As I sat in that shearing shed and heard her story, I began to feel excited there were women like her, so busy in her passion that she’d long ago left the notion that she had to ‘show the boys’ or ‘prove herself’. She was just getting on with it. So eager was she to encourage native perennial grasses back onto Moorna, she had collected, by hand, great swathes of bottlewash seed from other areas, bagged them up into garbage bags, and had her son hang out the back of her plane casting it over the expansive country whilst she flew. Annabel’s goal was to bring her country to life with the grasses that had naturally been there for thousands of years, until we arrived with our domestic animals and selectively grazed them out of the landscape, or cooked them out with rising salty water from artificial lake systems to feed big irrigators downstream.
When she spoke I was absorbed by her grace, humour and fully-fledged, empowered woman presence in what was a male-dominated audience. In my own public speaking gigs, I’ve been referred to in derisive tones as ‘girlie’ by farmer fellas who didn’t like what I had to say. I began to take note of how Annabel just presented her life’s calling with a noble grace. During the break a friend who had been to school with Annabel filled me in about the traumatic event in Annabel’s past. She was a Tassie girl originally who had fallen in love with Moorna man Horrie Walsh and married him, moving onto the land with him. But after a single vehicle accident about twenty years ago, Horrie was hospitalised permanently. Rather than sell up, she continued on with the property to restore it, and raised her three young boys into adventurous, successful men. Annabel has since been campaigning for change in grazing methods, with the wonderful perennial native grasses at the heart of her success and mission.
Her passion for plants and a healthy ecology means she has run over 60 kilometres of PVC pipe out and spread watering points to encourage stock to graze more evenly over the hard grey dirt of Moorna. Annabel has been doing away with the already slumping fences and trialling rotating her stock using watering points as a guide for stock to graze. No fences.
As she was a patient woman, I could see her animal behavioural training had great potential to mimic the natural process of grazing and rest of country using animals as a migratory herd from water point to water point. Even with parched earth due to low rainfall, Annabel is still able to coax bottlewash grass out of the salt-affected earth so that it sways gently golden in the breeze, where once there was just baked, capped soil. Dotting the flat landscape also, perennial saltbush and bluebush help to hold the moisture and have enough rest to seed for when rain does arrive. Native perennial mulka grasses and bottlewashes, river couch, bent grass, yam daisies, samphire, pigface and glasswort have rebounded.
‘The grasses have been my teachers,’ Annabel said.
As she stood before me – a grassland goddess – I knew the wisdom of the ancient feminine was alive and well in Annabel. She also showcased a deep change in perception within myself. Even though she had many thousands of acres, and I had only a few, the outcomes were the same. I was witness to not only the rejuvenation of the landscape I was caring for, but also a healing in my own self.
One of the defining moments when I saw just how much I’d transitioned from my old culture was after I’d been invited to Christmas drinks, where I found myself in a pub with a bunch of land owners I had known from my schooldays. Private boarding-school boys. Post-divorce I’d been in hiding, but now with my regenerative agricultural work under my belt, I felt ready to start networking again. I was nervous to walk into the pub by myself, but excited I was at last confident enough to hang once more with the farmer crowd. Instead, as the evening wore on and my rural colleagues had loosened their grazier-gentlemen personas with beer, I found myself fending off the most abrasive of questions.
‘Are you single?’
‘Do you date?’
‘Have you got a boyfriend?’
And then came the whopper. ‘We were wondering if you’ve had a boob job?’
I was left holding my drink with my mouth hanging open. The comments stung. I ended up jovially punching the fella’s arm, saying, ‘Sit down, you dirty old dog,’ trying to laugh it off, but inside I raged. I turned the anger at myself, lamenting that I should never have come out alone, or been roped back into that world with people who clearly weren’t on the road I was travelling. I realised that I no longer fitted into this crowd, if I ever had at all. I looked around the room and saw that almost all of the men there didn’t have their wives or partners with them. I felt sorry for these blokes, and at the same time gobsmacked they would even think cosmetic surgery on the bits of my body that had sustained my kids was in any way my thing, just to look good for men?
