On a dog sled heading towards the North Pole, Liz Courtney discovered a new part of herself. It was -20°C, and in the vast, quiet landscape, there was little to hear beyond the sound of the dogs. Then a voice surfaced: Hello. I’m your adventurous self. It’s so great to finally meet you.
Liz had spent nearly two decades building a successful career in communications, rising to become Managing Director of Ogilvy PR Australia before helping to grow another agency from 15 to 52 people. She knew how to build a business, lead a team and shape a story. She had yet to discover where those abilities might take her beyond corporate life.
Out on the ice, removed from the roles and expectations that had defined her, Liz recognised that the adventurer had always been there. She had simply needed enough distance from the noise of everyday life to hear it.
The journey towards that moment began after the birth of her first son, Dakota. Liz had expected to return to work. Instead, she found that her values had changed.
You don’t truly know who you are until you either put yourself out there, or you go somewhere quiet enough to hear who you actually are, rather than everybody else defining who they think you are.
Liz had always been fascinated by film. She would drag her husband to the cinema three times a week, absorbed by the way moving images and stories could come together to make an audience feel something. Eventually, she began exploring how she might make films herself. Her first contract, for a series about artists with ABC Australia, led to commissions from the Discovery Channel.
Then came an invitation to direct an expedition to Antarctica with 40 teenagers as part of a global youth initiative. Her first instinct was to decline. She had recently watched a film in which someone drowned in heavy seas, and she thought about school schedules, sport and lunch boxes. But when she stripped away the practical reasons, Liz recognised that what was really holding her back was fear. So she said yes.
Antarctica changed the trajectory of her life and the scale of the stories she wanted to tell. Time with the teenagers also changed what Liz was looking for. Through them, she saw the planet from the perspective of the generation that would inherit it. Their questions stayed with her: what were adults failing to do, and what kind of world did they think they were leaving behind?
You can let fear define what you choose to do in life, or you can say: I’m going to be the driver of my life, and everything that I need is also within me.
The expedition led to six months of research into climate change. Captivated by the way and Professor Tim Lenton at the University of Exeter wrote about tipping points in the climate system, connecting glaciers, ocean currents, heat and weather across the planet, Liz took a chance, and called him late one evening from Australia. To her surprise, he answered.
That conversation helped launch a $3 million climate production that took a year to research, two years to film and another year to complete. Liz travelled from the Amazon rainforest to Greenland, Alaska and the Great Southern Ocean, working with scientists and Indigenous communities to make the scale of the climate system understandable. The challenge was showing people how a change in one part of the planet could alter lives somewhere else,in a way that they could connect with it emotionally.
The work also changed how Liz listened. She remembers interviewing an Indigenous participant whose story unfolded in circles. At first, Liz found herself waiting impatiently for the point. When she let go of her questions and followed the story on its own terms, she realised she had been taken on a journey that a more rigid interview would never have allowed.
Some people connect more through the data and information. Other people connect through the heart when they hear the story. When you can combine the two, that is a very important part of storytelling.
Years of interviewing people in vastly different places and cultures have given Liz a clear view of what storytelling requires. Liz is clear-eyed when she shares that the story belongs to the person telling it. The interviewer is not there to extract answers that fit a story already decided, the storyteller’s role is to listen closely enough to recognise when the real story has entered the room.
Sometimes, she senses that moment before anyone says a word: she looks towards the camera operator, receives a nod and knows they have captured what she calls “gold”.
When you give someone the space to tell their story, it’s like giving them oxygen. That’s when the story starts to unfold. If you’re talking away with all your questions, that’s when you miss the magic.
Liz and a colleague in Germany secured approval for what she describes as COP’s first youth media team. She brought together six young reporters from Africa, India, Europe and Asia and helped establish their newsroom in the conference media hub, beside The New York Times. From there, the team produced and broadcast a half-hour programme each day.
Each reporter wore a badge asking: Will you give the youth of the world three minutes of your time? The question helped them approach some of the conference’s most senior figures and made their purpose difficult to ignore. For Liz, the real achievement was seeing young people represented and heard in a room where decisions about their future were being made.
We are making so many decisions every day in board meetings and government about the future — and we’re not going to be here for that future. We need to make sure the next generation is part of the conversation now.
The same belief drew Liz to HerMark. She sees women’s stories as a way of showing others what is possible, particularly when those stories include the uncertainty and difficulty behind the achievements. One woman’s experience can give another the encouragement to take a step she has been postponing.
Liz is also working on her forthcoming book, Conversations with Earth, launching this November. It brings together stories gathered from Indigenous communities, climate scientists and people she has met in some of the world’s most remote places. She hopes those encounters will help readers understand the world differently while also feeling personally connected to it.
Among the women who have inspired Liz, oceanographer Sylvia Earle stands apart. Their paths first crossed at an ocean conference in Portugal and then, unexpectedly, in Antarctica, when their ships were held at opposite ends of the same cove and they found a way to meet across the ice. Liz admires the steadfastness with which Earle built her career in a scientific world dominated by men, together with what she describes as her “soft and steady wisdom”.
If Liz’s mark were a symbol, it would be an eagle. To her, it represents wisdom, knowledge and the perspective that comes from rising high enough to see the whole picture. Where others might react to the detail directly in front of them, the eagle reads the wider terrain.
That perspective runs through Liz’s work. She has connected climate science with everyday life, brought younger voices into rooms shaping their future and learned to let other people’s stories unfold in their own way. Her mark lies in helping us see the connections we might otherwise miss.
HerMark is a visual and narrative study of women shaping the marketing, advertising, and communications industry. Branding in Asia is publishing the ongoing series in partnership with HerMark.
Learn more at hermark.world and read the rest of the series here.
