Outback Heroines

by Sue Williams

  During all this time, Libby continued to work for half a day a week at a local GP’s surgery and sometimes doing locums in rural communities such as outlying Flinders Island. In the doctors’ rooms locally, however, she’d often be approached by patients who’d ask her to prescribe herbs for their ailments. She was nonplussed.

  ‘At first, I thought, How stupid!’ she confesses. ‘But some of these people were really sick and they still wouldn’t agree to have conventional therapies. So I decided to get some books on herbs and look into it, to see what I could do for them.’ In any case, she wasn’t as dismissive of alternative therapies as many other conventional doctors. She’d been doing yoga while pregnant and felt it had done her a lot of good, and she’d always believed in the benefits of healthy eating and minimising stress for good health. But when she started using herbs, she entered a whole new world.

  ‘And to my amazement, the herbs worked!’ she says. ‘So I started using them for some people and could see they could be really helpful, and I ended up setting up my own holistic practice. I had a lot of people with cancers and chronic illnesses coming to see me and I believed in people taking responsibility for their own health and I would use allopathic medicine in combination with a variety of alternative therapies, including herbal medicine, nutritional supplements, yoga and meditation. ‘I found that usually worked really, really well.’

  It was then that Libby and Greg came up with the idea of growing herbs. No one else seemed to be doing it, and they had the perfect parcel of land, with good soil, fresh air, no pollution and clean water. Gradually, the whole business began to take shape. ‘It was a huge risk, but we were sure we were doing the right thing,’ says Libby.

  When their next three children came along, Jyoti, Elle and Benn, Libby chose to give up her doctor’s shifts in order to be a full-time mother, while still working with the herbs. ‘But at times, it was hard to get our heads around why we were doing it,’ says Libby. ‘We were working so hard physically, and were earning very little money. At one stage, our accountant said we may have a real problem as we were living so far below the poverty line, there’s no way the Australian Tax Office would believe we were living on $6000 a year!’

  Today, Highland Herbs is acclaimed as the producer of some of the finest herbs, and herbal products, in the world. They are certified organic, and not only sell to health food and wholefood shops and health practitioners, but also, via their online business, supply herbs, teas and balms around the globe. The success of their enterprise has far surpassed their hopes and dreams, but it’ll still never make them rich. The way they choose to work in order to ensure their herbs are the best possible quality means their lives are still dominated by the season’s plantings and tillings and pickings and dryings. ‘We’ve never been driven by money,’ says Libby, smiling. ‘We still feel very, very privileged to be able to live a life like this, a life that’s simple and healthy and helping others.’

  Many of her patients have been exceedingly grateful for her help. Ann Gschwendtner went to Libby for herbal treatment when she was trying to fall pregnant and, after her child was born, returned to her when diagnosed with cancer. Libby steered her through, with courses of chemotherapy and radiation, as well as with herbs. ‘I don’t believe I would have got through it without her,’ says Ann today. ‘She has an extraordinary capacity to understand, without you actually saying anything, and she’s a true healer. I’ll be eternally grateful to her. Whenever I see her, I always feel energised by her joy for life, the integrity with which she lives her life, and the way her door is always open to everyone. She really carries the essence of selflessness, and her humanity is deep and genuine.’

  That empathy and generosity is part of what attracted Greg to her in the first place and, in the last 30 years, he’s seen that side of her develop and grow. ‘She’d give anyone the shirt off her back if they needed it,’ he says. ‘She really cares about people.’ When she became the doctor to the Buddhist centre in Launceston, despite not being a Buddhist, she was distressed to hear one of the lamas (spiritual leaders) talking of a nun back in Tibet who was dying because she couldn’t afford the $4500 operation she needed on her digestive tract. Libby immediately raised as much money as she could on her own, and asked friends to contribute. The nun had the operation and recovered well. Knowing the community in Tibet really needed a medical centre of their own, Libby then took out a bank loan to build one – and even constructed a replacement when the original was later destroyed by an earthquake – as well as a school beside it, and also bought a vehicle to take the doctor to outlying areas and medicine to those who couldn’t get to the clinic.

