Transcript
Invisible Farmer: Securing the history of Australian farming women
Catherine Forge and Liza Dale-Hallett, 8 June 2016
Thank you so much for coming today to the June seminar of 2016 History, Culture, and Collection seminar series, which is presented monthly by the humanities department of Museum Victoria. I'm Deborah Tout-Smith. I'm a senior curator in the humanities department, and I co-convene this series with my colleague, Lindy Allen, who's sitting up towards the back.
I'd like to begin today's proceedings by acknowledging the traditional owners of the land we're on today, the Bunurong and Woiwurrung people of the Kulin nation, and pay my respect to elders, both past and present.
And now to introduce what promises to be a very interesting paper by Catherine Forge and Liza Dale-Hallett. Catherine Forge was curator of the Invisible Farmer Project in 2015 and wrote her honour's thesis on the Victorian Women on Farm's Gathering Collection in 2007. She's since worked as a research associate on the collection, as well as conducting oral history interviews with women across Victoria. And Liza is a senior curator of sustainable futures at Museum Victoria, and she's been actively involved in preserving the history of women, of farming women since the 1980s, and was instrumental in establishing the Victorian Women on Farms Gathering Collection at Museum Victoria in the early 2000s. So their paper today is entitled The Invisible Farmer Securing the History of Australian Farming Women. Welcome Catherine and Liza.
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you, Deb, and thank you for being here today. As Deb explained, I'm senior curator of sustainable futures, and I thought we'd break this talk up into a variety of streams. So, before I start, I'd just like to thank all of those who've come from regional parts of Victoria and ask are there any farmers here today? Thank you for being here, and thank you for feeding us.
So, I'll make a few comments about invisibility. And then Catherine will talk about the pilot project and its outcomes. And then I'll talk about the recent success with an ISA linkage application and the goals that we have for that.
So, let me start by asking you all to imagine a farmer. Let's see what Google thinks of that. Have a good look. Now that's just a straight term, but let's see what they do about Australian farmer. This is what invisibility looks like. And yes , did you know- it's not moving to the next- can we- Tim, it's not going forward. There we go. Did you know this? Women contribute 49% of the total value of the output of farming communities. Women have always played a vital role in sustaining Australian farms, but where are they? Tim, yep- here we go.
Now I'd like to introduce Catherine Forge. Catherine and I go back a long way. We've been working together on this general field since her honour's thesis, which she did on the Victorian Women on Farms Gathering Collection some years ago now. She's also worked as a research associate for Museum Victoria and has a vast experience of interviewing rural women in Victoria and beyond. So I'll hand you over to Catherine now.
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you, Liza, and thank you everyone for coming along today. It's really good to see quite a few familiar faces in the audience. I met Liza, I think it was 10 years ago now, and I was doing a student internship in my early 20s. And I remember being completely overwhelmed by these Victorian Women on Farms Gathering Collection and the stories that it entailed. And since then I haven't been able to get away from it. What I thought I'd do today is talk to you about the work I did last year with the McCoy Invisible Farmer Project.
So just to explain, I'm not sure who's familiar with what the McCoy Project is. So not everyone. So, I'll just explain briefly. The McCoy Seed Fund was established through the McCoy Project, which is a joint initiative between Museum Victoria and the University of Melbourne. The McCoy Seed Fund provides a small number of grants on an annual basis for collaborative research projects between Museum Victoria and the University of Melbourne. It aims to support projects that will have an impact beyond the museum and academic environment and also that will be likely to be developed into either an ISA linkage grant or receive external funding and be sustainable beyond the project. So, we were very lucky to receive funding, and Liza will talk further about that when she returns.
So, what I thought I'd do just really briefly is try and explain these term invisibility. Actually on the way to the talk this morning I had a phone call with my niece. She's 10 years old. And I said oh I'm doing a talk today on farm women's invisibility. And she said why would farm women be invisible? Are they invisible? So I thought I just- I can't, sort of, attempt to explain it to you because it's very, very, very complex. But there are a number of factors that make up this invisibility, and one of them is a cultural factor. So we're all aware of this idea of Australia's national identity that's being wrapped up with ideas of the Bushman and Clancey of the overflow and the [INAUDIBLE] and mateship and Egalitarianism. All of those wonderful things that we've celebrated, but that, for many reasons, haven't included farming women in that version of culture.
