Can rhyme change the way we act; what we care about? This Tuross Heads author thinks so

She fears that one day that mechanic roar will signify the end of her favourite local trees - some of which are hundreds of years old.

Each morning she handfeeds a riot of kookaburras, each anthropomorphised in her mind with names and human-like traits.

"I can see the stress in their eyes," she said. "My heart bleeds for them when they hear the chainsaw."

She finds the climate situation "depressing" and "heart-wrenching" and so she decided take action.

Since she was 18, Ms Betz has expressed herself through rhyme. Close friends throughout the years have collected Christmas and birthday cards full of emotive prose. Ms Betz seems to be fueled by rhyme, one sentence effortlessly flowing into the next.

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Her skill is writing, and so when Ms Betz decided to do something about the environment, the natural option was to use her prose for the planet.

"I wanted to do my bit," she said. "I care about future generations and what happens in their world."

Whoops-a-Daisy the World's Gone Crazy is the first book by Ms Betz - who writes under the nom de plume BetZy - and was published in December 2021. It traces the battle of a seven-year-old girl as she learns about increasing biodiversity extinctions and the effects of every-day human actions on the the animals she befriends. It includes helpful hints anyone can implement to reduce their footprint on the planet.

The project took Ms Betz 12 months of on-and-off writing to complete, and is a work she is immensely proud of.

She hopes readers will be encouraged to be more conscientious in their actions.

"I am trying try to motivate people in a creative way that doesn't scare children, but makes them want to grow into a better person and a warrior for endangered species and animals," she said.

The feedback she has received suggests she is already achieving her aim.

One parent who purchased the book told Ms Betz that formerly their family never used to knot their plastic trash bags. After reading the book, they now knot their plastic bags to prevent them floating away into the air and landing as litter.

Ms Betz said all the feedback she has received is encouraging.

"People say they are becoming more aware," she said.

She is turning her attention next to the oceans; a storyline is already formed in her head and just needs to be transformed into prose.

She cannot stop the prose poetically forming in her mind, but she can stop environmental destruction - and she's trying, one sentence at a time.