Life on the Land

Resilience is a word that is bandied about and the experts are still unsure how it forms. After

speaking to women on the land, week in, week out, Emily Herbert has the sense that robustness is forged from walking through the fire. Living through the mess. Picking yourself up, dusting yourself off and putting one foot in front of the other. Just like every other muscle, it seems emotional sturdiness is made stronger through use.

Today's guest is Yolande Woods – mother, beef producer, designer, private pilot and I

know she won’t love me saying this, but also, warrior. Yolande’s life story weaves and turns like the Macintyre river she and husband, Bruce have built their home on in Goondiwindi, on the border of Queensland and NSW.

Like any river, her life has had pockets of extraordinary change; floods, droughts and rapids –

accidents, divorce and breast cancer – yet Yolande doesn’t see it as unique or any different to

anyone else. Raised in the outback, her bush roots hold strong, seemingly no matter what rushes her way. Aptitude seems her strength and if she’s not training for a marathon during radiation treatment, she’s learning to fly, fixing fences, working as an interior designer, raising cattle or starting a new business.

Welcome to a special episode of Life on the Land and a big congratulations to the National Winner of the AgriFutures Rural Women's Award, Yawuru/Bunuba woman Cara Peek from Broome in Western Australia.

This AgriFutures Rural Women’s Award ceremony was beamed into the homes, tractors and even paddocks of 600 Australians virtually via video links that connected MCs and finalists in all states and territories.

These awards are all about grit, determination and courage — and this is 100 per cent Cara.

She’s tough, and she's determined and I so clearly remember when we interviewed her earlier in the year, her bold doggedness to give opportunity to her people — in a way that is right for them culturally.

Her project is Saltwater Country — giving indigenous people and at-risk youth an alternative way of being involved in life, learning life skills on country and helping them become re-engaged in the world around them.

This week, Life on the Land sounds a little different and is a first for us.

Last episode, we spoke to Ju Roche, an artist living on a farm outside Wagga Wagga. Ju and Emily Herbert chatted about her painting process and how the land plays an integral part in her conceptual practise, sometimes painting outside under the moonlight. They also spoke about her family and in particular, her relationship with her artist sister Jacqui Meyers.

Ju spoke about Jacqui in such an infectious way that we just had to have her on the podcast…. Jacqui is Ju’s older sister, she has Down Syndrome and was idolised by Ju as a child – Julia says she used to follow Jac around like a bad smell. These days Jacqui is an artist, a wife and a brilliant Aunty. For today’s podcast, the sisters sat down in Jacqui’s home in Wagga, hitting record over a cuppa and meandering down memory lane.

The land has a deep and enduring effect on today’s guest. Julia Roche is an artist who lives on her family’s farm outside Wagga Wagga, in the heart of the Riverina in New South Wales.

Ju is part of a new generation of artists coming from regional Australia

To stand in front of Ju’s large, abstract landscapes is to bear witness to her inner world. Her paintings are evocative, visceral, layered and incredibly expressive. When not painting in her age-old woolshed studio – Ju has been painting outside and by moonlight, really distilling her pieces into what she can hear, smell, feel and taste, rather than relying on eyesight and aesthetics alone.

In this conversation, we talk about Julia’s practice, how she has balanced commercial viability with her creativity and how she works from a place of abundance rather than scarcity. We also talk about disability and inclusivity in the art world, and Julia’s personal and working relationship with her vibrant older sister Jacqui - who is also an artist, and who has Down Syndrome.

As a child, a teenager and even a student, today’s guest knew nothing about rural Australia, in fact, she had not a care for life on the land. She went on to become a political journalist in Canberra. And then – our guest today – author, writer and rural editor for Guardian Australia Gabrielle Chan met ‘The Farmer’.

Her eyes were opened to the daily routine of farming. She observed an intimacy between farmers, nature and the environment they co-existed upon. In the main street of her local community, she gleaned the complexities of culture and the climate – and what she was hearing, was a far-cry from the rhetoric being heralded in the halls of Parliament.

Gabrielle Chan finds herself as a unique kind of commentator, and her newly released book, 'Why you should give a fuck about farming', voices these intricacies in a new way.

But we start today, as we always do, at the beginning; in Gabrielle's early days as a child of the Sydney suburbs.

Thank you to today's episode sponsor, The King's School. As one of Australia's largest boarding communities, The King's School has a proud history of educating students from regional Australia. Applications are now open 2023 Scholarships and Bursaries. Learn more at their upcoming boarding webinars events or visit www.kings.edu.au for further information or to apply.

Today I’m joined by one of the Graziher Celebrities, Jane Smith – also known as The Shady Baker from a sheep station east of Broken Hill in New South Wales. Jane’s writing and recipes have been a feature in all but one issue of Graziher Magazine – and people, like you, have grown to love her work, her food and her gentle description of her life on the land.

To me Jane Smith is a true home-bod – when she has to leave, she can never wait to get home.

She loves that she knows everyone in her community – never feels isolated and her favourite thing in the world is to cook for her family. All these things are unique and relatable for thousands of women (and men) across rural Australia – and so I asked Jane to start with a small reading of what homesickness means to her.