We also have a really interesting thing going on with the way that women's work is recorded officially. So in things like statistics and in things like the census. So it was actually in- when was it- 1891 that it was decided that women's work would just not even be included in the record keeping or the census anymore, because it would create the impression that women were in the habit of working in the fields as they are in some of the older countries in the world, but certainly not in Australia. So women's work was just taken out of the census. And it wasn't actually until the 1990s that women in agriculture stopped being referred to as silent partners unproductive. Women's work continues to go unaccounted for. And it's really difficult, even in today's census. If you've got the question. It's very much a binary question. Are you of a homemaker or are you a farmer? For a lot of women, they're many things, and quantifying that work can be quite difficult.
Another aspect is the academic aspect. So, actually when I started working on this project over 10 years ago and went to write my honour's thesis, I actually became really worried that I wouldn't have enough secondary sources or material, because it was really, really scarce finding information on what farming women had done historically. So, in the past 100-200 years, and especially what farming women had been doing in the 70s, 80s, 90s during the rural women's movement. There just really wasn't much literature out there. So, one of the farming women that we know who has contributed a lot of her career to studying women's work is Margaret Alston. She's a sociologist. And she argues that studying women in agriculture is like looking into a black hole. Accounts of women's involvement are very sketchy, and in fact, established agricultural records provide little evidence of the significance of women's contributions. Official statistics are equally poor sources because they have failed and continue to fail to accurately record women's efforts.
And there's another issue tied in with this invisibility, which is reality TV. Not really. I am joking here. But I do think it's important that we think about television and media and how farming is represented, because I've been particularly interested this week in really watching advertisements, Kohl's ads, reality TV. And there is still a very are overwhelmingly male representation of what farming in Australia is.
So I thought I'd just talk briefly about the main aims and outcomes of the McCoy Invisible Farmer Project. I was working on the project. I was employed with a six month contract two days a week. So we were very aware from the very beginning that we wanted to change the world but we had a limited amount of time and resources within which to do so. So, really we were just testing out ideas in the hope that we would be able to do something further with further funding.
One of the main things that way noticed was of importance was to really look at what other existing collections were doing in terms of farming and rural women's history. What did they have in their records? Where were farm women locatable? And what were their current collecting policies? Were farm women part of these policies? Or what was there essentially? So, we worked alongside a number of institutions. We had the State Library of Victoria. We had the public record office of Victoria. Melbourne University archives. We also met with some women that were working at Dookie College. And we sat- and Museum Victoria, of course. And we sat down and really had a chat to begin with to talk about where women can be located, where farm women's history can be located. And overwhelmingly we found that there weren't really any firm policies with the different collecting bodies and that we really needed to look into strategies for how we could overcome this.
Another major aim of the project was to undertake a series of oral history interviews in order to give voice and give profile to some of the women that had been active in their communities. The oral history programme was by no means exhaustive. We had six months. So we couldn't interview everyone. But we did eight interviews with nine incredible women. And we focused on two main aspects. The first of those was on women that had graduated from agricultural studies. So women were actually legally not allowed to study agriculture until the 1970s. However, we know that women did study streams in agriculture earlier on, as early as the 20s, and at Dookie in the 30s and 40s. It was just, there's not a really solid account of what was going on. And so by interviewing these women we were able to sort of piece together what they were studying and what the campus life was like and what they ended up doing with their careers afterwards. And also of vital importance was the Rural Women's Movement Does everybody know what the Rural Women's Movement was? OK.
So, the Rural Women's Movement was really central movement in Australia's history that happened in the 70s and 80s when women started to network on a really large scale. So it started off in Victoria. It really rippled throughout Australia. And then by 1994 there was an incredibly large conference that attracted international guests from all over the world. It was actually the largest agriculture conference I ever had in Australia. So that was just one of the things that happened. There was the establishment of the Rural Women's Network, the Office of Rural Affairs, there were the ABC Awards- that's too many to mention. And some of the women that were involved in all of this networking and campaigning are here. So, we're honoured to have you here.
One of the other things was to promote the urgent need to document this history. So, we actually ended up having quite a concerted media campaign. To our surprise the media were incredibly interested. And really took up with this in the six months that I was there with the project. And I'll let Liza talk about the last two aims and outcomes, which were to develop innovative partnerships- so, I;ll let Liza talk about that- and also to prepare the ISA linkage application . So, I might just- Tim do you mind just playing this audio? Thank you.
