Women of the Land: Eight Rural Women and Their Remarkable Everyday Lives

communicators.

WOMEN

of the LAND

LIZ HARFULL

Eight rural women and their remarkable everyday lives

Unless otherwise marked, all photographs are by the author.

Photograph on ♠ provided by Catherine Bird

First published in 2012

Copyright © Liz Harfull 2012

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act.

Allen & Unwin

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Crows Nest NSW 2065

Australia

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ISBN 978 1 74237 753 7

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CONTENTS

Introduction

Chapter 1 Tenacity in salt lake country

Mary Naisbitt, Tarin Rock, Western Australia

Chapter 2 The apple packers’ lullaby

Lynette Rideout, Oakdale, New South Wales

Chapter 3 Till the cows come home

Jan Raleigh, Timboon, Victoria

Chapter 4 A sheep like Alice

Nan Bray, Oatlands, Tasmania

Chapter 5 The irrepressible farmer

Susie Chisholm, Adelong, New South Wales

Chapter 6 A horse named Riffayal

Cecily Cornish, Wando Bridge, Victoria

Chapter 7 The fight for life

Catherine Bird, Willalooka, South Australia

Chapter 8 Keeper of country

Keelen Mailman, Augathella, Queensland

Notes

Acknowledgement

INTRODUCTION

In setting out to write this book, I was told very early on by quite a few people that I would struggle to find women who had willingly taken on the challenge of managing an Australian farm. No woman would be foolish enough to attempt it on their own unless they were forced by circumstance, and I would certainly have a hard time finding women running farms on a commercial, full-time scale if there were able-bodied men in their lives who could take over for them or, at least, share the endeavour equally. What surprised me most is that the people saying this were other rural women.

Having spent most of my working life to date telling the stories of regional Australia in one form or another, I knew it simply wasn’t true. In fact, after just a few weeks of very basic research, I had a list of more than 40 potential candidates and I had barely scratched the surface. The greatest challenge was not finding women to write about, but choosing which stories to tell.

In deciding who to write about, I was influenced by my own background as the daughter of dairy farmers from a small farm in a closely settled area of South Australia. Writers, artists and filmmakers have long been fascinated with the outback and the more remote parts of our wide brown land, but there is much more to the Australia that sprawls beyond our urban boundaries. I wanted to share the experiences of women living in some of these places too, as well as their families and communities, and to capture something of their daily lives, personal struggles and extraordinary achievements.

While tragedy and unhappy circumstances may have played a role in some of them becoming farmers in their own right, it is by no means the only reason they are doing what they do. All these women share two things in common—they have made active choices to be farmers, and they love the land. Some are single, some are not, some have children and some do not. Some come from generations of farmers and grew up on the land. Some were actively discouraged by their parents from considering becoming farmers despite the fact it has been their hearts’ desires since they were children, not because they were girls but because it can be a tough and unforgiving way for anyone to make a living.

Spending time with these women emphasised the physical challenges that all farmers face. Farms can be dangerous work environments given they usually involve operating machinery and handling livestock, and some of them have experienced life-threatening injuries. While the nature of the work is physical there is more than one way to get the job done, as these women also demonstrate. Because they cannot rely on brute strength, they have found alternative approaches and clever little tricks that enable them to tackle many tasks on their own, whether it be handling a recalcitrant bull, hoisting a sheep onto the back of a ute, or working out the best way to move a stack of fence posts or a 30-kilogram bag of stock lick.

As someone who has observed more than a few farmers at work, I was also struck by their approach to working with others. Before they leapt into the task, they talked about it first to anyone helping out so that everyone was clear on what needed to be done and what was expected of each individual. Believe me this is far from common, as the number of seminar sessions run for farmers on communication skills and managing employees tends to testify. And it struck me that all of them are great networkers, quick to identify people who can provide advice and support when needed, and never ashamed to ask for it or accept it.

One of the more startling aspects of researching these stories was the unexpected points of connection between what at first glance seemed to be a group of women from totally different parts of the country and totally different backgrounds. It is hard to explain the series of coincidences and strange serendipity that kept emerging.

