Cassowary Crossing

FARMING WOMEN DON’T DO LUNCH
(A remarkable gathering of remarkable women)

(c) David Astle

The land can tell the story: the snake of dust that follows the water truck. The fences that tell you the road from the paddocks. The stranded pumps high above the dams. The crows jabbing at the mummified cows. Welcome To Shepparton.

Or Shep as they say round here, since farmers resent saying things in full. Up the road, Tocumwal is Toke, while Ky spells Kyabram: a brand-new alphabet to learn in northeast Victoria, each population cut down to size, a slow pulse.

Tatura is Tat and Murchison, Murch, as if reality feels too long in the mouth, like the drought itself, seven years without a decent rainfall. And ten years ago was the Great Flood, most of the shire underwater. Not that local farmers will bang on about it. Man or woman, they’ll boil their hurt down to a shrug, an irony, a glance upstairs.

A giggle? Never. Yet that’s the first sound you hear as you walk onto this Shep veranda. The veranda belongs to the William Orr campus, a TAFE outpost that specialises in fruit-growing, plumbing and artificial insemination. The giggle belongs to Mandy Simpson.

Mandy, a dairy farmer, is losing the plot. She’s trying to hide her face, as Noelene, a farmer from Katunga near the Murray, is pummelling Mandy’s feet with aloe lotion. The cream is sand-laced and ticklish. Mandy is giggling as Noelene kneads each sole.

She’s not alone in her glee. Across the veranda other women are doling out pleasure to other women. Fiona is snipping Mary’s hair. (Mary has eight children and a hundred cows near Congupna.) Carmel is plying Jodie’s shoulders. (‘My husband’s idea of a massage,’ jokes Jodie, ‘is a coupla pats on the back.’) Pat is doing Dale’s nails. (Despite the name, Dale is a woman. ‘My Dad was hoping for a boy,’ she smiles. She leases a farm in Harsten where the feed and water has all but vanished.) Meantime Trish teaches meditation under the she-oaks, but let’s return to Mandy’s feet.

She’s still giggling. Mandy can’t recall the last time she laughed, not like this, not like a toddler. Laughter tends to evaporate in hard times – this reservoir you carry inside you. Mandy’s joy nearly stirs the bub that sleeps beside her, a girl called Lily born around the farm’s last shower, that little squall on New Year’s Eve. The baby of course still coos and cackles, but less so her Mum. With husband Peter, they tend a 120 milkers on a piece of dirt in Invergordon, 40 kays from Shep, where laughter can be rare as rain.

Mandy catches her breath. ‘The worst thing is the dust,’ she says. ‘It gets everywhere. You can’t stop it. One time I left the bathroom window open just a crack, and before I realised there was dust over everything. The dust storms are incredible. I washed my windows last week, and the next day they were dirty again. I don’t even bother now.’

But of course this day on William Orr’s veranda amounts to ‘bothering’. Forty farming women draped about the woodwork, chatting, laughing, swapping stories. Roses grow around the edges, wilting in the pea straw. Beyond the grounds the land is the colour and texture of underfelt. The world is harsh and not given easily to change. If anywhere, the change will come from the veranda. A subtle revolution at the Goulburn Valley Time Out Ladies Day.

‘I started Time Out through fear of the unknown,’ says Shelley Walker, 36, a vibrant Shep gal with glimpses of the wild child. ‘Not knowing what was going to happen to our farm and our family. Pete and I have a great relationship, but this was already under pressure the day we bought our place, and the drought hadn’t really started.’

Drought distorts the mathematics. When rain doesn’t fall, the cost of off-farm water rises from $32 to over $500 a megalitre, in step with creeping feed costs. On top of that your water entitlement – an irrigation quota figured on your block size – can sink below 50%, though you’re still obliged to fork out your full ‘water-rate’ amount. (‘Like buying a pair of jeans,’ says one woman, ‘and only getting one leg.’)

On paper the Walkers owe the bank over a million dollars. With slack milk prices, they’re doing well just to pay the $135,000 interest per annum. Three primary-school kids don’t go to soothe the nerves. Even in good times Shelley knew how shaky a farm can be, losing Pete to a ruptured disc for four months the same year they bought the farm – and Shelley never having milked a cow in her life. The drought compounded that unsaid ill-feeling. Until a phonecall back in November.