And cue.
Thank you.
[AUDIO PLAYBACK]
- Are you an invisible farmer, Joy?
- No, I'm a retired invisible farmer.
- Were you once invisible?
- No, I wasn't. I was very fortunate in that I was a hands-on farmer with my husband for 20 years.
- Were you different to other women who were farming around you? Did you feel like the way that you participated on that farm was different to the women around you?
- Some, yes. They didn't come to meetings. They didn't turn up at sort of conferences. The husbands did. They were, probably, as busy as what I was. They were farming, and they were looking after the calves and feeding the calves. They were looking after the children. That were looking after the chooks. They were probably going into town and getting things that were needed. But they weren't, necessarily, in the position where they went to meetings. And certainly farming organisations were predominantly male.
- They certainly were, and they still are.
[END PLAYBACK]
So that was an excerpt from a Drawing Room, ABC Drawing Room feature, that Liza and farmer, Joy Brand, did together. It was just one example of one of the interviews that we did. We were quite surprised to receive so much interest from. We had ABC Radio, ABC Radio National. We had The Age page two to three, which was a bit of a surprise. We had The Weekly Times. We had a whole lot of media interest, and, I mean, it shouldn't be a surprise, because it's such an important topic. But historically these stories haven't featured widely. And I remember actually talking to some of the women, that might be here today, years and years ago about having to campaign a newspaper to change the title from The Man on the Land to On the Land. So, it's just a really important thing to get the media or newspapers to start seeing things differently.
I should also mention the amount of community response that we had. So, once we started to get all of these newspaper articles and radio segments going, we were inundated with emails, which was wonderful. It was also much more intense than we had imagined. So we received emails from people that were just generally interested and wanted to know more. We received e-mails from people that had mothers, aunties, grandmothers- just they really wanted to share their story. And often they had offers of diaries or photographs or objects pertaining to these histories. We also had interest from academics from various institutions, from libraries, and we had interest out worldwide, too. We had some museums across, I think it was Canada, various places that were interested.
One of the things that was fantastic and that we are hoping to leverage with these continuing project is the capacity for social media to really engage the community. We found we had, I think there was an Age article that was shared at least 3,000 times. Twitter over 10,000 times or something of that nature. So it was quite extraordinary to see how many people really engaged with the project. This is just one example of a Facebook feed that goes on and on. I'm really sick of being a farmer's wife. I will hogtie the next person who says it. I am married to a farmer, but I'm not a bloody farmer's wife. My mum, my grandmothers, and most of my aunties worked alongside the men. So I have a good history to follow. And I received a similar e-mail from a woman talking about her aunt, and she said:
I am excited that your project might move the common perception that a female farmer is simply a woman who married a farmer and, therefore, expected to pitch in to help his career. My aunt, now aged 84, was a single woman who purchased a 2000 acre property in Eurora and ran it her entire working life alone. Whenever a stock agent or chemical rep visited her property, they always asked her if her husband was home, as they wanted to talk business. No one ever really believed that she was the farmer, despite her receiving farming awards and hosting many demonstration days on her property. She was a real pioneer in rotational grazing in the district.
So we got a lot of emails like this, and it just really demonstrated how the stories are out there. We just really need a vehicle through which to capture them.
So with this project we did interview nine amazing women who had both been involved with agricultural studies and also were involved with the Victorian Rural Women's Movement. So, I thought I'd just play you a few snippets just to give you a little taste of the sorts of things that were covered throughout the interview. So, first, on the left here, we have Julie Williams- sorry- and she authored this amazing report in 1992 called The Invisible Farmer. And this report came out during the pro women's movement and was a really vital piece of information that allowed for some statistics to finally be captured. So, Tim, if you could play that please?
[AUDIO PLAYBACK]
It became clear that there just weren't statistics. Often you need statistics to be able to put a case forward for why someone should be recognised or whether a group should get funding or, for example, to continue the school courses into the future, or even to get some funding to run the gatherings. So without statistics on how many farmers were women and what their contribution was, it's hard to put a case together. So, that was a little bit of the background.
There was also quite an interest in what had been done in the past for farm women, but it was difficult to find any information. So, people might have run something or even written proceedings, but they weren't published. So they were lost unless somebody had a copy of them somewhere. So, it's a bit of frustration in not being able to sort of gather their history together, too, very effectively.