It began with discovering that Cecily Cornish’s ancestors made their start as pastoralists in Australia when they bought a block of land from the pioneering John Hawdon, brother of famous overlander Joseph Hawdon, who drove the first mobs of cattle from New South Wales to Victoria and South Australia. John turned out to be Susie Chisholm’s great-great-grandfather.

It ended on my final research trip with Keelen Mailman pointing out a distant hill on the station she manages in western Queensland. The hill was given its English name by the colonial explorer Major Mitchell, who climbed it during one of his famous expeditions from Sydney into the unknown hinterland. Only weeks before another farmer thousands of kilometres away in Victoria had taken me to a favourite spot on her farm, pointing out that it was the place where Major Mitchell stood to survey the valley before him on a completely different expedition.

Before starting, the one thing in common I knew all these women shared was that none of them actively seek the limelight. They are a modest bunch, and it usually took time, observation and conversations with others to uncover the true extent of their achievements. Most had to be convinced their story would be of interest to anyone other than their own family. Often they agreed out of a desire to help bridge the divide in understanding and experience between city and country, and open people’s eyes to what is actually involved in producing the food and fibre on which we all rely. Or they were keen to throw a light on the daily challenges of living and raising a family in rural communities where the services and facilities most of us take for granted do not exist or are under threat.

All of them have a deep, spiritual connection to the place in which they live. They believe very strongly that they are only custodians of the land and have a responsibility to leave it in better shape for future generations. None consider themselves heroes, and would dislike strongly being thought of in those terms. But the way they have confronted life’s challenges with grace and a sense of humour, their high level of skill as farmers, their compassion and generosity and sheer tenacity despite everything thrown at them is truly inspiring.

It has been a great honour to meet them all, share parts of their lives and tell their stories—a truly life-changing experience for me as both a woman and a writer. I hope their stories will inspire others too.

Liz Harfull

1

TENACITY IN SALT LAKE

COUNTRY

Mary Naisbitt, Tarin Rock, Western Australia

For a thinly populated farming district on the edge of nowhere, the Tarin Rock Tennis Club is a remarkable facility. Five tennis courts, flood lit and covered with intense green artificial turf, an undercover playground packed with brightly coloured equipment, an expansive clubhouse and the locals’ love of tennis make it the social hub for families from kilometres around. It is a place where they gather at weekends, not just for sport, but to share a meal and a drink or two and, for a few short hours, try to forget the drought which has kept the surrounding paddocks relatively barren for almost three years.

Drought wasn’t an issue when friends and neighbours gathered at the club on 3 February 1980 for a relaxed Sunday evening of social tennis. The harvest was in and it would be weeks before the tractors had to start up again to sow the next season’s cereal crops. On the other side of the continent, Australia looked like it was cruising to yet another easy victory over England at the Melbourne Cricket Ground, batsmen falling regularly to the fiery bowling attack of Western Australia’s favourite son, Dennis Lillee. In a country community reliant on farming for a living and sport for play, all must have seemed right with the world. But life was about to change irrevocably for Mary Naisbitt.

Mary’s husband, Joe, was only 46 years old when he collapsed and died that day on the tennis court. Aside from a distraught wife, he left behind four children under the age of seven and a 1828-hectare farm freshly calved from the bush in the salt lake country of Western Australia’s extensive eastern wheatbelt. Mary was 350 kilometres away from the support of her own family near Perth and had played no active part in running the farm. Most people expected her to put it on the market, pack her bags and head back to the city with her children. But Mary Naisbitt has never been one to take the easiest option.

Mary was born in the central wheatbelt town of Merredin, about 240 kilometres to the north of Tarin Rock, on 15 February 1943. Her parents, Bozo ‘Bob’ and Teresa Starcevich, were Croatian emigrants who had come to Australia independent of each other before the Second World War. The son of a woodcutter from a small village in what was then Yugoslavia, Bob had finished the national military service required of all young men in his country and couldn’t wait to leave. He wanted a better life and thought Australia would offer far more opportunities. Arriving by ship in Perth, Bob made for the isolated mining community of Kalgoorlie, 600 kilometres further east, in search of work. When he couldn’t find any, he headed back along the Great Eastern Highway, ending up at Merredin where he secured employment on a farm.

