Rising tides
Kimberley brings Pacific voices
to the forefront of climate action
Rising tides
Kimberley brings Pacific voices
to the forefront of climate action
The views from Kimberley Bernard’s workplace may be among the most spectacular on earth — turquoise oceans, remote islands and reef systems seemingly untouched by time.
But they are also a daily, deeply emotional reminder of what is at stake. Aboard Greenpeace’s Rainbow Warrior, Kimberley works on the frontline of environmental advocacy, travelling to communities already feeling the effects of a changing climate and helping bring their stories to the world.
The work has taken her into the heart of a global crisis she first encountered much closer to home.
As an ABC journalist, she reported on the devastation of the 2022 floods across the Northern Rivers and Queensland.
The experience made the consequences of a changing climate impossible to ignore — not as a distant environmental issue, but as something that was reshaping communities she knew.
Now she sees those same forces playing out across the Pacific, where rising seas and a warming ocean threaten the homes, livelihoods and cultures of island communities.
And her understanding of how suddenly lives can be upended is personal, too. During her final semester at Bond, her own home was destroyed by fire.
Three very different experiences, but each has helped shape the way Kimberley sees the world — and the work she has chosen to do in it.
Together, they form part of an unlikely journey that has taken Kimberley from a career in finance to Bond, from the ABC newsroom to the deck of the Rainbow Warrior — and from telling stories about environmental change to working directly on the frontline of the fight against it.
“I’m 33 and I have already had my two dream jobs,” she says.
The Fire and the flood
Kimberley arrived at Bond with a clear plan — albeit one that had taken several years to reach.
After finishing high school in 2010, she briefly enrolled in a creative and professional writing degree before deciding university could wait. She wanted to travel.
A nine-year career in finance followed, along with a life that took her around the world.
Then, in 2018, she was working in New Zealand and sitting in an office looking out at the Remarkables in Queenstown when something clicked.
“It dawned on me how unremarkable I felt,” she says.
“You can live a thrilling, adventurous life like I had, but for me, my daily grind needed to also be thrilling and purposeful.”
She returned to the Gold Coast and enrolled at Bond in 2019, determined to build a career in communications and journalism. And she knew exactly where she wanted it to lead.
Then, in 2018, she was working in New Zealand and sitting in an office looking out at the Remarkables in Queenstown when something clicked.
“It dawned on me how unremarkable I felt,” she says.
“You can live a thrilling, adventurous life like I had, but for me, my daily grind needed to also be thrilling and purposeful.”
She returned to the Gold Coast and enrolled at Bond in 2019, determined to build a career in communications and journalism.
And she knew exactly where she wanted it to lead.
“I wanted to get into the ABC,” she says. “It was my dream job.”
Before she could get there, though, Kimberley had to navigate one of the most frightening experiences of her life.
During the second week of her final semester, she and her husband Zaid Dillon woke at 2am to find their home on fire.
Their neighbour’s house was engulfed in flames, and the fire had jumped the fence.
“It was the most horrifying moment of my life.”
Everyone escaped and there were no fatal injuries, but the unit was unliveable and furniture was lost.
For the next three weeks, Kimberley dealt with insurance, real estate and legal issues while moving between family homes in Brisbane and trying to finish her degree.
She credits the Bond community with helping her get through.
“The people at Bond became a community I could rely on, a community who cared about me, and who wanted nothing more than to see me succeed.”
She did more than simply make it through.
Kimberley graduated as Valedictorian of her faculty and received the John Hardy Achievement Medal for the highest academic achievement in the Faculty of Society and Design.
She had also completed an internship with the ABC.
“With a bit of hard work and a lot of luck, I landed a two-month backfill contract on the day my internship ended,” she says.
The dream had become reality.
As an ABC journalist, Kimberley gathered and wrote news for radio, digital and television, attending events, digging into current affairs and trying to make sense of local issues.
Then there was COVID.
The pandemic brought a new level of difficulty to the job, particularly when she found herself reporting on border restrictions affecting people in her hometown.
The crisis was personal in other ways, too. Her husband Zaid lost his job as an aircraft engineer with a company working to develop battery-powered jet engines. The couple eventually had to dip into their superannuation to get through.
Today, the pair occupy perhaps one of the more unusual corners of the Gold Coast professional landscape. Kimberley spends months travelling the Pacific with Greenpeace, while Zaid is the lead technician for Gilmour Space Technologies — the Australian company behind the Eris rocket that made its first launch attempt in 2025.