[END PLAYBACK]
So, that's just an example of some of the activities that were happening during the Rural Women's Movement. But that importance of having documentation was incredible. And a lot of the women that I interviewed spoke about referring to this report whenever they wanted to go to government or to start lobbying for change. Having this report, which actually acknowledges that farm women do contribute this much on their farms, was really a vital piece of information. I wish I could talk about everyone here because they are fantastic, but we will move over to Viv McWaters, who is third from the left. Thank you, Tim.
[AUDIO PLAYBACK]
I was quite adamant about women being allowed to do agriculture. So, whenever I had to give a talk or a speech, it was like there goes Viv again talking about feminism and equal rights and it's OK for women to be doing this sort of stuff. And I can remember there being some animosity from the male students to that attitude. And there was also some- I think that people weren't clear that women could have a career in agriculture. There was an expectation that women would marry farmers and support male farmers in doing what male farmers do. There wasn't the expectation that women would get careers in agricultural research, in extension, in journalism, in all of the support activities that are around agriculture.
[END PLAYBACK]
So, Viv actually studied agriculture at Longerenong, and she was one of the first women to study in her cohort in the 70s. She actually lobbied to change an act of parliament so that she could be allowed to live on campus, because previously women were having to make a commute often two or three hours to get to campus because they weren't allowed to live there. She then talked in the interview about her career. She ended up getting a job working as a journalist for the state government. She worked alongside Joan Kirner setting up some conservation groups. And her story is another one of these amazing stories.
So, finally, down at the bottom on the left, we have Meredith Hayes. And Meredith is a classic example of a woman that has been a farm woman her entire life, takes it in stride, doesn't want any awards for it, and does not consider herself to be a pioneer. She's an incredible woman, and she was one of the- she was the only woman to graduate from Dookie College in 1949. So, this is Meredith reflecting on her experience of studying alongside the men as the only female in her class. Sorry. That ones for Tim.
[AUDIO PLAYBACK]
- Did you feel in any way that you were treated differently by any of the staff or fellow students being a woman?
- No, not at all. I mean if there was a subject we were doing- I'd always been keen on riding horses and things anyway. So the fact that we were using draft horses to run the machinery in those days up there, if it came to harnessing up draft horses to pull a hay wagon or something, I was probably better at it than a lot of the guys that had never been near a horse in their lives. I was used to farm animals because I'd spent childhood holidays on farms. And you have to milk the cow bar machine because I've been to my cousins dairy farm for holidays. Now I actually probably was at a bit of an advantage to a lot of the return guys just because of my childhood memories of holidays. So, there was no problem there.
[END PLAYBACK]
So, I should mention here, through a very strange twist of fate, that Meredith is my great-grandmother-in-law. And I didn't know that she had done all of these things until this project really made me aware of it. So, I always knew that she'd farmed out in Gibbs Land, but it was never really spoken of in the family in a very celebratory way. So, it was really fantastic that she was able to be interviewed. And I have discovered through researching that she had won an Order of Australia for services to conservation. She'd worked and campaigned heavily throughout her area to work on issues like soils and salinity. And she just have had a remarkable career and ended up farming until she was 84, I think, running the farm. But without this sort of documentation process of interviewing, her story would have been lost. And sadly Meredith had a stroke two months ago now and her memory is, it was already starting to fade then, but it's not very good now. So, I just really feel very grateful that we were able to record her story. And it really does illustrate, I guess, the, urgency in collecting these oral histories, because they live on in people's minds and will be interred with their bones if they're not- that's a quote by Henrietta Lawson- if they're not captured now. So, and sadly we were due to interview Joan Kirner for this project, too. So, unfortunately we didn't get to capture her story, but she should definitely be remembered as being one of the key women involved in the Rural Women's Movement. And we need these stories to be made more visible than they are.
So just finally, this is an article I found in Trove while researching my grandmother-in-law. She wrote it in 1950. And she was arguing that women graduates, their numbers might be small, but they can do many big jobs. The article then goes on to talk about how women have a really big role to play, and we need to just acknowledge that. And I thought that was a nice place to end. We owe it to people like her to take an active interest in their stories and to continue capturing them, preserving them, and making them more visible in the public arena. So, thank you all for coming and listening to me today, and I'll pass you back to Liza.
