Fact-finder: A former police officer, Lyn White's investigative skills make it 'hard to say no to her', says one MP. Credit:Thom Rigney She has also used her role as chief investigator and campaign director of the Melbourne-based organisation Animals Australia to look into some of the darkest corners of Australia's lucrative live animal export trade. When White started giving TV journalists video footage of horrendous scenes showing cruelty to Australian cattle inside nightmarish overseas abattoirs, politicians and cattle exporters found themselves scrambling to deal with the fallout. "She is their nemesis and their bogeyman," says ABC journalist Sarah Ferguson, who has come to know White well. "They imagine they see her everywhere, about to visit ruin upon them. But it's more than that. They may not accept this, but I think she also acts as their conscience. "From the more enlightened, there's a respect because she is so unflinching. It's a tough industry with tough people in it, but they recognise that she is their match. Off the back of A Bloody Business, Lyn brought about a paradigm shift. She moved animal welfare from the fringe to the mainstream." Ferguson is referring to her own explosive investigation into the live animal export trade, screened on Four Corners in 2011 and triggered by video footage provided by White of the savagery meted out to Australian cattle in Indonesian abattoirs.

On the warpath: Princess Alia al-Hussein of Jordan is a friend and ally of Lyn White. Credit:AFP The footage featured hideous scenes of animals being beaten and kicked in the head, and struggling for life after their throats were clumsily cut. The final insult was that the "restraint boxes" - designed to cause animals to trip and fall on their sides so that they could be easily slaughtered - had been commissioned by Meat and Livestock Australia. There was uproar. Shaken members of the public demanded action. The federal government suspended the live cattle trade to Indonesia. The Nationals' then senator Barnaby Joyce told the ABC, "Ours is the quiet consultation option. Lyn White's view, to be honest, is the nuclear bomb option." White at a sheep market in Kuwait. Credit:Courtesy of Lyn White This wasn't the first time that White's work had sent the cattle industry reeling or had adversely affected Australia's trade relationship with another country. In 2006, she had given video footage of equally horrendous scenes inside the notoriously violent Bassatin abattoir in Cairo to Channel Nine's 60 Minutes. The live cattle trade to Egypt was suspended (and the live sheep trade brought to a halt, never to be resumed, later the same year). Two years ago, the live cattle trade to Egypt was suspended again after a local vet contacted White with evidence of ongoing cruelty in abattoirs. And last year, she showed sickening pictures of sheep being horribly slaughtered away from authorised abattoirs in Kuwait and Jordan.

White is an influential figure in Jordan. Princess Alia al-Hussein, the eldest daughter of the late King Hussein, has become a close friend and ally since White became her chief adviser on animal welfare. The two women first met seven years ago after Australians, appalled by the brutality shown to a Uruguay bull in an abattoir outside the Jordanian capital, Amman - scenes documented once again by White - sent impassioned emails to Jordan's Queen Rania, who consulted Princess Alia. The princess, in responding to the emails, discovered that "the famous Lyn White of Animals Australia" had written one of them. White with her border collies Nellie and Buddy on the beach near her Victorian home. Credit:Thom Rigney How do decent people become animal abusers? How did they lose their way? White and the princess later returned to the same killing ground to check that all the illegal abattoirs in that area had been demolished. They hadn't. Princess Alia got on her phone; shortly afterwards, bulldozers flattened the area. In February, in a joint investigation between Animals Australia and Animal Liberation Queensland, White's knowledge of how to use evidence from covert surveillance was critical in the sensational exposé of widespread live baiting in the Australian greyhound racing industry. Once again, Four Corners screened the story. It triggered a major police and RSPCA investigation across Queensland, Victoria and NSW. At the time of writing, 23 people in Queensland have been arrested on 65 charges of serious animal cruelty - including using live kittens as lures - and 21 trainers have received life bans. In Victoria, 17 people have been suspended and seven people charged by Greyhound Racing Victoria with 33 offences for "conduct contrary to both local and Australasian rules". In NSW, where a Special Commission of Inquiry is under way, 11 trainers have been suspended.

