photographer EMMA WILKINS
The first question I ask ecologist and jewellery maker Dydee Mann is not the one I planned: “Do you want to tell me why you’ve brought dead birds to my house?”
The threatened species biologist is visiting me for an interview during her lunch break. She’s just come from the museum, where she borrowed a box of swift parrot specimens for a training course she’s running. She wants attendees to see the birds up close and appreciate their unique beauty.
Mann’s work involves considerable time in the bush as well as the office, so she’s fortunate to have seen many rare and threatened species in the wild. Her love of fieldwork began in high school, when she volunteered to help a German PhD student track platypuses in Tasmania’s Central Highlands. “We’d go up to the lake about four o’clock every afternoon and swing this radio antenna around, trying to work out where each platypus was; and track and record the location of each one until about three or four o’clock in the morning,” she says. Then they’d drive back to the hut, sleep, return to the lake “and do it all again”.
You might think the hours and the cold (“You needed to wear seven pairs of thermals to stay alive”) would put her off fieldwork for life, but Mann was hooked. “It was just fascinating to be so up close and personal with this really cryptic creature that I’d only seen a few times before in the wild,” she says. She realised that a career studying wildlife would take her to amazing places and offer some unique experiences.
In her university years, Dydee Mann studied biological science and worked as a bushwalking guide. Her honours degree focused on the Tasmanian devil facial tumour disease, which meant a year in the field with some of Tasmania’s most experienced wildlife biologists. Since then she’s worked for the state government in a range of field-based wildlife roles.
It was through this work that Mann ended up working with a renowned ornithologist who, in 2019, decided to mark her retirement with a bird-themed party. Mann didn’t have any bird-themed clothes (a problem she’s since rectified), so she sculpted some swift parrot earrings out of polymer clay. It took more than an hour – she wanted to get the shape, the colours and the markings just right – but she enjoyed the process and was pleased with the result. At the party, various guests commented on her highly original earrings, and she offered to make more.
“That generated more and more interest, and I realised there was a niche there.”
The realisation led Mann to create Wilderness Bling, a micro-jewellery business that specialises in Tasmanian wildlife. She’s since sculpted more than 100 species – mostly birds, but also mammals, fish and plants – into earrings, brooches, necklaces, magnets, wine-glass charms and ornaments.
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Dydee Mann sees the business as an opportunity to raise awareness of the beautiful wildlife Tasmania (and to a lesser extent Australia) has to offer, to draw people’s attention to threatened species, and to start conversations about conservation.
One of her favourite parts of the job is getting commissioned to make a particular species for a particularly passionate customer. “I’ve made some unusual things, like someone requested a particular species of bat that is different from other species of bats because of the way that its nose folds in a different direction to other bats.
“I had an order for some jewellery for a lady who lives in Victoria. She has a little patch of bush that’s protected for wildlife and this is the third time she’s ordered stuff from me, and each time she orders the species that she’s finally seen on her little bush block ... She enjoys being able to celebrate it with someone who gets how exciting it is to see eastern barred bandicoots hopping through her bush.”
Mann has also been commissioned to make a series of yellow-tailed black cockatoo earrings and brooches, and a series of rakali (water rat) necklaces, brooches and earrings, both for bridal parties.
Thanks to her day job, she’s already seen most of the creatures she sculpts in the wild, but she’s also made species she’s never encountered herself: a maugean skate for the scientist who discovered the species, commissioned by his forest ecologist partner, and some Antarctic seabirds for a scientist who works with them up close. In both cases, it was a welcome opportunity to learn more.
“It’s helping me to add to my knowledge all the time,” Mann says. “I’m looking up photos of these things, I’m reading their official descriptions, why they differ from other species and where they live. One of the things I really like doing is including the details that determine one species from another, and sometimes you can’t necessarily immediately see that from a photo; you need to read the description of the species or ask an expert what is it about this species that makes it different to another one.”
Because Tasmania’s scientific community is fairly connected (“everybody knows who everyone is, and for the large part people are really willing to share their knowledge”), Mann is often able to message an expert if she’s not sure where a fin should go or how long a tail really is.
“It’s great interacting with species specialists because often they work on … specific creatures that most people have never heard of.” They delight in having someone not only show an interest in “this amazing critter they’ve spent their whole life studying”, but sculpt it into something to be worn and admired.
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“My aim is to make pieces of jewellery that spark conversations,” Mann says. “Someone might be wearing a spotted handfish brooch to their event, and they get some questions about it. ‘What the hell is that thing? I’ve never seen it before.’ And they can spread the word about this amazing, critically endangered fish that only lives in a few places around Hobart.”
I ask Mann whether she wears a different pair of earrings to work every day. Not quite. But she does wear her wares most days. “Part of my job is running training courses for people, so often I try and match my accessories to the topic, and if I know I’ve got something coming up and I don’t have the right species, I make the effort,” she says. By the time the event rolls around, she usually has earrings to match.
Dydee Mann, who lives in Moonah with her partner and their two children, says there are many other places in the world with easy access to incredible wildlife (“I’ve been to some amazing places – the Pantanal in Brazil is a world-famous wetland with incredible wildlife and you just have to walk out the door and you can see a million amazing species”), but she would not want to settle anywhere else.
“What’s cool about Tassie is that you have great access to amazing wildlife and a great quality of life,” she says.
Dydee usually welcomes commissions, but she refuses to mass produce any one creature. It means her work, like so many of the species she sculpts, will remain rare. Even so, it’s been spotted in parliament, at corporate functions, and in the corridors of the ABC. If you look carefully, you might see it in a Hobart street, at a Launceston cafe, maybe even a mainland pub; dangling from somebody’s ears, perching on a lapel, hanging around a neck.
Emma Wilkins is a Tasmanian journalist and freelance writer. Topics of interest include friendship, parenting, literature, culture, and faith. Her work has been published by The Guardian, The Australian, the ABC and a range of other publications. She enjoys reading, baking, walking, travelling and entertaining. She lives in Hobart with her husband and their three children.
