The best paddock
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 2: Dreams of Land
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Judy Kennedy
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Judy Kennedy's biography and other articles by this writer
A decade ago, Debbie Thiele remembers putting the phone down, heart thumping, head buzzing with the news that she had been selected as a finalist in ABC Radio's inaugural Rural Woman of the Year award.
Through the kitchen window she could see the rolling dust from a car coming down the road. It pulled to a stop, a man stepped out.
She went to greet him.
"Morning. What can I do for you?" She could see he was a chemical salesman.
"Wondering if your husband's home," he said.
"No, he's not. Why?"
"Wanted to see if he was interested in some wetting agents," he replied.
"I can talk to you about that," she said.
"I'd rather speak to your husband," he said.
She laughs as she recalls her reaction.
"The conversation never really went anywhere after that and he pinged off!"
Two weeks later, the wheat and sheep farmer from the Murray-Mallee of South Australia stepped up to the podium to accept the national Rural Woman of the Year award. Her story of being relegated to "farmer's wife'" was greeted with laughter and rueful acknowledgement by the audience.
In 2003, Debbie Thiele says she doesn't feel the need to tell that story much anymore. There is widespread acceptance of women in rural industries, even if their recognition in policy-making by government and agri-political organisations has not made the same gains.
THE EARLY '90s WERE A WATERSHED IN TERMS of publicity for the role played by rural women. The early years of the rural woman's award combined with a change in the role of farm women during the killer droughts of the 1980s and '90s to bring a greater awareness of the previously silent partners. The first-ever International Women in Agriculture conference was held in Melbourne and gave birth to a new organisation, Australian Women in Agriculture.
In the early years of the 21st century, that public momentum has stalled, but there's been no waning of the private passion for achieving equality. There are around 320,000 women over the age of 15 living on farms in Australia. About 80 per cent participate in farm work, yet only 120,000 women report themselves as employed in agricultural occupations. Many still write "housewife" as their occupation on survey forms, although more than 70,000 women define themselves as farmers or farm managers.
Most rural women deny they are feminists. Theirs is more a quiet confidence in their ability to provide a different set of skills to complement traditionally male ones and for those skills to be recognised without fanfare.
In 1995-96, the National Accounts reported that the market value of farm output was $14.5 billion. In economic terms, women's contributions on farms amount to at least $4 billion annually. Add to that about $8 billion a year of unpaid household work, and at least $500 million in volunteer work in rural communities, and you have an extremely significant input.
Yet when ABC Radio's rural reporter Lisa Palu and executive producer Edwina Clowes first proposed a national Rural Woman of the Year award in 1993, there was plenty of opposition to the idea that rural women needed public recognition.
Clowes, who now co-ordinates the award for the Rural Industries Research and Development Corporation, remembers it was more the older generation of women and men questioning the need for a "women's" award.
"You'd get a whole lot of different reactions. In the early days, we focused on past achievements, runs on the board, and lots of women thought it was about the older, wiser types and big achievers," she remembers.
"Once they saw the ordinary, typical women winning, they were encouraged by it. And the women who were finalists were blown away by the support they found in local communities, the fact that local people celebrated the award and really ‘owned' them."
Clowes says for most women, the award wasn't about celebrating feminism.
"For the majority of rural women, feminism isn't really an issue," she says. "They're just quiet achievers. They don't see themselves as extraordinary, and changing the inclination of men to deal with only male farmers, for example, is just a matter of evolution."
Victorian dairy farmer Mary Salce convened the first conference of International Women in Agriculture in Melbourne in 1994 because she felt a need for "women's thinking" in response to the double whammy of the 1980s-prolonged drought and low commodity prices.
"When men talked about the downs of the drought, they talked about machinery and interest rates, not the social costs to families and communities," she says. "Whereas I knew women would tell it like it is."
It was tough going, though. Other farm women would not go with her to lobby business and government for support. Salce says they "didn't think they deserved it". But the conference went ahead, was deemed a massive success and gave rise to the formation of Australian Women in Agriculture.