It's a tough industry with tough people in it, but they recognise that she is their match. Credit:Getty Images Fresh animal abuse revelations - this time concerning the slaughter of cattle with sledgehammers in Vietnamese abattoirs - hit the headlines in May. Animals Australia didn't release the disturbing footage they'd obtained, but lodged a complaint with the federal Agricultural Department. Agriculture Minister Barnaby Joyce responded by saying his department had been investigating similar claims, and warned Australian exporters of repercussions if they were found to be providing live cattle to non-accredited abattoirs. White, who co-ordinated the investigation in Vietnam, says the footage is shocking. "But so is the fact that exporters have known about this for two years, yet have been sending weekly shipments to Vietnam." The days when Senior Constable White patrolled towns in the Adelaide Hills - and ate meat - seem a very long time ago. It was in Nairne though, that White first started to consider the fear that is experienced by animals. "What is that fear if it isn't the desire not to be harmed?" she asks. "Animals are our fellow species. They share our ability to suffer. The key question we face in determining the morality of our actions towards them should be: is their suffering necessary? This is the crux of it all." Last year, she showed sickening pictures of sheep being horribly slaughtered away from authorised abattoirs in Kuwait and Jordan. Credit:Getty Images Lyn White lives with her two border collies, Nellie and Buddy, in what she describes as a "shack" that she owns on Victoria's Mornington Peninsula. Most mornings at sunrise, she's walking by the ocean with the dogs, a solitary figure. These are the times, she tells me, when she's most content. Nellie and Buddy, who eat specially prepared, plant-based dog food, are her constant companions.

Previously, White was also the owner of Piper, "the love of my life", a small, white "bitzer" who came with her when she moved from Adelaide to Melbourne in 2003. Piper died four years ago but there are photos of her inside the shack - in reality, a four-room house in need of some paint. "To be honest, everything in my life outside work gets neglected," says White unapologetically. There are koalas and possums nearby and, at night, the sound of crickets. On very still nights, she can hear the sea. There's a photo, too, of the British animal-welfare investigator whom White first met in Kuwait 11 years ago, who was instrumental in getting the abattoir footage taken in Egypt and Indonesia. "He is a soul mate and a dear friend. Had he not been married, he may have been something more," she says, before requesting that his name not be used since his work undercover places him at risk. You might think that White may have received death threats, but she has never received so much as an anonymous phone call. "I have a deep-seated belief that, somewhere in each human heart, people know that they're not meant to harm animals," she says simply. "I had some wonderful relationships that didn't translate into marriage, but nor was that ever really on my horizon," she continues. "If I look back at my life, had I married and had children, I wouldn't be doing what I'm doing. I needed the freedom to be able to go where I needed to go." Dr Bidda Jones, RSPCA Australia's chief scientist and a friend of White, says later: "Lyn has only one focus. She has basically given her life to her work."

If an abattoir worker's wife gave White pause for thought in her career, it was bears that provided the turning point. White was still in the police force when, in the late '90s, she saw a photo of a caged bear in China, clearly in agony, being "milked" for its bile. "Bear farming" sees the animal confined, sometimes for years, with an open wound from which a steel catheter delivers bile from its gall bladder. This is used in traditional Chinese medicine as a remedy for everything from trauma, sprains and fractures to hepatitis and fever. Shortly afterwards, in 1998, White became a volunteer worker for Animals Asia Foundation, the group set up by Englishwoman Jill Robinson the same year. She took six months' leave from the police force before resigning from the force in 2000 to work for Animals Asia as their Australian representative - then left Adelaide three years later, after accepting the job at Animals Australia in Melbourne. "When you become aware of great injustice, it's like being thrown into some sort of current," she explains. "There's something so profound and right about it that you don't doubt for a minute that you're heading in the right direction." White grew up with three sisters, two older, one younger. All of them were encouraged to play musical instruments, the piano and violin in White's case. Sherri, her younger sister, is a cellist in the South Australia Symphony Orchestra; Robyn played the flute and Andrea the clarinet and, as adults, the two taught music for a time. Their mother, Nan, still lives in Adelaide; their father, Ian, a manager at Shell, died in 2008. White, who adored her dad, explains that he suffered from Alzheimer's disease and passed away in a nursing home: "I'd just come back from Jordan with some evidence I had to take to the Department of Agriculture [in Canberra]. His condition deteriorated the night I spent with him. My family said, 'Now go.' By the time I got to Canberra, I got a message saying that Dad had died." The evidence from Jordan - video footage - never became public. The Australian government had partially funded the design of a "restraint box" for an abattoir in Amman. The box was completely inhumane, explains White, because the animal's legs were only partially captured before it was tipped on its side prior to having its throat cut. The result: a thrashing, terrified animal and no possibility of minimising its suffering.