  With the project later opened to anyone wishing to donate, and a number of people coming forward to help keep it going, two locals are also training at the medical centre in Tibet to become doctors. Now, as well as her GP shifts, she works regularly for the Rural Women’s GP Service – which sends a female doctor to far-flung communities without a regular female GP, so that patients who feel uncomfortable about seeing a male GP can receive treatment – as well as for the RFDS, and part-time for the Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre in Launceston and adolescent health services.

  Bob Brown says his favour to Libby and Greg of the loan of his house for a short time has since been repaid many times over. ‘Within a few years, Libby more than returned this as she called by to help tend my mother, who died in 1983,’ he says. ‘They have been the most kind and considerate neighbours. My career in green politics has kept me mostly away from Liffey, but it has always been good to know that Libby and Greg were there and to watch their babies grow into fine young adults.’

  While Libby and Greg have always loved their life in the wilderness, and the chance to help others, their children weren’t always convinced. At first, the kids all loved the freedom of playing in the rainforest they nicknamed ‘fairyland’, running around in the summer without clothes, climbing the cliffs as soon as they could walk and learning about all the animals they saw every day. However, Tim, now 29, and Jess, 28, were keen to be like the other kids at school, who didn’t take homemade bread, dahls and vegetable curries in for their lunch, didn’t wear op shop clothes and who had TVs at home rather than parents who did yoga. Too often, they felt different and excluded from conversations about the latest fashions and hit television shows.

  ‘They didn’t know what people were talking about,’ says Libby. ‘Our lives were all a bit fringe for them. They couldn’t get out of here fast enough! They just wanted to be “normal”! But it’s been quite interesting. Now they all eat like we do, with no junk food, and they hardly ever watch TV; it’s like they’ve come a full circle. They now say they wouldn’t change their upbringing for anything!’

  Tim works as a professional lifeguard and surf coach on the Sunshine Coast and has travelled the world in search of the perfect wave. Jess is a doctor, like her mother, and was nominated for Young Australian of the Year when she cut short a 2005 holiday in Thailand to work in a makeshift morgue, identifying tsunami victims. That year, she was also voted the nation’s most outstanding woman in a poll by readers of The Age newspaper. She’s also spent time working as a volunteer in the Aboriginal community of Yuendumu, 350 kilometres north-west of Alice Springs, in a remote part of India and in refugee camps on Sri Lanka’s east coast.

  She’s one of Libby’s greatest fans. ‘Just having six children and still doing what she does is pretty extraordinary,’ Jess says. ‘She helps so many people and always has time for everyone. I think she’s one of the least selfish people I’ve ever known!’

  Libby’s third child, Matt, now 26, is an environmental engineer living and working in Finland, returning home to Liffey to build a Finnish sauna in the forest that the whole family, at various times, have enjoyed. Second daughter, Jyoti, the kid who wouldn’t stop climbing trees, walked up the cliffs at the age of just four and grew up a daredevil explorer, is, at 22, a professional circus performer in Queensland – an expert in flying trapeze and other a
erial acts – currently touring the world performing, and studying physiotherapy in her spare time. Elle, 18, is still at school, as is Benn, 13.

  Elle’s not sure what she’d like to do next, but Benn is determined to become a farmer. Early on, he bought chickens with his pocket money and reared two orphaned poddy lambs, insisting on bottle-feeding them in the house where they could stay warm. Later, he sold eggs in order to buy two pregnant ewes. Other animals that have come along over the years are also treated like part of the family: Tom the horse, who hangs around by the back door to say hello, and Roger the sheep, who behaves much more like a dog than any sheep. Once, he accompanied visitors all the way up the bluff adjoining the property, running along at their heels for the six-hour return trek, and then stood at the top looking for all the world as if he were admiring the view.