[APPLAUSE]
So, on to the ISA Linkage Project. The Invisible Farmer Project is the first national study of farm women in Australia. We aim to combine personal narratives, similar to what Catherine's been talking about, with academic research to map the diverse innovative and vital role that we know women play in a Australian agriculture. It will create new histories and narratives of rural Australia and hopefully stimulate discussion about its future and why it matters.
So, why does it matter? This is why it matters. This is globally and intimately, personally important to us all. We all need food, and we wouldn't be here today without fibre. I can tell you now I don't think we'd live much without these clothes. So, thanks to farmers we are alive. We have a great lifestyle. But the reality is we live in a climate-changed world. And the biggest threat to this planet, amongst many, is food security. For Australia that means adapting to increasing numbers of extreme climate events, rising temperatures, changing patterns of rainfall, declining soil moisture, and increasing risks from pests and diseases. And I don't know if any of you watch Landline on the weekend, but an interesting example of the impact of climate change is the relocation of Brown Brothers Wine Enterprise South to Tasmania. Basically it's an impact of rising temperatures and the shorter growing season.
Climate change is predicted to reduce food production in Australia by 15% to 30% over the next 40 years. So, coming to these sustainable development goals, Australia's, the Australian government supports this United Nations 17 sustainable development goals. And you will see there, amongst many others, number five, gender equality. The UN is quite clear: it identifies rural women as quote key agents for achieving the transformational economic, environmental, and social changes required for sustainable development. And more recently the UN released a draft report called the Global Gende4r and Environmental Outlook report, and its findings are clear. Gender inequalities have a negative impact on human health, the environment, and sustainable development. It states that women's empowerment, otherwise known as participation in decision-making, is essential to build resilience and adapt to climate change.
Now we all know, those that have been involved in this field and certainly the farmers in the room, know that women play a central role in sustaining their family funds and have done so forever. But we're facing, now, a new reality that's impacting the world and women and the issue of gender are critical.
So, why does this matter? Well, we know, because of that vital role that women play in farms across Australia, they are identifiably key agents of change and innovation and offer significant leadership in sustainability, food security rural communities, natural disasters, and policy-making. Making farm women's contributions visible is not just an exercise in recording and rewriting history, it is a critical step in securing our future. And to help us along the way we have a series of fabulously rich and diverse expertise from social work, women's history, media, government policy, cultural informatics, archival, and museum practise.
And in terms of research outcomes, one of the first items that is really critical on which is a follow on from the pilot study, is a PhD that will document the history of the Australian Rural Women's Movement. And that will be supervised by professor of history at the University of Melbourne, Joy Damousi, and myself here at Museum Victoria. This movement, as has already been indicated, is nationally and internationally significant. And understanding and capturing the oral histories of the leading people, men and women who are involved in this movement, is really important and urgent activity that, hopefully, this PhD student will undertake. This is an untouched field of history, and it will yield immense, rich and important data that will help us inform ourselves for what's actually happened since the 1990s and why is it that invisibility is still an issue. There will be 45 oral histories collected, and they will be housed with one of our partners, the National Library of Australia, and made available through their website.
Our second outcome is a contemporary analysis of women in Australian agriculture. And that will be supervised by Professor Margaret Alston from Monash University and DEDJTR, which is the Victorian Department of Economic Development, Job, Transport and Resources, and DEDJTR is a really important contributor financially to these PhD programme. So we're really thrilled to have them on board, not just because of the money, but because they will facilitate access to data that will help us understand the current situation as it relates to the contribution women make in agriculture, and, most importantly, be able to use that data from this investigation to influence policy and policy development. So that's an exciting outcome.
The third element of the research relates to enhancing online access and connections. And one of the enduring themes of rural women is about inter-connectivity. The fact is that they somehow have this amazing capacity to communicate and connect across vast distances across many different areas. And to help us with this, we have a partnership, which is as a result of the University of Melbourne's relationship with us, the eScholarship Research Centre, will work with the National Foundation for Australian Women and use one of many platforms, including the Australian Women's Archives Project, to assess and enhance rural community access to online information, research, and other material that relates to this topic. So hopefully through that analysis we'll be able to test the power and potential of Australia's online tools as vehicles to access and research community transformation and cultural change.
