these kids a sense of freedom and the ability to track down information and find it out for themselves, then I’m giving them their freedom to find their passion and purpose,” he says.
Students were enthralled by his tales of Australian animals, inspiring Tutt to Google Australia’s most remote school and send them his science books.
Aboriginal children in remote areas are less likely to attend school regularly, and more likely to have literacy problems than Australian children elsewhere.
Tutt discovered that the poor outcomes are no surprise – the schools he was contacting had very few books, much less equipment, and the texts they had were wildly out of date.
DeadlyScience
Tutt founded DeadlyScience in 2018; ‘deadly’ is a word Indigenous people use when they mean ‘excellent’ To fund it, he worked two jobs and started a GoFundMe. Tutt has now raised over $270,000. DeadlyScience is now an organisation that includes Indigenous leaders, along with experts in bilingual, business and STEM education.
To date, it has supplied remote schools in Australia with more than 20,000 books. It has also supplied telescopes and other scientific and educational equipment. Through DeadlyScience, Tutt launched at Zoom platform in 2020 to connect scientists with school kids. Media stars like Professor Brian Cox and “Dr Karl” Kruszelnicki are also supporters.
“DeadlyScience is more than a charity,” says Tutt, clear that it’s a collaboration between the Deadly Science team, the young people they serve, and scientists. Its long-term goal is to raise the number of Aboriginal students studying science at university level, which Tutt believes has been stymied, due to the apathy of both government and teaching institutions.
Tutt sounds upbeat when he describes DeadlyScience, except for one thing: people often make promises to help, but don’t follow through.
His next mission is to “get some corporate dollars in”, but on his terms – “not as a tokenistic thing”, he says. “We know DeadlyScience is working – we’ve got attendance data and photos to prove it.” Indeed he does – schools involved in DeadlyScience have reported a 25% increase in student attendance.
He tells the story of Trae, who was kicked off his school football team because of poor academic performance. “I invested my time in Trey,” says Tutt. “Now he doesn’t want to be a Deadly AFL footballer, he wants to be a Deadly geologist – the first ever Aboriginal geologist.”
What Trae needs now is more mentoring, encouragement and access to materials, says Tutt. “It’s a basic human right to provide these resources to these kids.”
DeadlyScience is going part of the way to ensure that when Indigenous students in Australia want to study science, the doors will open for them – and they won’t be told that studying their own country is not “for kids like you”.
If you or someone you know is thinking about suicide, call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255 or use the online Lifeline Chat, both available 24 hours a day, seven days a week, to those in the United States. In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on 116 123 or email jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline can be contacted on 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at www.befrienders.org.
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Article by Felicity Carter
Photo Credit: Photo supplied