Although she also came to Australia from Yugoslavia, Teresa was born in the United States of America. She was the only daughter and middle child of emigrant parents, who also had two sons. Their mother died when Teresa was four and her baby brother was only two months old. Not able to cope with the children on his own her father returned to Yugoslavia, where he married again. However, tragedy continued to mar his life. His youngest son died, as did his second wife and the children he had with her. He married a third time, to his second wife’s sister, and had another son, before immigrating again, this time to Australia. He took only his oldest son with him and they worked hard to save money so they could send for the rest of the family.

Father and son ended up at Merredin, where they met Bob. Drawn together by a common heritage, they became good friends, which brought Teresa into Bob’s orbit soon after she arrived in Australia with her stepmother and half-brother. Bob and Teresa eventually married. They had two sons, John and Stan, before Mary came along. By then Bob was working part-time for the Public Works Department, carrying maintenance crews to the pipeline which supplied water to towns along the highway from Perth to the Kalgoorlie goldfields. They lived on a 2-hectare block on the outskirts of Merredin, where they had an extensive vegetable garden and fruit trees that supplied produce to the town. Mary can remember spending most of her time outside and playing at being a farmer, using she-oak nuts to create miniature herds of cows and sheep.

When she was about seven, the family moved closer to Perth in search of more reliable work. They settled at Midland, where Bob and Teresa remained for the rest of their lives. Even though he suffered from a bad back, Bob took on a range of physically demanding jobs to look after his family, wrapping his back tightly with a wide band of grey flannelette to keep it warm and support the muscles so he could keep going. At one stage the doctors told him he would never be able to do heavy physical work again, and he spent three months in hospital, leaving Teresa to cope with the children. Mary can remember the strong smell of eucalyptus oil—her father’s cure-all for every ache and pain. He shovelled coal on trains, worked on maintenance crews for Perth’s water and sewerage systems, and spent his final working years in the railway yards at Midland unloading freight, until regulations forced him to retire on his 65th birthday.

Now a suburb on the eastern edge of Perth’s metropolitan sprawl, Midland was then a separate township with a large rail terminus at its heart. Mary remembers a vibrant community of many cultures, with significant numbers of refugees from Italy and eastern Europe. At home, she spoke Slav with her mother, who found it difficult to learn English. Her Australian friends joked that it sounded like ‘Double Dutch’.

Mary completed her primary schooling at St Brigid’s Catholic School, run by the Sisters of Mercy. Encouraged by her mother, who was an excellent needlewoman, she went on to learn dressmaking at the Midland Junction Technical School, across the road from where she lived. ‘Mum was always adamant that no matter what, I was going to learn dressmaking, because she felt that she had missed out on a lot,’ Mary says. ‘In Croatia, the women used to sit outside on the verandahs and knit socks and jumpers or whatever. Mum always used to watch, and apparently the ladies used to say if you gave her wool she would know how to knit because she was so keen to look . . . She was very much a housewife. She made all our clothes. I can remember my dresses were always made with a big hem that could be let down when I grew.’

While she was studying at technical school, Mary worked part-time in a local grocery store, weighing and packaging up grocery items that arrived in bulk. ‘The biscuits used to come in tins and we used to have to pack them in cellophane bags ready for the customers; sugar too and things like icing sugar, dates, prunes and dried fruits. I used to quite enjoy it . . . but I felt I needed to get something permanent rather than just working in a shop. I kept thinking I had missed out on something. I hadn’t had a lot of schooling. At that stage getting married wasn’t one of the things I thought I had to do and I kept thinking that if I’m going to be working all my life I’ve got to do something.’

At the age of about eighteen, Mary took herself back to the technical school and studied English and typing, with the idea of finding an office job. She studied part-time at nights, while earning money making shirts at a clothing manufacturing factory set up in Midland by G&R Wills & Co Limited. After graduating three years later, she and a girlfriend decided to head to New Zealand on a working holiday. Aside from adventure Mary thought it might offer a great opportunity to gain some experience in office work so that she could return home and find decent employment. ‘It was fantastic,’ she says. ‘I stayed some of the time with friends my mother had grown up with in Croatia, and I think that helped, but I travelled the whole of New Zealand and worked at lots of different things. I was away for about eighteen months, much to Mum’s horror.’

