International Rural Women’s Day

Today I delivered a speech to an inspiring group of women who came to celebrate International Women’s Day. Thank you Zonta Club of Tamworth for the opportunity, I was honoured to be a part of such a wonderful and uplifting afternoon!

“Here we are celebrating International Women’s Day. It’s a day to celebrate the achievements of women and to mark the call for action on gender inequality. It is an amazing thought... to think that we are here celebrating International Women’s Day when at the same time all the world over, there are other women and men, all celebrating the very same thing. This women’s rights movement, or feminism, is the biggest single social justice movement in the world, and we are a part of it... I can feel the energy of a united front and look forward to what the future brings for women the world over. 

And so, we celebrate the achievements of the women who inspire us. 

When I was a child, I was inspired by Enid Blyton - the children’s author who made climbing a tree seem like the most magical and daring thing to do... she set my young imagination on fire. 

When I was a teenager, I was inspired by Anne of Green Gables - she made it okay to be a dreamer, a lover of books and an adventurer who never refused a dare. 

When I was in my twenties, I was inspired by Bridget Jones - the fictional character who made it okay to daydream and procrastinate and mess things up and fall in love with unsuitable men. 

When I was in my thirties, I was inspired by Brene Brown - an American research professor who studies human behaviour and in particular, things like courage, vulnerability, shame and empathy. 

When I came to write this speech, I wondered about who it is that inspires me these days, and it really got me thinking. 

Firstly though, I want to tell you a story about another woman who used to scare the living daylights out of me. 

Her name was Dorothy May Green and she was a wildly fierce woman. 

When I was little, she stood over me and said: “you WILL eat that spinach and you WILL eat your peas.” And I pursed my lips together as tightly as I could. It was a battle of wills.

In my teenage and early adult years, I got to know my grandmother a whole lot more, and I became really fond of her... except for the time before the regional showgirl competition and I’d spent all afternoon at the hairdressers having my hair done, only for her to say, without hesitation:

“are you going to do something with your hair?” 

Dottie, as I knew her, grew up just down the road at Blandford, near Murrurundi, and was one year old when the Titantic sank. She was the eldest daughter of an English Blacksmith, whose wife haemorrhaged and died after giving birth to their fifth child. The doctor arrived too late, and far too drunk to be of any help. When Dottie’s devastated father told the children they would have to be split up and go to live with relatives, my fierce, determined grandmother made it clear that that would not be happening. Although the newborn baby went to live with other family, Dottie left school to care for and help raise her other younger siblings. She was only just twelve. 

As a young adult, she was the first in the district to dance the can-can. 

She ended up marrying a bloke, a train driver, and became Mrs Dottie Lonergan. He must’ve seemed okay at the time but, as the children came along, he developed a habit of drinking. He frequented the Muswellbrook Workers Club and drank until all his pay check was gone. He would plait his legs all the way home to 46 Ford Street, to a family deprived of fatherly love and protection, and indeed, inflicted quite the opposite. 

Although I never met my grandfather, I struggled after hearing of my mother’s family’s experiences and wondered why on earth my grandmother did not leave him. It was a different era, of course, and our ideals and expectations of marriage or a loving partnership are perhaps different nowadays. But also, my grandmother became a Catholic when she married him, and I expect that she honoured the sacrament of marriage and the promises made - to honour, to obey - with as much fierce determination as she showed me when I would NOT eat my greens.

During my mother’s childhood, feeling unsafe and scared and poor was the norm. She wore cardboard in her shoes when the soles wore out, because there was no money for new shoes. But she remembers never going hungry, and her mother always managing to provide despite the circumstances. She remembers Dottie always meeting the school bus and walking the rest of the way home alongside Mum and her six siblings. 

Mum speaks of her mother with words like stoic and resilient and with a definite pride for the woman she was. After all, my mother’s mother faced significant adversity but never wavered from her values. 