Fundamentally this whole project is about women's stories, and as Margaret Alston terms it, it's about revealing the hidden heart of rural Australia. So one of the partners you might have noticed is ABC Rural, and we're really thrilled to have them on board. This is a really significant partner and immediately allows us to do what it is we're wanting to do here as a national project. So, that gives us a fabulous reach across Australia to tap into community stories and to help generate interest and involvement in discussing those stories and enable communities to participate in a fairly active way. They will also, hopefully, be a tool for us to share the research outputs from the ISA Project, so that we can get back to those communities with some of those outputs.
But most importantly, as has been demonstrated by the interests the media showed last year in the pilot, is there's an immense interest about this with urban audiences. And given that the bulk of Australia is urban, I think one of the things that- I don't know if anyone saw Q and A, one of the issues this week, of course, is over and over again, the feeling that rural communities are being left behind and that they're not really- there's this great vast gap between them and the urban consumers who depend on them. So hopefully through ABC Rural we'll get some dialogues happening and make those cross-connections, which is a really valuable exercise.
The project also aspires to unwrap the layers of invisibility and reveal the rich diversity of women's lives, including those women who have and continue to be marginalised, and that includes indigenous women, those who are from linguistically diverse backgrounds, young women, those who live in remote areas, and especially those whose work is never acknowledged. And in terms of indigenous women, one of the partners is the National Pioneer Women's Hall of Fame, which is based in Alice Springs, and they have an ongoing relationship with local Aranda women. And this project, while this is a vast topic, this project will help support programmes that give some acknowledgement of the role of Australia's first farmers and that ongoing and really important way in which indigenous women contribute to land management and the sorts of products that emerged from that. Bush foods is a really extraordinary current industry that goes back obviously into the deep past, but it's an important part of the current development in agriculture that indigenous communities are involved in, and especially indigenous women.
So, we have many partners in this. It's vast, it's national, it's a big canvas to work with, but the most important partners by far, are the people of Australia. And as Catherine has indicated, we've been literally overwhelmed with the level of interest from across Australia, from men and women, from academics, from farmers, from people who were interested in this topic. And they want to be involved. They want to share their stories. So while the AIC is a great starting point, it's not got the capacity to do everything. And so in addition to what we can bring to be under the AIC, we're also seeking financial sponsorship that will enable us to really provide outcomes for the community to actively participate in this project. So we look forward to that, and it's certainly a space that hopefully will see some substantial outcomes.
The other thing that we're very aware of is that many interested organisations and communities that want to participate and have already indicated an active interest in this project and how they might help, the CWA is obvious and they're very keen, the Australian Women in Agriculture Organisation is another one and that's a really important, again, national organisation that will contribute. And there will be others. I'll just reflect briefly on this thing called history. So what is history? So just off the top of my head there's a number of things that could come to mind, but history is the stories we choose to remember. Collections held in public museums, libraries, and archives help us remember. We've been overwhelmed, as I said, with calls from men and women across Australia wanting us to record and preserve the stories of farm women, to add them to our national history, and national narrative, our history collections, and our collective memory. A key aspiration of this project is to give these women's stories visibility and a permanent and tangible place in our local, regional, state, and national history repositories.
So, as well is giving voice to all of these fabulous stories, the project will address the urgent need to bring together some alliance of research and collecting repositories to assess strategies for identification, collection, and the preservation of rural women's stories.
So back to the future this is what we aspire to have as a result of this project. So the next time when you start to Google farmer, you might see something that does actually reflect reality. We hope that this project will create really positive outcomes and change that will benefit all of us, but most importantly, those that we are focusing in on here. We hope it will empower farm women to reclaim their history and to create new narratives of rural Australia. We hope to create new public collections in libraries, museums, and archives. We hope to facilitate greater participation of rural women in decision-making forums. We hope to stimulate public dialogues about contemporary issues facing rural Australia and its future. And ultimately, we hope to redefine the farmer. Thank you for coming, and remember to thank a farmer the next time you enjoy food or put on some clothing, and keep an eye on Google. Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you so much. It was extremely interesting and thought provoking in so many ways. Fortunately, we do have about 15 minutes for questions. We've got a couple of microphones there if you prefer not to stand up and shout. But has anyone got anything they'd like to ask for comment on? Well, I will get the ball rolling. No, I'll let you get the ball rolling. Then I'll [INAUDIBLE].