After brief stints in Melbourne and Brisbane, Mary finally returned home and applied for work in the Perth office of an insurance company she had worked for in Melbourne. Although the South British United Insurance Company initially had no vacancies, Mary was soon called back and offered a position handling reinsurances for larger clients whose policies represented too big a risk for the company to handle on its own. Much more responsibility than she had anticipated, Mary is not quite sure why she was offered it.

‘It was a very interesting job and it was a job that was generally carried out by a man,’ Mary says. ‘I was the first woman in that company to do that job. Women were known as typists only, really. I have a feeling there must have been something in the reference they gave me in Melbourne, or maybe they couldn’t get a bloke interested in doing it. Some people might think it would be boring, but I didn’t.’

In her leisure hours Mary started going to a social club in Perth run by the Catholic church. Young people over the age of 21 would get together on a regular basis at each other’s houses or organise social events such as cabarets. ‘We used to have lots of fun,’ she says. ‘It was a fantastic time.’ Mary doesn’t recall exactly where or when, but she first met Joe at one of these events while he was visiting Perth to see one of his sisters, who was a member of the club. Ten years Mary’s elder, it was Joe who followed up the initial encounter and asked her out. In between occasional dates when he was in the city, they wrote letters to each other and she gradually fell in love with the tall, fair-haired farmer.

Missing her company, Joe urged Mary to write longer letters. One day she decided to give him what he asked for, literally, and created an entire letter on a long paper streamer. She kept all their correspondence until just after he died, when the letters were burnt. ‘I do regret it now, but at the time I just felt that they were really personal, and there were so many people around and I didn’t want anyone going through them, as well-meaning as they were,’ she says.

Mary tries to describe the man she remembers: ‘Often people used to call him Old Joe, because his hair was thinning out. I do remember when I met him, I suppose because his hair was receding and it was light coloured, he may have looked older than he was . . . A lot of people said he used to joke a lot, but I don’t know. He was very happy and he had a good sense of humour. He was certainly a very genuine person, and always did the right thing by everybody. He was very well liked among his peers. Anyone who knew him always spoke well of him. He was always a very fair person, a good listener, and he was good with kids, actually. The kids really missed out because he was the one with all the patience.’

Joe Naisbitt was born in Perth’s King Edward Memorial Hospital on 4 November 1933 and grew up on a farm at Tarin Rock, about 20 kilometres west of the town of Lake Grace. His father, Ted Naisbitt, had taken up a 400-hectare parcel of land in 1923, after emigrating from Durham in England with his mother and sister. It was a time when farming in Western Australia was developing rapidly and confidence in agriculture was booming, drawing many immigrants and returned servicemen to the Lake Grace area. Ted worked hard clearing the land for cropping and in 1929 married Win Stacey. Battling through the Depression years, the couple survived with Win milking cows to supplement the family income. They had nine children, with the oldest John and third-born Joe both returning home from boarding school to work on the property in the late 1940s after their father became ill. John and Joe also set up a contracting business to earn extra money, taking on welding and carting grain as well as purchasing half-shares in a bulldozer and ripping equipment to clear land.

Mary was not at all daunted by the idea of marrying a farmer, leaving her life in Perth and moving to the relative isolation of Lake Grace. ‘I think I always had it in my bloodstream,’ she says. ‘I couldn’t wait to get out of the city. I worked there because I had to, but I was always more of an outdoor farming person.’ Her work colleagues weren’t surprised either. They had been expecting for some time that Joe would ‘pop the question’ and they had a fair idea she intended to say yes. ‘They had all expected me to get engaged on my birthday . . . but when I got back there was nothing on my finger. I said nothing to anybody, but we had decided to wait until the long weekend. I remember walking into the office and sitting down, and then I happened to put my hand up to my ear with the phone. A couple of the girls noticed the engagement ring and there was one mighty scream and yelling. The bosses were not overly happy—I was 27 and I have a feeling they had thought I wouldn’t be getting married.’