My own mother is the same, but her fierceness is a little more subtle. She worked full time shift work as a Registered Nurse and midwife, she helped run the family business and she raised three busy children, my sister, my brother and me. She is no less fierce than my grandmother, and faces adversity with determination and never wavers from her values. In 2012, when my Dad’s health was deteriorating and my mother became his carer, she was diagnosed with breast cancer. The day after Dad’s funeral, Mum came up to Tamworth with me and we saw the oncologist who said we needed to commence chemotherapy as soon as possible. After a year or so of surgeries and chemo, she was given the all-clear, and today, is still running around socialising, looking after grandkids and serving a mean ace that would frighten Ash Barty (because Ash Barty would NOT be expecting it) at the age of... actually, she won’t let me tell you that detail, but rest assured, my mother is a legend. One day, when we were talking about the wild ride that 2012 was, she said, “the chemo and all that breast cancer business was nothing compared to losing your father.”

So, my point is, is that inspiring women are all around us. We can of course, look to the Mother Teresa’s and the Ash Barty’s and the Helen Reddy’s of the world but I suggest... actually, I implore you to also look around a little closer to home. 

There are women sitting beside you right now who, I guarantee, have faced challenges in their life... but have become stronger because of it. There are women here today, who suffer with physical or mental health issues, and might struggle to get out of bed in the mornings. There are women here today, going off statistics, who have been sexually assaulted and never spoken up for fear of ridicule or backlash. 

The rape of a woman is never, ever okay. 

We will never achieve gender equality while ever we focus our attention on teaching our daughters to ‘stay safe,’ and not teaching our sons to respect women so that they know that raping them is wrong, wrong, wrong. We need strong role models in our children’s lives. We need women who model self-respect, who are independent despite maybe having a partner. We need men who speak up when they witness disrespect to women, and we need men to respect the mothers of their children. What children see is what children do. 

I firmly believe that 99.9% of people on this planet are doing the best job they can, under the circumstances they are in, the influences they are under and the environment that they were born into. So the answer, therein, is education and lots of it. 

Silence on the important things is very rarely golden. We need to speak our truth, it’s the most powerful thing we have. When I speak my truth I am usually terrified, like now in this very moment, but if I choose to silence the voice within me, I am choosing complacency and accepting that I am happy if things don’t change. But I will not be happy until gender equality is achieved, and therefore I cannot be silent about it. 

When I was sixteen, I was good mates with an exchange student from Brazil. Her name was Fernanda Nogueria Beuno and she took me from Merriwa and made me see the world beyond, without even leaving town. She and I skipped class so we could sit under the bridge and eat chips with chicken salt, and it was there that she gave me my first cigarette. One day, she organised a horse-riding expedition with a man who had offered to get her on a horse and give her an Aussie experience. I was horse-mad and when she invited me, I jumped at the opportunity to go mustering out in the sticks. On the morning of, Fernanda was sick and couldn’t go. So only I went, with a highly respected member of Merriwa society. We mustered the cattle and got them into the yards, then headed back down the long, straight dirt road towards where we had parked the truck. I don’t remember talking too much, I was a fairly shy character back then. As we rode along, he suddenly edged his horse closer to mine and, as he placed his hand on my upper thigh, he said: “I wouldn’t mind a cuddle from you.” My reaction was one of fear, distress, repulsion, and I couldn’t breathe let alone speak. I was 16! We rode home in silence as my heart thumped against my chest and I wanted to be anywhere else but there at that time. 

This story is one example of many unwanted sexualised attention from men that I have had in my lifetime and I wonder how many of you can relate. It’s more than upsetting for a teenage girl to have unwanted sexual advances occur from a man more than three times her age and literally in the middle of nowhere. 

And the story needs to be told so that the story can change.

In the last couple of years I have discovered a couple of things. 

Number one, that the power of story-telling is an incredibly powerful tool that aids connection and progress. I have always loved writing and in July 2018 I wrote a story, my story, about how the drought was effecting my family. We run a cattle and sheep farm out at Halls Creek, and at the time of my facebook post we were working really long and hard days trying to maintain our livestock in a reasonable condition and it seemed that the world couldn’t care less. My post was shared nearly 8000 times and prior to that my Facebook experience had been to post about one photo per year of my kids, to occasionally comment or like a friend’s post and lots of sneaky stalking of people I was curious about...

