Not a farmer's wife

Updated

As agriculture grows up, brute strength is no longer the prized trait. Instead, technical skill, ambition and a level head are in demand and it's women who are proving very good for business.

Jane Sale is a farmer in her own right. Her work and life are not balanced, but instead purposefully stitched together.

Metres from the home office is the children's School of the Air classroom, and while the cattle have millions of acres to roam, they're never far from Jane's mind.

That's the deal when you move from the city to outback Australia to build and run cattle stations.

Jane, 43, and her husband Haydn, 45, manage the Yougawalla Pastoral Company, covering Yougawalla, Bulka and Margaret River stations in Western Australia's Kimberley region.

"I came out here, but I didn't marry into this. This is a project that Haydn and I have built together and both want," Jane said.

From Perth, the journey to their homestead is a three-hour flight north, then a seven-hour drive on bitumen before another four hours off it.

Dust fills the frame of the rear-view mirror, but when it settles, the vast landscape is revealed in layers: the wide, blue sky meets a deep green at the horizon, then the yellow of the spinifex covers the distance until the red of the road. It's like that for hundreds of kilometres in every direction.

This is deep cattle country.

"It would be a pretty hard life if you were doing this just because you love someone because you've got to love what you do as well," Jane said.

"If I couldn't be in there working on the ground, I wouldn't be here."

Jane is the glue that holds so much of the operation together: a leader in the yards, in the community and for women across the Kimberley region.

She says, as a manager, she's not trying to treat her male and female staff the same, but trying to treat them equally and is careful to explain the difference.

"We are who we are. There is no denying gender. We just work with it," Jane said.

Recruiters and managers say stock teams are increasingly diverse because having qualities inextricably linked to being a female within them isn't just good for progress, but fundamentally good for business.

They say a female presence helps keep their herds calm, still and heavier, and those kilos are worth thousands.

The Yougawalla stations hold a stock school for workers recruited for mustering season. This year, the gender split is 50:50.

Jane is there, sitting at the back of the class making notes in a small writing pad, the kind often carried in stock hands' shirt pockets.

Every so often, she jumps in to share knowledge. One of her lines is notably relevant to the young group: "Don't risk your mob."

Keeping the cattle and themselves safe will take good judgement.

Recruits learn the decisions they make in the yards will reveal the "mettle of the man or woman".

Their attitude, observation and attention to detail all help them understand the livestock and are key to keeping them relaxed and, ultimately, the mob safe.

Women have always had a presence on cattle stations, but when handling the herd is about someone's nature and not just their brute strength, the opportunities open up.

"There's potential for women in every role that has previously been male-dominated," Jane said.

Nina Hardie, 34, is a pilot, skilled in the art of helicopter mustering.

She gets her two-seater Robinson Beta II aircraft close to the cattle, diving and weaving across the Kimberley landscape to get the mob into the yards.

"There are a lot more women nowadays getting into managerial positions and technical positions because the mentality has changed around the beef industry and who works in it," Nina said.

"Fourteen years ago when I was on stock camps [there were] six to eight men and two women. The roles are reversing.

"It's come a long way in a short period of time, but that's also because it's had to. Because the rural industry and the agricultural industry is having so much trouble finding staff to come out here and work."

Across the three Yougawalla stations, young women talked about their plans for careers in law, psychology, paramedics, genetics, management and advocacy in a rural context.

"Although people think it's a simple country life, there's nothing simple about the qualifications needed and the skills needed to have any role in the rural industry," Jane said.

"The way you develop a property, where you place your waters, why you place your waters there, what stock supplements you have to feed, the weather, how you muster, how you develop your yards, how the animals move through it — it's all incredibly technical."

And when it comes to university admissions for agricultural courses, women are holding their ground there too.

Across agriculture-related courses, female domestic students make up 53.4 per cent of admissions, according to 2016 data from Universities Australia. In animal husbandry, it climbs to 83 per cent.

Dugald Storie calls himself the Bush Recruiter and says he has seen "a fair increase" in the number of women "putting their hands up" to work on stations.

He receives thousands of applications every year for placements on cattle stations and says over the past five years the number coming from women has increased from 15 per cent to 40 per cent and that people are coming to him "because they want a career".

"The women are very ambitious. They have a real passion for going out and making something out of their profession of being on the land.

"[They] are really so critical in the workplace."

Jane's message is repeated over the several days of stock school: "Don't risk your mob."

The lesson is, don't lose focus, chase a stray and risk losing control of the herd — sometimes several thousand animals deep — as it moves towards the yards.

As Yougawalla worker Stephanie Coombes says, when it comes to working with cattle, "boring is good". Calm is good.