The internet connection for this chat – is dodgy in parts – I think trying to find a perfect line from the east of broken hill to the isolated hills of Blakney Creek can sometimes be a hard ask sometimes!

Thank you to our amazing sponsor for this episode, the team from SG Off-Road - Make adventure happen with SG Off-Road.⁠⁠⁠

Our guests today are photographers. Georgie Mann from a sheep and cattle farm near Caramut, three hours west of Melbourne and Jess Howard who lives on the Sunshine Coast and originally hails from near Biloela in south east QLD.

These women make up two of the eleven photographers of the Beauty in the Bush Collective on Instagram. Last week they boldly launched a newsprint publication. The Bush Journal.

It’s another exciting example of private enterprise, not even that, just a handful of women, invigorated by each others influence – reigniting the way stories are rural Australia are told and sold.

The story behind their coming together is one we can all take heart from. Collectively they were seeking connection, maybe even feeling a little isolated, they 'looped' up via Instagram, realised their similarities and their unique offering. So they started creating. Lots of things. An Instagram account. They printed a calendar for sale and now they have a quarterly publication.

Thank you to our amazing sponsor for this episode, the team from @sg_offroad – make adventure happen with SG Off-Road.⁠⁠

Welcome to a little bonus episode of Life on the Land. If you listened to our podcast earlier this week with Olympia Yarger, you would have heard that we were going to share this bonus episode detailing Olympia and her husband, Eric’s experience with the current situation in Afghanistan.

Eric is a former US Marine and special forces operative, who was involved in six combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan. Last month he set about trying to get his former Afghani interpreter out of the country – and ended up helping 12 families get safe passage out of Afghanistan.

When Em Herbert interviewed Olympia, she said Eric was exhausted, having spent every spare second he had on the phone trying to find seats on planes in the carnage that was Kabul Airport.

This episode deals with the experience of losing a child, which may be triggering. If you need to speak to someone, please call Lifeline, on 13 11 14

There aren’t many interviews in which our host Emily Herbert has both cried and laughed until a little bit of wee came out. But there isn't many people like Olympia Yarger, today’s podcast guest.

Olympia is a maggot farmer. Yes, you heard that right. She is the founder and CEO of Goterra, a rapidly growing organisation based in Canberra. Aussies throw away 20 per cent of the food they buy. Isn’t that crazy? And that waste has a huge effect on our environment.

Olympia has developed waste infrastructure to solve our food waste crisis. She’s developed a system where she takes food waste, feeds it to black soldier fly larvae who munch it all up, which then excrete the goodness to create an amazing fertiliser. The maggots themselves are then made into protein rich pig, chook and fish feed. It’s a perfectly circular economy.

Not only this, she and her team have decentralised the system – creating robots full of maggots which can be parked at supermarkets, hospitals, bakeries, and anywhere where there’s a lot of waste.

Olympia’s journey to building this start-up – and raising more than $10-million of venture capitalist funding along the way – is extraordinary. She is darkly hilarious, intelligent and amazingly articulate. Behind this, her life’s experiences broke my heart. She has known terrible tragedy and grief, and has somehow gleaned how to move through and with it; a catalyst of meaningful change that I can only describe as remarkable and quite singular.

We start our chat with her beginnings in Canberra and how her innate love of farming was unexpectedly formed when attending boarding school in Yass.

This episode of Life on The Land is bought to you by a small (but big in personality!) bush-based café, fashion & gift retail store, located in the far NW NSW town of Walgett. Stone's Throw, is jam-packed full of unique gifts, homewares and more recently, a fashion line. With everything in store also online, it is an easy place to shop from the comfort of your home, offering dispatch within 24hours.

Stone's Throw also specialises in corporate orders for those looking for something special for their employees and or clients this Christmas. The majority of Giftboxes are proudly and exclusively Australian-made. Custom designed boxes are also available to suit any budget.

Until the 13th of October, Stone’s Throw is offering a 10% discount to listeners – just enter LIFEONTHELAND at checkout.

Head to www.stonesthrowonline.com.au for all your online retail experiences or contact Katie on 02 6828 3359 for corporate orders.

Karen, her husband Dan and their four daughters Bonnie, Molly, Jemima and Matilda, produce Angus beef from their properties and feedlots across western Queensland. All four girls are determined to continue working on the land, and by the end of the year they will all be back living and working at home.

On any given day, the girls might be online in university lectures, studying for exams, fencing, drafting, feeding, grader driving, maintaining aircraft, doing the accounting, dealing with Chinese customers or the Australian Government, marketing or teaching primary aged kids. The scope and skill of this modern day farming operation over 100,000 acres is utterly remarkable.

For mum, Karen Penfold, the journey to launching her family’s branded beef, Four Daughters and taking it to a Chinese market has been riddled with challenges.

Looking back, Karen could never have foretold how her life would play out, with a childhood spent in inner-city streets…

This episode is bought to you by Farmbot. “Life’s too short to spend hours driving to check water.” Spend more time at home, go on a holiday and check your water with Farmbot. Start the conversation about adopting Farmbot.