Had it always been this ‘base’ in my rural world? Was I just noticing it now because I’d found my power and my path? Had agriculture become such a mechanised, masculine and corporate pursuit that women were excluded unless they rolled with the sexist punches? Was that why there were very few women here? Was it social conditioning? Had I lost my sense of humour? Shouldn’t I just lighten up, move on and have another drink? It got my mind racing.
As I stood there, I thought about the old black-and-white pictures of my grandmother, great-grandmother and great-great-grandmother. Hair knotted in buns, with long feminine skirts, but wearing boots and expressions that suggested they meant business. With aprons on and sleeves rolled up for work, these women were present in the efforts on the farm. I saw them in photos with a milking cow. Feeding a litter of partly weaned sheepdog puppies. In the hop field toiling beside the men. My grandmother Joan Wise, who worked so hard, milking cows, folding washing, digging spuds, that her hands failed to function for a time and she had to wear plaster casts on both wrists. In her later years she used those same hands to type out carbon-copy manuscripts on a clunky old typewriter with a cigarette smouldering. Stories woven richly with firsthand experiences about women who defied society’s rulings. Women ahead of their time. Women who were naturally a part of farm business – or so I had thought.
As I looked about that busy, beery, buzzy Hobart pub where blue-striped rural shirts formed a wall to the bar, I realised I had been independent for so long and happy in my own groove, that as I scanned these familiar faces I suspected change might be very hard for them. They were the sons of sons of sons of white settlers and they still seemed to have such an assumed right to the land they lived on and a right to be above the women and even the creatures of the ecosystem they ‘owned’. Was conquering and dominating nature for profit, to the detriment of all creatures, still their foundation? I don’t want generalise about the fellas who were simply enjoying Christmas drinks, and I’m sure there were some good-uns amongst them, but I truly began to ponder the notion that women were not only excluded (or willingly excluded themselves) from their farming domain, but that women were not honoured. They were ultimately, after enough beers, reduced to objects, only worthy of having pissy conversations with about breast size. And these were blokes who’d had the privilege of a ‘good’ education. Sure, there are more girls out on cattle stations now in charge of stock camps and women are getting a handful of managerial roles on properties, but there is no streamlined way to funnel talented young women into work on the land, to grow pure food – the education system does not support it, and nor does the culture.
Recently I was asked to give a talk at my old school. Think private. Think all girls. Think wooden banisters from the war years and dark oil portraits of former female principals, and uniform hems worn at the ‘appropriate length’. Before I arrived, I was a bit like a snorty, nervous horse, not really wanting to go back into a stable after running so free (and feral) in the wild for so many years. But I made myself go, because I wanted to ask the girls this question: ‘Who is aiming for a career in agriculture?’
After I asked it, there was an uncomfortable silence and an awkward pause. Only two girls out of 150 senior secondary students tentatively put up their hands, and even then I think it was because they were being polite.
My next question was a hopeful one – hopeful for me, because I wanted the girls to see . . . to see within to their inner, ancient womanhood, to see the past, the present, the future, for all of humanity . . . to know what really turns this big old world that we all walk and share. I asked, ‘Who here eats food?’
There was a collective chuckle amongst them. Food! Of course every person in the room put up their hand.
‘Food,’ I repeated. ‘It’s kind of important. And that’s why I’m here.’
Most of the young ladies sitting inside the red-brick walls of the auditorium were being steered towards university pathways such as science, nursing, law, medicine, accounting, computing – areas that are all worthy, but skewed towards economics and science. And, they are all areas that don’t produce food.
In our education system there is no formal pathway to teach feminine wisdom. This wisdom was once part of ancient food production knowledge that women held, but has been lost to society around the world since agriculture was hijacked by corporations after World War II. Nowhere in the masculine education systems are there places to teach women about holistic farming. The movement to impart such knowledge is grassroots and organic, and in some third world countries bound by governments that support big seed and chemical companies, such teaching, wisdom sharing and seed sharing is even considered rebellious.