It is an unlikely pairing of careers, but one thing they share is a fascination with pushing into unfamiliar territory. For Kimberley, that journey increasingly took her towards environmental activism.
She had already been involved with Sea Shepherd since 2016, campaigning around ocean conservation, sharks and marine debris. But the environmental stories she was reporting began to feel increasingly difficult to keep at arm’s length. Then came the floods.
The devastating 2022 floods across Queensland and the Northern Rivers, along with a succession of other natural disasters, brought the consequences of climate change closer to home. Kimberley began to question whether telling people’s stories was enough.
“I wanted to make a difference, and I thought I could do that by telling the stories of people affected by climate change,” she says.
“But I began to believe I could have a bigger impact on the frontlines of activism.”
When she saw a Greenpeace role that aligned with her values, she jumped at the chance. It meant leaving the ABC — the dream job she had worked so hard to achieve. But she was not leaving storytelling behind. She was taking it somewhere else.
On the frontline
Kimberley has now spent more than six months at sea, including her 30thst and 32nd birthdays, aboard Greenpeace’s Rainbow Warrior, travelling through the Pacific and working with communities on the frontline of the climate crisis.
Life aboard the ship is a world away from the newsroom.
Everyone has their Greenpeace role, but everyone is also part of the crew. That means the work can involve high-level communications and campaign strategy one minute and decidedly more practical duties the next.
The toughest job is in the galley.
Feeding about 30 people from different countries, cultures and culinary tastes is no small task — particularly when the chef has set strict rations to make sure supplies last. And despite spending months at sea, the crew cannot simply fish for dinner, with the ship’s conservation principles extending to life on board.
“Food is the heartbeat of the ship and we always try and give the chef a day off, so we all get to take turns making a meal,” Kimberley says.
“It’s important but stressful so I always want to do Sunday breakfast where everyone seems to be happy with pancakes and fruit.”
It is a small detail, but it captures something important about life aboard the Rainbow Warrior.
Life aboard the ship is a world away from the newsroom.
Everyone has their Greenpeace role, but everyone is also part of the crew. That means the work can involve high-level communications and campaign strategy one minute and decidedly more practical duties the next.
The toughest job is in the galley.
Feeding about 30 people from different countries, cultures and culinary tastes is no small task — particularly when the chef has set strict rations to make sure supplies last. And despite spending months at sea, the crew cannot simply fish for dinner, with the ship’s conservation principles extending to life on board.
“Food is the heartbeat of the ship and we always try and give the chef a day off, so we all get to take turns making a meal,” Kimberley says.
“It’s important but stressful so I always want to do Sunday breakfast where everyone seems to be happy with pancakes and fruit.”
It is a small detail, but it captures something important about life aboard the Rainbow Warrior.
The work may involve confronting some of the biggest environmental and political challenges in the world, but there is still laundry, cooking, cramped living quarters, tiredness and the daily negotiation of life with the same group of people at sea.
There are also moments that could never happen in an office.
In one voyage, Kimberley and the crew sailed to Auckland to mark the anniversary of the bombing of the original Rainbow Warrior by French intelligence agents in 1985.
In 2023, she joined a Pacific voyage to Tuvalu, Fiji and Vanuatu, working with communities on the frontline of climate change.
The mission involved gathering legal testimonies documenting the environmental harm already being experienced by those communities. The testimonies were ultimately delivered to the International Court of Justice as part of a Pacific-led campaign initiated by students in Vanuatu.
In 2024, the ICJ delivered a landmark Advisory Opinion affirming that government actions driving climate change could be illegal and that states may have legal obligations to cut emissions and compensate vulnerable nations.
For Kimberley, the significance was not that Greenpeace had won something. It was that Pacific communities had been given the resources and platform to tell their own stories.
“This was a win for the Pacific,” Kimberley says. “Not for Greenpeace, and not a personal win, but to know we were able to offer our resources to communities telling their own stories was incredibly powerful.”
Story is Everything
That instinct — to use storytelling as a vehicle for change — was forged at Bond.
A New Colombo Plan scholarship took Kimberley to the Solomon Islands, where she immersed herself in the environmental challenges facing small island communities. She produced Green Makira, a three-part long-form documentary series, interviewing provincial government officials, snorkelling over warming reefs and surveying logging sites. The experience changed her.
“Going to the Solomon Islands turned my world upside down and really drove my passion for important storytelling and gave me a type of confidence I’d never had before.”