Mary and Joe wed at St Brigid’s Catholic Church in Midland on 7 August 1971. Mary entered the church on the arm of her proud father. Joe’s brother Michael, who had been ordained earlier that year, officiated at the ceremony with assistance from the local Franciscan priest. All of Joe’s large family were there along with Mary’s relatives and a few friends who later gathered in the local show society hall for the reception. The couple cut a three-tiered wedding cake made by Teresa and decorated by Mary, who had taken lessons from a lady down the road. Mary recalls that ‘the day went without a hitch—a happy, great day. Everyone enjoyed themselves as far as I can remember.’

The newlyweds spent their honeymoon travelling with a caravan up the Western Australian coast as far as Carnarvon, about 900 kilometres north of Perth, before returning to Tarin Rock less than a fortnight after the wedding so Joe could get back to work. The caravan was parked alongside the Naisbitt farmhouse and became their home. With Joe’s large family around them and limited personal space it was hard to find time alone, but seven months later they finally moved into their own house on a nearby farm which Joe purchased from Mike and Dot Treasure.

Set on a low-lying ridge about 15 kilometres from town, the property overlooks the expansive, crystalline salt pan of Lake Grace North, part of the massive Lake Grace wetland system. Almost 26 kilometres long and more than 7 kilometres across as its widest point, the lake rarely contains much water. The glistening white salt plain is a spectacular sight which fascinates travellers and provides a distinctive backdrop for the town of the same name, although locals rarely go there because it is so hard to access. Even the Naisbitts had rarely stepped on the crunchy salt-laden lake bed until recent years when their son Kevin started leasing land along its western shoreline.

The lake was not visible at all from Joe and Mary’s first home, a prefabricated cottage set low down in a secluded spot at the northern-most edge of the farm. The small house is still there, relatively unchanged, with verandahs at the back and front and only three main rooms. The front door leads straight into the main living space, an open-plan room combining both the lounge area and kitchen. At the back are two small bedrooms which had raw asbestos walls when Mary first saw them; she insisted they were painted before moving in.

Drought has killed off the small square of lawn at the front of the house and most of the garden plants, but she loved the prospect from here, particularly in the evenings when she would watch kangaroos hop up to a nearby dam for water.

Kevin enjoyed it too when he moved in with his wife Sarah just before they were married. ‘I loved sitting here with a beer after work; it was really relaxing, I don’t know why,’ he says.

Mary and Joe soon settled into life in the cottage. Mary was lonely at times but she tried to focus on her new role as a homemaker while Joe worked long days with his older brother on both his own property and the family farm. During particularly busy periods like seeding and harvest, she would pack lunch and take it to him out in the paddock. If he was working nearby on the tractor, Joe loved nothing better than looking back at the house in the evenings and seeing the warm, comforting glow of the lights, knowing Mary was waiting for him. ‘He always liked to think when he came home I would be there,’ she says. ‘I remember one evening I got the dog and went for a walk up around the bush. He came home and he was quite worried that I wasn’t there.’

From the beginning Mary loved living in the country although it took her a while to get to know her way around. She can remember failing to locate Joe one day when she was meant to be delivering his lunch, and then there was the time she got lost in a paddock in thick fog, trying to move sheep. The idea seems strange to her now, with every square metre of the farm firmly engraved on her memory, including the 100 hectares of remnant scrub she has protected.

Mary’s quiet life ended in 1973 with the birth of Patricia. Known to everyone as Trish, ‘never Pat’, she was born on Joe’s 40th birthday, when Mary was 30—at the time considered old for a first-time mother. ‘We didn’t wait overly long to have children because I wasn’t that young, and he wasn’t that young,’ she says. ‘We always intended to have either two or four children, and Joe always said, It’s up to you. You’re the one having them, and you’ll be dealing with them. Little did he know how much!’

Trish was born in the hospital at Wagin, about 120 kilometres west of Lake Grace, because there was no resident doctor at the time. Prospective fathers were not permitted to be present during births in those days, but Joe was allowed to see Mary and the baby soon afterwards. He then rushed back to the farm, where shearing was in full swing and all hands were needed. Nine days later he returned for the first time to collect mother and daughter and take them home.