The word "humane" should never be connected to the word "slaughter", she goes on: "At best, you can get systems that are more humane, but even in the best-designed abattoirs, animals sense their fate and are fearful and distressed. "Princess Alia had asked me to visit the main government slaughterhouse to determine if the practices were acceptable there," adds White, who demanded, and received, Australian funding to fix the situation. The result was the first government-run abattoir in the Middle East to use pre-slaughter stunning. (In Australia, national standards require this, too. A gun fires a metal bolt into the brain at high velocity, killing the animal outright. In halal stunning, now used in the Amman abattoir, a high-velocity blow to the skull causes unconsciousness. The animal's throat is then cut and it dies from blood loss.) There is no hostility towards White in Canberra. She says the capital's agriculture officials have always treated her with respect, even when "they're wondering what I'll have next to make their lives uncomfortable". Sarah Ferguson observes that there's an ethical and philosophical framework governing everything White does. "That's what people respond to and it can make them feel guilty or afraid of disappointing her," she says. "She is zealous, but not a zealot. I have sat with her, meeting people from the live cattle trade who have come to confess their past sins. They are almost hypnotised by her. She creates a compulsion in people because she forces them to examine how they live. And she doesn't congratulate them for confessing. She expects them to go further."

Independent MP Andrew Wilkie, who has campaigned against the live export trade, believes White, though deeply motivated, never lets passion cloud her judgment. "She's a trained investigator, which makes her an effective lobbyist around government [corridors]. It's hard to say no to her. She has the facts." White, in the meantime, quotes a memorable line from the TV series House of Cards about political spin being the "ability to rationalise the obscene into the palatable", which is exactly what happens, she argues, when people defend live export and factory farming. "Denying animals all quality of life and shipping them to countries where there are no laws to protect them from cruelty is morally obscene, yet the purported economic benefits are meant to make these industries 'palatable', " she says. "There are economic benefits in child labour and economic benefit was the primary argument used in the defence of slavery. What has underpinned all of these issues - slavery, child labour, cruel animal industries - has been indifference to suffering." She says Animals Australia supports the local processing of animals as an alternative to live export, because at least they would be killed in line with Australian standards and regulations. (Neither Jed Matz, chief executive of the Cattle Council, nor Alison Penfold, chief executive of the Australian Livestock Exporters Council, returned Good Weekend's calls.) Jim Nolan, a former Victorian slaughterman-turned-abattoir consultant in his 60s, is one of White's more unlikely admirers. The two have visited about 70 abattoirs together in Jordan. A few months after the Australian government suspended the live cattle trade to Indonesia in 2011, he invited White to an AFL match at the Melbourne Cricket Ground, where they lunched with some abattoir owners and meat industry workers. White, who has loved AFL since her childhood when she attended matches with her father, got on famously with everyone. Nolan's friends made it clear that they respected her work.