She's explains why while driving an old Land Cruiser behind stock being led back out bush for another year of grazing.

The speed is slow; a crawl behind cattle that are taking their time moving towards a water source.

"Every now and then you're going to come across a cow that's going to want to put you up the rails, but it should not be a consistent thing within your mob," she said.

"And if it is, then you're not doing something right."

At stock school, the recruits sit in the outdoor classroom and listen to messages about keeping the mob tight and how important human contact is.

Then, they return to the living quarters and spend more time together.

"We work from sun-up to sun-down. We live altogether. We're part of a team constantly. You don't get to go home and live 20 minutes away from a colleague you just worked with for 12 hours," Nina said.

Rosie Jackson was part-way through a paramedics degree when station life became a welcomed distraction.

"I rocked up to Margaret River and it was all boys and at night time they liked to just sit in front of the TV … be on their phones at dinner and no-one really talked to each other," she said.

"And I just didn't like it … I felt like everyone would get along a lot more if we all just chilled out at night time and sat around and talked about our day."

The 19-year-old made some changes. Everyone was asked to come to dinner with a question — a conversation-starter.

"In the afternoon they'd be like, 'Oh my question is: how is your day? No-one else ask how your day is because that's my question'," Rosie said.

They no longer need a question. Rosie and the three male stock hands sit around some trestle tables that have been pushed together. They eat, talk and gossip. Everyone digs in to clean up and everyone remembers that one guy who used to leave his plate in the sink. He didn't last.

These workers wake before sunrise every day and are ready to work minutes later. They wait for first light.

At 5:15am one morning, the Bulka Station manager asks lead stock hand Charles "Darby" Haling if the crew can start. "Can't see a f***ing thing out there yet," he replies. As soon as they can, work begins.

At the other end of the day, dinner is served early and lights are out by 8:00pm.

At Margaret River, the television never gets turned on because they've talked the whole time. This is how Rosie keeps her mob together.

The landscape might be vast, but at stock school, the recruits learn that, really, cattle handling is intimate. During drafting, someone looks at every animal and makes a call on whether it's ready for sale, will be sent back out bush or if it's a "stranger" that needs to be trucked home.

The Kimberley covers more than 400,000 square kilometres, so it would be easy to think the people who call it home were strangers too, but they say the distance doesn't make connection more difficult; it forges them.

Jess Seiler, 30, and her husband Rex, 30, are the station managers at Margaret River. Jess says: "The relationships you build with other girls up here and other staff in general, is worth so much more."

"I was here for three-and-a-half, four months on my own. Hadn't seen another girl for that period of time [and] with a baby. And I remember Neens would fly in on her way back from somewhere else, another station, and land and just have a cup of tea with me and that means so much."

Jane and Steph built a community around the idea that sharing stories was a powerful way to connect and cope for everyone, not just women.

Their blog is called Central Station and members of the rural community from Australian cattle stations contribute to it, writing about their lives, mental health and reminding everyone that, no matter the distance, help is always close by.

Sharing stories also means sharing struggles, because as another lesson goes: "You can't run from a bull. You have to face it. And pivot."

Steph recently wrote about how important it was to find the right job on the right station because sexism still exists.

"For women, while the industry has progressed and the opportunities for women are so much more available than they were a long time ago, you really have to back yourself and know, and probably even expect, at some point people are going to close the door on you for that, but just keep going."

And while women earn nearly half of all on-farm income in Australia, there are still far more men in management roles and on the various boards and bodies that shape the future of the industry.

Steph is very much about just getting on with the job, but she has felt the weight of sexism in previous workplaces. Her way through is to think: "Alright, they're not ready for me."

"That's not the right thing, thank you and keep going on your way. You've got to do that or otherwise it would be really easy to fall in a hole.

"You've got to have grit to just keep going."

You've got to pivot.

Yes, there has probably been a "McLeod's Daughters effect", but for an industry that needs workers, any drawcard is a welcomed one.

As Nina says: "The rural industry has been romanticised by TV shows and everything — but if that's what gets them out here, I think that's great."

Jane thinks social media has played a role, but also "people are drawn to this life full stop".

"I think there is something about the raw lifestyle out here that makes you feel connected on an emotional level and a physical level and it gives you a purpose."

Despite being isolated, those who choose to spend time out on stations say the sense of community is strong. They choose connection over connectivity. Man or woman, they find a place to work hard and a way to contribute.

They have found their mobs and are keeping them tight — wouldn't want to risk it.

Credits:

Reporting and production: Emily Clark

Photographs: Matthew Abbott

Topics: rural, rural-women, agribusiness, women-in-agriculture, halls-creek-6770, wa

First posted