‘Trish (of meditation fame) invited me over to her farm at Strathmerton. Let’s do a bit of meditation by the river, she said. So I rang my friend Sue – and asked her. After I hung up I thought, hey, maybe some other people would like to come.

‘There happened to be a UDV (dairy farmers’) barbie that same day. So I made up some gift vouchers. I called it Indulgence Day. I said we’ll have hairdressers and masseurs and stuff, and 48 women put their names down. I had no hairdressers, no masseurs – and I thought….God….set a goal and make it happen….’

Four days later, enlisting a troop of pro-bono beauticians from farms and salons, Shelley chose a strawberry farm to host the inaugural Time Out Ladies Day. ‘Farming women don’t do lunch. We won’t just come and have a cup of tea. There has to be a reason. In tough times, the first thing to go is haircuts. So if I could offer a haircut, that would justify a nice day and the rest would flow from there.’

What flowed in fact was staggering. As the women surrendered to shiatsu fingers, pumice stones, aloe vera, they started talking. Little by little, the sense of isolation melted. Older women admitted using superannuation to feed their cows. Younger women admitted keeping their kids in the dark – and the family was corroding as a result. Universally the women confessed a concern for their men.

‘We’ve had eleven suicides in the valley before Christmas,’ whispered Shelley, away from the veranda. ‘I spoke to the local police as well. They said domestic violence had increased by 27% - and it’s mainly new families. People with no previous record of violence.’

As I’m scribbling, Shelley talks of milk. She mentions a cell count can measure the stress levels in cows. And by default, the farmers themselves. Lately the tally across the valley has been a tad erratic in both man and beast.

So Time Out hatched a Blokes Day too. Rather than haircuts, Shelley opted for golf, but strictly the non-serious variety. Husband Pete crafted a few oversized tees, with all driving done with a putter. Twenty-five men turned up. Next came a Family Day. Since then, with Time Out flyers distributed by milk tankers, over 900 people have indulged – with not a cent being spent.

In the last few months, government aid has lightened the dairy burden a fraction. In December a drought relief grant of $20,000 from the State coffers barely financed a weekload of water for the Walkers. Around the corner, maybe, Exceptional Circumstances will see interest rates on farming loans halved – just as the hay tab soars. ‘I’m basically spending $6 per day,’ says Mick, the back-patting hubby of Jodie, ‘just to give each cow enough roughage to make $4 of milk.’

‘Farming women are the meat in the sandwich,’ says local State member, Jeanette Powell, who’s come to spy on today’s hedonism. ‘On one side the kids are saying why can’t we have Nikes? On the other side the husband complains about money. The women feel like the ones who have to hold it all together. They have to keep fit and healthy. But usually on a farm you can’t get out – you can’t share what’s in your life. Days like this are important. They form a sistership.’

And a platform. Month by month, Time Out is morphing into a network. Slowly social workers, Centrelink staff, financial counsellors, local cops and Relationships Australia have been put in reach, coming along and taking part. One whole support system built on a free haircut.

Shelley amplifies her utopia. ‘Shep’s always had enough money to get itself out of the shit. Always. This time we’ve been flattened. So its an amazing opportunity to build a new community. Why just bad times? Why cant’ we do this in good times too?’

Yvonne from Ky is waiting for a foot-bath. Mandy is almost done. She’s telling Sue about a wedding last week in Melbourne. ‘This guy said to me, You don’t look like a dairy farmer. So I asked him, What’s a dairy farmer look like?!’ And the girls guffaw.

Julie is purring. Pat is doing Julie’s nails, wan from milking cows in latex gloves. As the manicure unfolds, Julie describes her other life as an Ag Care worker, visiting farms with ‘a thousand choices’ for stricken families. She gives me a foretaste:

‘In tough times a farm can decide whether to milk their cows, or not milk. To milk part of the herd or all of the herd. To keep some cows or sell some. Or will we keep some cows, sell some and park (freely borrow out) some? Will we leave the farm? Will we stay on the farm and get rid of the herd? Will we find other jobs? One farmer I know parked himself and 100 of his cows – he went to Koondrook near Kerang to take up a manager’s role. He had to leave his young family behind. There’s no easy decision.’

Meantime Trish is sitting cross-legged under the she-oaks. She holds out her palms and says, ‘I want you to picture a beautiful place.’ A circle of sunburnt women close their eyes and go to that place.

[Sunday Life, November 2002]