Changemakers: Natalie Pietrobon

A small girl in shorts and T-shirt hauls a tin of white paint and an old, wiry paintbrush up a ladder to the top of a rickety outbuilding on her father’s sugar cane farm in Ingham, North Queensland. The blazing Australian sun makes the corrugated tin roof hot to the touch but 10-year-old Natalie Pietrobon EMBADJ2019 won’t be deterred.

An hour later, aching and tired, she’s done. Up close, she can’t appreciate the full effect of her handiwork. But she knows that, from the skies, the 3m-high word she has spelled out – HELLO – will be clear to anyone passing overhead.

Really, the message is only intended for one person: her future self. Since the age of five, Pietrobon has known that she wants to be a pilot. She vows that one day she’ll fly herself over this roof to witness the promise she made herself. Everyone tells her that flying is only for boys. She will prove them all wrong.

“My motivation was being told I couldn’t do it. I was like, ‘Well, let’s see’”, Pietrobon says. She went on to become only the 13th female pilot to graduate in the Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF). “When I started flying C-17’s in 2011, I was the second female pilot to have fl own the aircraft,” she says. “Since then, there has been a steady stream of female pilots behind me.”