When do you start- oh sorry. [INAUDIBLE] When do you start this, and how long do you think it'll be before you've got something, the finished report?
It's three to four year project. It's only just been announced. We haven't had a project team meeting. So, all of this is still very fresh and hasn't really hit the ground. It all will hit the ground hopefully in the next month or so. In terms of the process of outcomes, that will depend on how soon it takes us to appoint relevant PhD scholars to the project and what sort of other partners might be involved in the project that can help facilitate.
I'll jump in with my question then. I was glad about your comments about history and how we understand history and what is lost and found in the process of history making. Having just worked on a project about World War I and thinking back further about the factors that affect women's both presence on the farm, roles on the farm, and invisibility or visibility on the farm, I wonder, in terms of thinking how far back, are you thinking you might have the capacity to go in your work?
One of the really important parts of this project, as I mentioned, is the stories, women's stories. So in terms of our capacity, the PhDs are fairly well-defined and they have a fairly tight framework. But the women's stories is something that's open for, and hopefully if we get the sort of support we need to do that, that will open up the time range and the sort of range of things that might come from community and individuals who want to share stories of their sister, daughter, mother, wife, grandmother, great-great-grandmother, et cetera. So, it's over to the community to help shape that time frame. I think it's up to us to try and find the partner we need to fund the way in which those stories could be captured, recorded, and preserved in some way.
Hi, Liza and Catherine. If you're aware of other potential partners who would like to contribute or support in various mains, do you have a contact that you can communicate with or engage with a project?
Well, I think the best contact is probably directly to me.
OK. Great.
I can give you my details later if you like.
Terrific. Thank you. Hi. Hi, Liza. Hi, Catherine. I'm really, really interested in the types of women who might participate in those oral histories. What geographical reach does this have? Is it Victoria, or is it nationwide? From different types of rural industries? And whether or not you'll be interviewing other members of their family or community to talk back about that woman's role, maybe revealing some of her humility. I don't know. I find that kind of group interview might share some more. So I'm interested in that.
The interviews that we'll be conducting relate to the PhD on the history of the Australian Rural Women's Movement. So in a sense, the individuals involved in that movement will be the focal point for those interviews. Now it might be that when we have the conversation about that type of research element that we extend it into reflections by others of those leaders, and that might be an interesting and useful thing to do, too. The reality is the Australian Rural Women's Movement had its heartland in Victoria. A lot of the women and a few men involved in that will be based in and around southeast Australia. But the issues that they're attempting to address are national and are continuing to be national. So, there will be an element of flexibility there about how we interpret the task of that scholarship and how we sort of hone in on opportunities. But there's any number of ways in which, and this is where the ABC Rural will be an important partner for us, where we can identify fabulous stories that might be suitable for Landline or for Radio National or for the local regional radio station. And in that way we can enable the community to access those stories and also to celebrate those lives.
We're dealing with history. I'm interested in the future. We have to have a rural history of what's happening in the future and this young lady, I know, our youth coming on, how are you looking into some of the opportunities educationally that are available to women today? Young women that are coming into the tertiary universities, colleges, what's their future? We've built up the history, but what's their future? Are you touching on any of that?
One of the slides which I showed but I didn't talk to featured a number of extraordinary, contemporary farm women, including an image from one of our collections, but one of those women is Claire Dunn, and Claire was featured this weekend on Landline. Claire's an amazing 23-year-old grazer, and she's just, these last 12 months, launched a magazine to share and to profile the role of women's stories in rural Australia. Amazing woman. And an example of many ways in which contemporary issues of women and the role they play is profiled publicly. The PhD on the contemporary analysis of women in Australian agriculture is contemporary analysis that will cover current issues about innovation, leadership, opportunities to make change, decision-making forums, the access to higher education, the sorts of ways in which women are involved in the industry, and how they contribute to that industry, and how they have a voice in their industry, and what future they feel is there for them. I think we're very concerned with capturing and making this relevant, and it's, as you know, Lynn, a great passion of mine to make history relevant. So, this is a history project with a very clear focus on the future.
Just briefly there I should mention we did have a lot of interest from younger women. And I think there's so many different avenues that these stories can be captured. So, the social media presence was huge, and I think, the capacity for radio or television broadcast is really going to tap into that younger generation. So, it's pretty exciting.