  At various times, all the kids have pitched in with the business, and they often had help from WWOOFers, members of the voluntary worldwide movement Willing Workers on Organic Farms, who work in return for food and board. For the children, it meant meeting new people from different parts of the world, and learning about life far beyond Tasmania. For the visitors, it was a chance to learn about herbs, find out how to grow plants and join in yoga and meditation sessions.

  As the family grew, extensions were tacked on to the house, which now resembles a crooked kind of homemade tin-and-wood storybook castle. Inside, the small wood-lined interior is warmed by a pot-bellied stove roaring away under the drying racks, while outside the front door, a plastic bottle of water hangs down on a pulley devised by Benn so the door always closes behind everyone. There was also an old bus bought and parked outside, where the two eldest boys lived when the house overflowed with people. The toilet is still a simple composting loo, shielded from the house but on an open platform at the other side, looking out over the landscape and straight up at Drys Bluff peak. It must simply be one of the best views from a toilet in the world.

  For the future, Libby and Greg hope to switch to more solar- and water-powered energy, but basically keep on doing what they do best, and living where they love the most. ‘More and more people are now turning to natural therapies in conjunction with allopathic medicine,’ says Libby. ‘We get a lot of positive feedback from the people buying our herbs; the number of online customers are increasing each week. We’re very happy to keep producing the best quality herbs possible, and promoting a life closer to nature.

  ‘As long as that demand is there, we’ll continue as organic farmers, growing our herbs. There is an increasing number of organic farmers in the Outback now, and maybe we help people see there is a different way to how things are conventionally done. We are very happy living this simple life. And every time someone rings up and says our herbs saved their life or how much they’ve helped, then you think, We’re doing the right thing! And then that we’d better keep going . . .’

  10

  BRIDGING THE DIVIDE

  Deb Bain, Stockyard Hill, Victoria

  A little girl squeals with pleasure as a hungry poddy calf fastens on to the bottle of milk formula she’s holding and starts suckling. A 13-year-old boy returns from a ride on a mini-motorbike around a paddock, wide-eyed with excitement. A city mum frets as her kids disappear with their new bush mates off towards the local creek.

  ‘They’ll be right!’ Vivien Thomson reassures her, as they sit together in the farmhouse of her property drinking tea. ‘My kids’ll look after them.’ And, of course, she is right.

  ‘Those children ended up having an absolute ball!’ she says. ‘For a lot of city people, coming out to the country is such a different world for them, and their kids absolutely love the wide-open spaces and the freedom, the kind of things you just don’t get in a city.’

  As the puppet-master of this exchange – sending a city family out into the bush to stay with a farm family to see what rural lives are really like – Deb Bain smiles to hear of both sides’ experiences. The city kids haven’t stopped buzzing with excitement since they arrived home; the country kids were fascinated to learn that what they take for granted every day isn’t how everybody else lives in Australia.

  ‘There’s so much both sides have to teach each other,’ says Deb, walking through the paddocks of her own farm, a 1400-hectare sheep property 45 kilometres west of Ballarat, Victoria. ‘A lot of our farming community in Australia are very good at what they do, but not very good at publicising it. At the same time, many people in the cities have no idea about our lives on the land and get fed a lot of negative publicity about farmers. They don’t understand how much we care about our animals, how we’re interested in being environmentally responsible, about the long-term future of agriculture.

  ‘So I wanted to come up with a way of teaching people about what it is we’re doing on the land, about promoting all the good things going on, to help bridge this divide.’

  The first step was easy: Deb and her husband, David, whose family has been on this part of the land since 1869, resolved to invite a few teenagers they’d met in Melbourne, who seemed to have little idea of where their food came from, up to their farm. But just around the same time, there was a lot of discussion in newspapers and on the TV and radio about farming – and little of it was positive.

  So Deb decided to go one better, and see if she could organise to invite a lot more city families out to the country to stay with farming families and see first-hand what it was like. And so Farm Day was born.