Even the agricultural college I attended in Orange, which at times to me felt more like a dating service for blokes needing good farmer’s wives, has closed most of its rural course component. The Orange campus that once offered on-farm practical lessons is now mostly used for studies that are non-agricultural. There are many vibrant, clever young women agronomists, scientists, researchers and administrators who are working in agriculture, but their belief systems and inner ideology are mostly founded on masculine principles and systems, and they are taught in universities that have rigid systems locked into technology as the answer to our global food shortages. Blokey roads of thought, which are great . . . but only when balanced and tempered by feminine wisdom.
In that pub I was surrounded by the result of those slanted educational foundations. I farwelled the boys, and cheerfully headed home to watch the cricket. It was good knowing that I had moved on, that I was travelling towards my own pack . . . men and women who embraced nature, balance, inner truth and desires.
I could feel that chilly morning in the shearing shed, after driving the winding potholed road to the field day, under rural railway bridges and past dying gums, that I had found a cluster of like-minded beings. The audience members weren’t blocking the flow by putting up their hands and challenging the ideas of the speakers, like what happens so often at gatherings. Instead they were asking constructive questions about the lessons we were learning. The male speakers too, brave boys like Graeme Hand and Col Seis, were making statements about the need for greater gender balance in farming. Nowadays I look to be around ‘gentle men’ – not gentlemen in the old-fashioned sense who still used their status to be superior to women while using polite etiquette, but a new breed of male . . . a gentle version. Gentle on self, on land, on women, on livestock, gentle on their own gender but strong within themselves. As an expression of how I’d outgrown my old beliefs, I’d trashed my hero character Charlie Lewis in the sequel to Jillaroo, The Farmer’s Wife. It was an expression to other women to not believe the fairytale. To really dig deep towards men who honour women and the land. Life was bigger, richer and more exhilarating if you didn’t waste your time and energy chasing that elusive false dream of ‘the one’.
As a maturing writer and a maturing woman, I didn’t want to keep hitting the repeat button about our romantic notions about ‘the Australian bush’ (I cringe at that simplistic term). And I also didn’t want to keep us trapped in the confines of old notions of romance between rural men and women. But in getting the message out, we need it to come from the people who hold the power in our world . . . men.
There speaking with Annabel was grazing expert Graeme Hand, a power pack of a man who ‘tells it like it is’. He likens our future food shortage and the environmental disaster that’s happening all around us to driving off a cliff. He said all government environmental protection policy will do is slow down the vehicle, but we are still heading in the same direction so we will eventually drive off the cliff.
‘We actually need to turn the vehicle around and drive away from the cliff,’ Graeme said. He added that many men know they need to change, but they don’t change to regenerative farming ways because it can take too long to see the results.
‘If the ground takes five years to recover, it’s too long for a lot of Y chromosome characters.’
I’ve heard Graeme have a dig like this in each of his talks. He says it jokingly, but he’s deadly serious about jolting men to change their mindsets. Overgrazing is an accepted norm in this country. People who don’t know otherwise bang on about ‘the cloven hooves’ of animals not suited to our ‘delicate’ Australian environment, saying it’s the hooves causing the degradation. But that’s a fallacy that has been disproven by people at a grassroots level. The people in the bricks-and-mortar institutions and the ones inside the building in Canberra with the upside-down Hills Hoist on top of it are yet to catch up. As Graeme Hand points out, ‘It’s not the hooves causing the problem, it’s the number of mouths.’
He said when he hears people blaming cloven-hoofed animals for the disaster on this continent, he says to them, ‘Well, it’s lucky rabbits have soft feet.’ He makes the point that country that is never rested from grazing is damaged . . . no matter what sort of feet the animal has.
The grazing management on Moorna has revealed that grazing can be used to both destroy a landscape and restore a landscape. It all depends on management. It all depends on the number of mouths and the time the land is given to recover. In that shearing shed, I began to wonder why there weren’t more Annabel Walshes on the planet taking care of and restoring vast tracts of degraded land?
