Science journalist Alison Ballance hangs up her boots

With more than a thousand conservation stories under her waterproof parka, science journalist Alison Ballance is retiring from RNZ's Our Changing World programme.

Alison Ballance has dived with 17 different species of shark, she's drilled down into the ice of Antarctica to capture the symphony of Weddell seals, she's become the kakapo "aunty".

But after telling more than 1,000 stories, the voice of RNZ's science, environment and nature programme Our Changing World, Ballance is retiring.

"My work life balance gets a bit blurred because I can go to a remote island and help out on a diving expedition and I can be recording for Our Changing World and I might be blogging for Auckland Museum, when I went to the Kermadecs and I'm diving and it's all just a big blancmange for me," she says.

Today on The Detail Ballance talks to Sharon Brettkelly about her career that was inspired by a four-month trip to the sub Antarctic islands to study feral sheep for her master of science. She didn't really want to study the sheep but she desperately wanted to go to the southern tip of New Zealand.

"I've kept going back, sometimes there's decades between my trips but once you get down there it just gets into your system."

For five years she persistently contacted the Natural History New Zealand documentary team in Dunedin asking for a job, before they finally recruited her. The job took her to Mongolia, Ecuador and Russia but the "incredible" Galapagos Islands remain her top overseas experience, continuing her "obsession with seabirds and with islands and with natural history".

For more than 12 years Ballance has taken OCW listeners to far flung places to tell science and nature stories.

"I'm a tramper from way back, I'm a camper from way back so I don't mind how basic the living conditions are, if it's an opportunity to join people - and there are some very generous and amazing scientists in New Zealand who've been willing to have me along - I don't mind how crude my living situation is if I've got an opportunity to tag along and tell stories."

The rugged and famously windblown sub-Antarctic islands have a special place in Ballance's heart but they are also the location for one of her toughest living and working experiences.

"The living conditions were very difficult because there had been a massive rainfall event, there'd been these huge slips which had shunted the one small hut on the island about 20 or 30 metres and it needed to be fixed…

Go to this episode on rnz.co.nz for more details