This year, 2017, is an important one for BCG, and for me. BCG has reached its 25th year and as for me, well you can double that number. I’ve now spent almost half of my life living in the country, mostly in the Mallee.
I grew up in Frankston, nowhere near a farm, although my grandfather was brought up on a farm in Cobar in the middle of NSW and later he and my granny managed properties in Tallangatta and Apsley.
I still get asked how I like country life compared to the city or how on earth I managed to become Chair of an amazing organisation like BCG, not usually what is expected from a suburban woman with a professional life working mostly in irrigated horticulture.
I got interested in agriculture when I was about 12 when my Dad bought a hobby farm on French Island in Westernport Bay. Only a 20-minute drive and a 20-minute ferry ride from where we lived, in many ways it was a world away. Only about 35 people lived on the island, there were no bitumen roads and the only electricity was from generators. Sheep country, the paddocks were dotted with the remnants of old chicory kilns. They used old fridges for letterboxes and the state park which covered more than half of the area, was full of koalas.
Dad bought 180 acres of mostly virgin bush, some of which we cleared to run cattle – a huge herd of 30. A solicitor by profession, Dad probably wasn’t much of a farmer and certainly not much of a handyman. Unfortunately, the block was on the very aptly named Mosquito Creek Road, but we still had plenty of fun helping Dad cut firewood, set rabbit traps, cut bracken fern and feed the cattle.
As a consummate community man, Dad was involved in the French Island Progress Association because that was the other part of country living which my Dad introduced me to – volunteering. When he started his business in Frankston as a young graduate, he was a founding member of the Lions Club, Cricket Club and local kindergarten to name a few. He was instrumental in the “hands off French Island” campaign when the mainland shire wanted to take over management of the island. Thankfully the islanders were successful and when we visited early this year, to lay Dad’s ashes in the cemetery, we found French Island very much as we remembered it.
Inspired by the bit of farming experience, I did Ag Science at uni and my first job in the country was working for Hycube Industries, the old lucerne mill in Boort, making cubes for export to the Japanese livestock industry. There were four of us at Hycube for work experience. When the boss looked at my friend Tracey and I, his first comment was “We’ve never had a woman at Hycube before.”
It took them a bit longer to get used to Tracey and I compared to the other two male students, but it wasn’t long before we graduated from the broom to the front-end loader and before long we were experienced cuber operators.
I ended up working there for about eight months and learning a healthy respect for people with a more practical bent than my dad could show me.
That was in 1989 and after almost 20 years at the ag department in Swan Hill and seventeen as part of the Renney farming family, I reckon I nearly count as a Mallee local.