Story is Everything
That instinct — to use storytelling as a vehicle for change — was forged at Bond.
A New Colombo Plan scholarship took Kimberley to the Solomon Islands, where she immersed herself in the environmental challenges facing small island communities.
She produced Green Makira, a three-part long-form documentary series, interviewing provincial government officials, snorkelling over warming reefs and surveying logging sites. The experience changed her.
“Going to the Solomon Islands turned my world upside down and really drove my passion for important storytelling and gave me a type of confidence I’d never had before.”
It also helped define the kind of communicator she wanted to become.
In 2026, Kimberley’s commitment to using communication as a force for change was recognised when she received the Bond University Alumni Community Service Award at the 2026 Bond University Alumni Awards.
Kimberley Bernard receiving her award with Vice Chancellor Tim Brailsford and Chancellor David Baxby. Photo: Cavan Flynn
Kimberley Bernard receiving her award with Vice Chancellor Tim Brailsford and Chancellor David Baxby. Photo: Cavan Flynn
But for Kimberley, the award is less a destination than a marker of how far that journey has taken her.
“Story is everything,” she says. “Nature, justice and climate all have a story, and bringing those stories to life is how we create change.”
Today, that belief takes her well beyond reporting on environmental issues.
Kimberley is helping design campaigns, training activists across Australia and the Pacific in media engagement and working behind the scenes to influence political and policy outcomes.
Most recently, she returned from the Pacific Islands Forum Leaders Meeting in Palau, where climate change and rising seas remain existential concerns for the region’s low-lying island nations. The timing brought the urgency of her work into sharp focus.
A new United Nations Environment Programme report released during the forum warned that the world is now virtually certain to overshoot the Paris Agreement’s 1.5°C warming limit, with even the most optimistic scenario seeing warming peak at 1.8°C. The news sent a ripple around the world. In the Pacific, where Kimberley was standing, the implications were stark: rising seas and a warming ocean threaten to engulf low-lying communities, along with the homes, cultures and livelihoods they hold.
For the communities Kimberley works with, the issue is not an abstract global target. And that is why the spectacular views from the Rainbow Warrior can be so confronting. The beauty is inseparable from what Kimberley knows could be lost.
Her career may have taken an unexpected route, but each chapter has left her with something she now uses in the next.
Finance gave her professional experience and independence. Bond gave her the confidence to start again, the skills to tell stories and the opportunity to experience the Pacific.
The ABC taught her how to report, communicate and make sense of complicated issues.
Greenpeace has given her the chance to take those skills into the fight itself.
Her workplace can be a newsroom, a meeting room, a parliament or a boat crossing the Pacific.
Looking back, she does not see leaving the ABC as abandoning her dream. She sees it as discovering a bigger version of it.
“There are so many opportunities with a Bond degree — you can do anything you want if you work hard, put your heart into it and back yourself,” she says.
“Since Bond, I have done two out of two of my dream jobs and reflecting on the impact I’ve had is really special.
“Piece together your passions with your strengths and something that you can do every day — you will have a dream work life.”
For someone who spent nine years in finance before starting again, Kimberley Bernard has never followed a straight career path. Perhaps that is the point.
Her story is not about finding the right job the first time.
It is about recognising when the job you once dreamed of is no longer enough — and having the courage to chase the next one.
Image: Cavan Flynn
Image: Cavan Flynn
Her career may have taken an unexpected route, but each chapter has left her with something she now uses in the next.
Finance gave her professional experience and independence. Bond gave her the confidence to start again, the skills to tell stories and the opportunity to experience the Pacific.
The ABC taught her how to report, communicate and make sense of complicated issues.
Greenpeace has given her the chance to take those skills into the fight itself.
Her workplace can be a newsroom, a meeting room, a parliament or a boat crossing the Pacific.
Looking back, she does not see leaving the ABC as abandoning her dream. She sees it as discovering a bigger version of it.
“There are so many opportunities with a Bond degree — you can do anything you want if you work hard, put your heart into it and back yourself,” she says.
“Since Bond, I have done two out of two of my dream jobs and reflecting on the impact I’ve had is really special.
“Piece together your passions with your strengths and something that you can do every day — you will have a dream work life.”
For someone who spent nine years in finance before starting again, Kimberley Bernard has never followed a straight career path. Perhaps that is the point.
Her story is not about finding the right job the first time.
It is about recognising when the job you once dreamed of is no longer enough — and having the courage to chase the next one.
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