  It started small in 2006, with 75 families in Victoria making the trek out to the bush in all different parts of the state. It proved such a success that the next year it became a national project. Now, more than 1000 people from cities all over Australia have visited farms, with 12 million more reading or hearing about their experiences through the press, Facebook and Twitter. Of the participants surveyed, 95 per cent said they’d learnt that farmers genuinely cared for their animals, and 89 per cent said they’d gained an understanding of the role of farming in their daily lives. Having a farming family host an experience for ‘fun, friendship and understanding’ had proved one of the most powerful means of closing the great divide between those in cities and those in the bush.

  ‘It all worked fantastically well,’ says Deb. ‘We got so much positive feedback from everyone involved, it became bigger and better each year.’

  And even more extraordinary was the fact that the whole initiative had been the brainchild of a woman with no family background in farming . . . and who wasn’t even Australian.

  Deb Shaffer was born in Canada, the daughter of two Brits, Jerry and Penny, who’d left the UK in 1962 to start a new life overseas. They didn’t have much time to explore their new land, though. After nine months, Deb was born, then five years later her brother, Gerald, and the family moved from the suburbs of Vancouver into the city itself.

  It wasn’t just the four of them at home, however. They also had a menagerie of animals. Deb’s dad, who worked managing office real estate, had spent his childhood visiting London Zoo, always loved animals and was constantly rescuing them and caring for them. As a result, Deb grew up with a lively collection of parrots, lizards, rabbits, guinea pigs, dogs, ferrets, pet spiders, rats and injured wild birds that they nursed until they were ready to be transferred to a bird sanctuary. Little wonder that she became an ardent animal-lover, with a burning desire to be a vet, dreaming of working with lions in Africa. The option of working with sheep in Australia couldn’t have been further from her mind.

  From a very early age, Deb became a seasoned traveller. Her grandparents on her dad’s side were often on the move, and she visited them regularly, in places as far afield as Ireland, England, the Channel Islands and Switzerland. Her first solo trip overseas was at the age of three, when she went on a plane alone to the UK. ‘It was the ’60s and you could do anything,’ she says. ‘I travelled on my own most summers as an unaccompanied minor. Those were the days when I’d be allowed to help the stewardesses and give out chewing gum to the passengers, and things
like that. It gives you a sense of independence; it certainly takes away any fear of the unknown or of travel itself.’

  From high school, Deb went straight to university to study her three-year zoology degree. While there, however, she discovered that vets mostly end up working with small animals and a large part of their job is having to put them down, so, at the end of that degree, she went on to study pharmacy. ‘It’s still in the health profession, and I wanted to help, if not animals, then people,’ she says. ‘And it’s a profession you can take anywhere you want, with only a few restrictions. For someone who likes travel and people, it’s a fantastic career.’ After that degree, she studied one more year, for a post-graduate diploma in clinical pharmacy.

  When she’d finally finished, she decided she wanted to spend some time travelling. She went over to the UK for a while, then travelled in Europe, then flew to Africa, to see those lions she’d dreamed of for so long. She enjoyed South Africa, but fell in love with Swaziland, the tiny mountainous kingdom bordered on three sides by South Africa and to the east by Mozambique. It’s one of the poorest countries in the world, with an average life expectancy of just 47 years – and a dire shortage of pharmacists – and she decided she’d like to stay there and work for a while. But first she had her round-the-world ticket to finish off, so she resolved to continue to her last stop, Australia, then go back home to Canada and organise a move to Swaziland from there.

  Back in 1987, to fly to Australia from South Africa, you had to transit through neighbouring Zimbabwe, so Deb, then aged 24, had a 12-hour stopover at the airport of its capital, Harare. ‘It’s a very long time to be stuck in a transit lounge,’ says Deb. ‘You get very bored. But then this very handsome man walked in. He stood out because he was white, of course, but also because no one else in the lounge spoke English. He was also very good-looking and was carrying a load of African bags, eight beautiful woven baskets with all the lovely colours in them, and he had them all stacked up. I was curious and I went up to him and asked him why he had so many. He said they were for his mum and sister and friends. “And what about your girlfriend?” I asked him. It turned out he didn’t have one . . . so I changed that! It was love at first sight. I would never have believed it, but it’s true!’