"I've seen how courageous she is," says Nolan, referring to their abattoir visits in Jordan. "They could have pulled knives on her. We'd raid a joint and I'd say, 'Lyn, don't go in there,' but she would. She's a level-headed lady but if she sees cruelty, she'll take on anyone." When White talks of the anguish in a dying animal's eyes, her distinctive calmness turns into a sad remoteness. Princess Alia noticed this, too, the first time they met in 2007. At first, she says, she mistook White's manner for fatigue. But then, she goes on, White suddenly smiled. "She referred to a plan of action and said, 'We will do it - for the animals.' Something in her eyes changed. Sparkle and light came through for a brief moment." White, who once had to show workers in a Jordanian abattoir how to use a head restraint properly to lessen the suffering of "an absolutely terrified animal", says that she constantly "enforces a level of discipline" to keep the worst memories at bay. The killing of a bull in Amman haunts her. In a blood-spattered room, workers lunged at it, stabbing the animal's throat. "Bit by bit, it became weaker and weaker," she says quietly. "One of the hardest things, memory-wise, was its terrified bellowing. "If someone asks me how I am, the answer is, 'Fine, thank you,' but the honest answer would be, 'Deeply battle-weary.' This work is relentless and the last 11 years have been a constant cycle of investigations documenting terrible cruelty, exposing that cruelty and then going into battle with those who defend it, lie about it and whose goal is to undermine you." When white first moved to Melbourne in 2003, she and Piper lived for the first four years in the Animals Australia office in Fitzroy. White slept on a sofa and cooked her meals in the staff kitchenette. Finances were tight. She was still paying a mortgage on her house in Adelaide, which she'd kept so that Clancy, her old border collie, could stay there and be cared for.

Perhaps if he'd known this story, veterinarian and West Australian Liberal Senator Chris Back would have thought twice about alleging at a Senate inquiry four years ago that he'd heard from a source that an Indonesian abattoir worker who appeared in A Bloody Business had been paid by a driver employed by Animals Australia and by a white, male foreigner (White's co-investigator), there as cameraman, to be cruel to the cattle. White, outraged, denied the allegations. More recently - and, coincidentally, a week before the airing of February's Four Corners program on live baiting - Back introduced a private, two-part bill that would force anyone in possession of images of animal cruelty to report it to the authorities within one day and hand over the images within five. The second part of the bill, as Back told Parliament in March, is directed at anyone "who would ... intimidate, threaten or attack a person or persons associated with an animal enterprise or would invade that property to place animals and, indeed, humans at risk from an occupational health and safety, animal welfare or biosecurity point of view". The bill's critics, however, insist its aim is more about identifying and punishing whistleblowers in a version of the so-called "ag-gag laws" now in force in parts of the United States, which make it illegal to film factory farms. The senator declined to talk to Good Weekend, but his spokeswoman said that Back, as a vet, deplores cruelty to animals: nothing in the bill prevented a person from continuing to gather evidence of suspected cruelty or to present their concerns or evidence to the media or anyone else. White doesn't believe the bill will get the necessary support. Had a bill like this been passed before now, she says, the difference in terms of the greyhound investigation would have been stark: a handful of people would have been implicated in one state, as opposed to 70 across three states. Nor would three government inquiries have been launched. White shows no triumphalism when talking about the trainers caught up in the live baiting scandal. She's more concerned with the deterioration in human behaviour that was revealed. "How do seemingly decent people become animal abusers, or wife beaters or child abusers? What's underpinning that?" she asks. "The biggest thing for me is: how did those people lose their way?"

Lions and hyenas roam happily on an Amman hillside at the New Hope Centre, an animal rescue facility set up by Princess Alia in 2009 at White's request. On an earlier inspection of Jordan's zoos, White had seen a wolf kept in awful conditions. The animal was so distressed, she'd run into a wall until her face was bloodied. She was relocated to New Hope. A few weeks later, White visited her in her enclosure. What happened next was extraordinary. "This animal ran to me and wrapped her paws around me. It was one of those moments ... They humble us with their forgiveness." White believes that animals will ultimately prove to be our most unlikely saviours. "Those who have suffered the longest and the most at human hands are going to be the same animals that awaken our humanity," she says. "We call them dumb animals, but they have every right to call us dumb humans."