Shortly afterwards, I was invited to the studios of Channel Nine where I sat opposite Sylvia on the Today Show and endured a live broadcast interview about the drought. I was terrified, much like a rabbit in the headlights, but I kept reminding myself of my responsibility to other farmers who were going unnoticed and seemingly unappreciated. I had been given an opportunity to make a difference. I might stand corrected, but I believe that interview was the first one about the drought on national television, and it kickstarted a media frenzy that, like the drought, went on and on, but it helped to bring attention to the bush and to the people who needed support. Farmers and other people in the bush who were effected by the drought were put in the spotlight and the public outcry of support was nothing short of incredible. 

I figured that my writing might be useful, or fit for a purpose of some sort, so without any idea of what I was actually doing, I called on the help of a good friend, Ali Reid, a social media guru and a technological wizard, to help me start a Facebook page. Quite a few people ‘liked’ my page and it grew steadily in followings, despite me still not having any idea of what I was doing. 

About a year later, as the drought crawled on, I was finding my writing to be more and more therapeutic. In Mental Health Awareness month, October 2019, as the dust blew in from the west but before the smoke started blowing in from the East, I wrote another blog piece that would go viral. This time The Project from Channel Ten picked it up and sent a cameraman to our farm to film me reading it. It was about not being ashamed to call for help when things are mentally tough, and people seemed to resonate with it. 

Gender equality will never be achieved while ever we continue to refer to female farmers as ‘farmer’s wives,’ because female farmers make up half of the agricultural workforce in Australia, but guaranteed, if you google “Australian farmer” you’ll find that 80-90% of the images are of men, not women. Women in this country have been active contributors to our agricultural sector since early settlement. It’s time to take our place beside our male counterparts. We need to step forward and they need to make room. 

I’m passionate about a few things, gender equality is one of them, and rural mental health and ADHD is another. Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder is the most common mental health disorder in children and affects around 1 in 20 people, yes adults too, worldwide. It’s highly stigmatised and misunderstood yet one of the most treatable disorders around. I rave on about it because I feel like it might make a difference to someone else. Left undiagnosed and untreated the trajectory from school to jail or to substance abuse issues or to other mental health issues is not good and has been proven. And so, I’ve been given a responsibility to share my experiences, as someone who was diagnosed as an adult only a couple of years ago, in the hope that it might help someone understand the condition a little more, instead of thinking that it’s just an excuse for bad behaviour or poor parenting or “thinking that ‘the kid just needs a good smack’.” 

So while the first thing I have learned is that story-telling is powerful, the second thing I have learned is that telling your story or your truth, is not usually a comfortable thing to do, but choosing courage over comfort is vital to forming meaningful connections and instilling progress in a world that seems constantly troubled.

So look around you and be inspired by a woman you know already. 

Hear her story and let your heart listen.

For this International Women’s Day and beyond, we want gender equality. This does not mean we think women are better than men, it does not mean that we hate men. It simply means that women all over the world should be paid the same amount for the same work, and be given the same opportunities that are currently bestowed on men. And conversely, men should be given the same opportunity to show and feel their emotions without the risk of being labeled weak or ‘not man enough.’

Now, nobody is born equal in this world. There is no straight start line where we all take off from. There is no level playing field, where everyone gets a fair crack at the finish line. I speak from a privileged position of being born in Australia and white, with middle class, hard-working parents who loved me and cared for me and who instilled in me a belief that I could do and be anything or anyone I wanted to be. I am grateful for winning the lottery of life, because millions of girls have not had such luck. I have been given a voice and the opportunity to use it and with that opportunity comes a responsibility, to help my sisters who are less fortunate. We all need to speak for ourselves and for those who cannot, for any number of reasons, speak for themselves. 

So in conclusion, let’s look for the inspiration around us, let’s listen to the stories, let’s remind ourselves that we can do difficult things. Let’s choose courage over comfort. 

We are stronger than we think. 

Happy International Women’s Day and thank you for listening.”

Photo credit: Deborah Ann Chorlton (thank you!)