With a second child on the way, Joe and Mary decided they would need a bigger house. They ordered a brand new transportable home in September 1975, on the day Susan was born at the Lake Grace Hospital. The house was placed on a rise with distant views of the eponymous lake and was ready to move into the following January. Only a toddler, Trish took exception to the change at first. One afternoon when Mary thought it was a bit quiet, she found the determined two-year-old heading off across the paddocks towards the cottage with the family sheepdog. ‘I am going home,’ she told Mary.

The Naisbitt family expanded with the arrival of a third child, Diane, in January 1977. This time Joe was allowed to attend the birth. He was there too when Kevin was born in September 1979. Mary remembers the local, elderly doctor gave her a lecture about having a child at the ripe old age of 35. He accused her of taking risks only because they wanted a son to inherit the farm. ‘He really upset me, I can tell you. I went home and told Joe but that is one time I really don’t think he supported me. He just said not to worry about him, ‘What does he know?"’

A loving father, after a hard day’s work Joe enjoyed nothing more than relaxing in the evening by playing with his children. ‘After tea he would go into the lounge and they would follow because they knew it was playtime, and they would jump all over him,’ Mary recalls.

As the oldest child, Trish is not so sure she actually remembers these play sessions, or whether she has adopted the memory and made it her own after hearing about it so many times from her mother, who was careful to talk about their father after he died and answer their questions. ‘Sometimes you get confused about whether they’re things you actually remember or because you have heard the stories over and over, so you can just visualise it and after a bit you take it as your own memory,’ Trish says. ‘But I do remember sitting on his shoulders and having to duck going through doorways—the doorframe coming towards me and thinking, Oh my goodness, I’m going to hit that. And I can remember birthdays. Dad and I shared the same birthday, and I remember my sixth birthday quite clearly. This was in November and Dad passed away the following February. He was 46 and must have made a comment that he was getting too old for birthdays. Kevin was being christened on the same day and he was only about two months old. It was enough for me to think, Dad is too old for a birthday, Kevin is too young to know about his, this is all mine!’

With a new baby in the house, three young children underfoot and the crops to harvest, the lead-up to Christmas 1979 was a busy time for Mary and Joe. Most local farming families head to the coast for a summer break in January, once the harvest has finished, but the Naisbitts usually stayed at home, preferring instead to take regular short breaks during the year to visit Mary’s parents at Midland and run farm errands in Perth. That year, however, they packed up their brand new Ford station wagon and headed to Albany for ten days, towing a large caravan Joe had bought with his younger brother Herbert. They celebrated Diane’s third birthday at the historic port in the state’s south-west on 30 January, and drove back to Tarin Rock the next day so they were back in time for Trish to start school.

The following Sunday was a relaxed day. Friends who had been managing the property across the road were leaving the district so they came to lunch. After they left Mary cleared up the dishes while Joe bathed the girls, ready for an evening with other families at the Tarin Rock Tennis Club. The club had far more basic facilities then, but a few people were out on the courts ‘fooling around’ and playing social tennis, while others gathered in the shed that served as a clubhouse.

A consistent district-competition player in his youth, Joe was keen to revive his skills and start playing more often. He headed to the court with three others for a relaxed game of doubles while Mary sat in the shed. Given the amount of laughter drifting from the court, they seemed to be having fun.

At about six o’clock Mary was talking to a couple of other women, with Kevin asleep nearby in his pram and the girls playing with friends, when she looked up to see people gathered around someone lying on the court. She is not sure how, but she had an immediate sense it was Joe. She jumped up and ran to his side, where several people were trying desperately to revive him. ‘I can still hear them calling out, Come on, Joe. He never responded in any way at all.’ Mary stayed beside him while others took charge of the children and kept them away from the traumatic scene.

Trish was playing in a sandpit only a few metres from the courts when she became conscious of ‘a lot of commotion’ as people ran from the clubhouse and other courts to the spot where she had moments before seen her father, standing by the net, facing towards her. Her next memory is of walking down the road away from the courts, towards the Tarin Rock grain silos, with a group of children and a couple of their mothers. ‘I remember walking by Kevin’s pram and asking the two ladies, "Was that my