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Tara Bellerose spends 15 to 20 hours a week making videos for Instagram and TikTok from her farm in rural south-west Victoria. Inspiration comes from all around the 23-year-old, with each video taking about two hours to make. The final product is a short video that is engaging, fast and contains colourful captions, images or filters tackling one of the biggest threats facing humanity: climate change.
“There is nothing really to it,” she says. “I don’t have any other hobbies, this is my hobby.”
“I am trying to teach people about animals and wildlife and what the earth has to offer. You can’t force people to change, people don’t like being forced to do stuff, but if you suggest and say, ’look how beautiful our reefs are and how cool these animals are... you can make people care.”
Tara Bellerose, 23, uses her large social media following to talk about the climate crisis.
As a third-generation farmer, Ms Bellerose has seen the impacts of climate change first hand, with floods and droughts impacting crop growth. “Dad says the weather is different from when he was my age,” she says. “When I saw the effect of humanity, I wanted to learn more, and use my platform to teach people about the ‘invisible’ day-to-day impacts we have as humans and try to show them the creatures they don’t see but harm indirectly.”
She’s been on social media since 2016, but it wasn’t until she watched David Attenborough’s Blue Planet II in 2018 that she pivoted her content to address the climate crisis.
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Ms Bellerose has a large following: 585,000 followers on TikTok, 12,000 followers on Instagram and 33,000 subscribers on YouTube. But there’s an ugly side to social media.
She’s been subject to death threats - at one stage she was getting one a week. One such message sent last year said: “I hope you kill yourself or get hit by a truck. I really hope that happens to you. Or you get malaria and just die because you are a waste of space. You shouldn’t exist.”