My question led me back along a fog-bound road of thought to a time 5000 years ago when the feminine and all her powers were celebrated, respected and revered. I began to read how Mother Earth was our religion, and as a collective society we knew we were governed by her feminine powers. I saw clearly how humanity changed, in particular for women, when our ‘modern’ forms of religion started to strip away the powers of my gender. Something deep within my very knowing linked me to my past sisterhood and those who had been subject to horrors if they didn’t tow the Christian line. I began to dream of past burnings, hangings, stoning, beheadings as if I had experienced them myself. I could feel the legacy of those mental and physical tortures as generation after generation of women were forced to give up feminine worship of the seasons or our power of healing using Mother Earth’s plants. For several generations girls were taught by their mothers to dull their inner light. If they shone too brightly in the world they were dubbed witches and heretics. Via church-based religions, I saw how we became the property of men who owned us for their own wealth gathering, for procreation to produce a line of males, and how we were in service to them.
In my mind, it has never been more important for humanity to restore respect for the feminine and to create holistic systems that encourage women and children back onto the land. Globally women need to be involved not only in re-visioning our food systems, but also contributing feminine design of the landscape and housing in which we live. Even in politics, we women are limited by male language and systems. I believe if we are to survive as a species, women need to be encouraged to share their vision of how the world can look and be heard by the blokes, and supported by gentle men and awakened women. We are the givers of life. Western agriculture needs the feminine balance returned, and feminine wisdom needs to be restored to our society. In that shearing shed I saw clearly my need to be fearless and to declare that it’s time to put the feminine back into farming.
I’ve often said, ‘When I grow up I want to be a cross between American c
ountry singer Dolly Parton and Australian poet Les Murray.’ People laugh, but I’m serious. To me, music is poetry and poetry is music, and those two people are amazing in their chosen fields. I’ve often imagined what would happen if I could combine the two. Over the years I’ve written a few poems but I’d always wanted to write songs. Aussie songs. Country songs.
When I was about seven or eight, my friend Luella and I would set the needle on the record player and crank up Slim Dusty’s hit single, ‘I Love to Have a Beer with Duncan’. We’d sit behind her granddad’s bar on stools, chugging empty pewter beer mugs together, singing our guts out to his song over and over, while the adults, who were half-cut on beer, laughed at us. A few short years later, I was shoved into an all-girls school, away from my bestie Luella. I must’ve spoken so much like an Aussie bush pig that the teachers had to give me speech lessons. I blame it on bloody Slim! Or was it those early years of Rolf Harris? Or was it the beer-drinking uncles of mine who called me ‘girt’ or ‘cobber’ or, when I was being cheeky, a ‘rum’un’? There was no denying it, I revelled in country-rough and was shocked that the school and my parents seemed to think I had to somehow ‘improve’ myself.
At recess in the first week I was dragged, perplexed and ashamed, into the drama room with another farm girl from Campania, so they could sandpaper the rough edges from our ocker Tasmanian tongues. Over time, the speech-and-drama teacher, with her ivory clasp in her elegant scrolled hair and her blue eyes that expressed such patience, set about turning my words ‘crick’ into ‘creek’, ‘I seen it’ to ‘I saw it’, ‘we done that’ into ‘we did that’, ‘youse’ into ‘you’ and ‘arks’ into ‘ask’. I had no idea why, of all the girls, we were singled out from the herd of first-year intakes. Despite the teacher’s kindness, it made me feel like a wormy tail-ender in a mob of sheep. It was devastating, but also, in hindsight, thrillingly convenient, because it gave me something to rail and push against. It was this abrasive start to my teenage years that forged me into someone who never wanted to fit into social norms and systems that were on offer for Sandy Bay-schooled children of Hobart professionals or Tasmanian blueblood graziers. As far as I was concerned they could stick that kind of life up their tweed skirts and pleated trousers!
Down the Dirt Roads Page 13