Thank you for that Liza and Catherine. That was terrific. And congratulations on a project, which I think is imaginative and very broad and wonderful. A question for you. In terms of some of the longer running organisations, rural organisations, that involve women, the CWA, you mentioned them right at the end, and the Red Cross, things like that, will you be trying to write that sort of parallel history at the same time and weaving that story in? And I'm aware that at times it will be a contradictory and contested story.
I think initially what we're wanting to do is give visibility and document women's stories. That's the first priority, because that is the substantial issue that we are addressing. In terms of the opportunities with the CWA, I think there are many ways in which we can have them as an active community partner on any number of levels, but most importantly, at the grass roots. There is an opportunity for substantial critical analysis of the material we collect. And I think that's something that is open for anyone who's interested to pursue. I think in this instance where wanting to engender relationships that yield us access to stories that we know need to be documented. Part of it is a sort of process of enabling, at this point, and I'm sure as we get through into the centre of the project, we'll be able to identify certain issues, themes, and opportunities for analysis that we can't anticipate now, and I anticipate that that will be part of it. But yes, it's a rich field.
Following on from that, women that are my age that had very few opportunities apart from nursing, teaching, or working in a bank, a lot of the women that have gone through and been doing things in agriculture have been wonderful. Nowadays young people have got so many different options. Are we getting enough of the really intelligent people that are my age that have done a really great job. Are they going to be still here in agriculture in another 10, 20, 30, or 40 years? You know we're noticing that CWA and the Red Cross are definitely diminishing. Of all the committee and managements, I'm the youngest one on the committee. Everyone's older. The younger women are working. We've still got wonderful young women that are doing terrific things that are leaders, but have we got that core group of people that are going along doing all the hard work and nurturing their communities, their families, their committee of managements and everything? Is that going to still be around? And is it going to be around in 20 years time, or are we all going to be too old?
And the critical thing here is why rural communities matter to urban consumers. It does matter. And part of this exercise is to hopefully create understanding about why the health and well-being of rural communities matter. Part of the reason for these complex stories is that, and the reason of the invisibility, is that women do a whole heap of stuff, as you know, in rural communities. They're not just a farmer, they're also the business manager, they're the food provider, they're the shopper, they're the gopher, they're extra hand unpaid, et cetera, et cetera. And they also are the glue for rural communities, and they're fundraising support, they're the chauffeurs for the football team, they pull the community together on so many levels.
And as someone involved in issues to do with sustainability, they are the classic example of how the network and the inter-connectivity makes for a healthy community. Now in terms of the question you're asking, that's a question to be put to politicians, I suspect. But it does raise the issue that healthy rural communities is not just single, solemn mentality stuff, healthy rural communities is about networks of individuals, families, enterprises, and communities working together across the spectrum of interests. And hopefully this project might reveal some of that complexity.
It's the reason why it's hard to find women in the statistics, because you have an option in your, you know, the census, what is your occupation. Superwoman would be a good one, but I don't think they're going to offer that next time around. But these are the sorts of questions which frame policy, which is why that contemporary analysis is so critical to have on board as a key partner, someone inside of the bureaucracy shaping some of the data, so that we can address those sorts of issues.
And women's history, this is the silences of women's history, aren't well-documented, and I think it's always women who are writing those invisible histories. Do you have a view about that in terms of this invisible history? Is it for women to write that history, or is there some way that we should have male historians involved in that history, as well?
I hope everyone's going to be interested in this history because everyone actually is a stakeholder in it. And I suppose the thing that was really interesting from the feedback we had, the community feedback, is that a lot of those people who contacted us were men. So, I think we don't have any doubt that men will support this, because they value their women, too. It's just they haven't found a way of doing that. And this is a tool that might enable them to celebrate the contribution that the women in their lives make to their communities, their farming enterprises. So, in terms of making a resource, it's an opportunity to build a resource that allows for the interpretation that Margaret's talking about, that you're talking about, and that Lynn's talking about, that it can be a reservoir from which a number of interpretive opportunities exist, whether it's critiquing the CWA, or whether it's a vision for the future and the critical issues facing rural regional remote communities, or whether it's just a reframing of Australia's narrative. [INAUDIBLE]
This is focused on women farmers, but there's no reason why those interested in the broader context of the history of Australian agriculture wouldn't want to incorporate it. They'd be silly not to really. Wouldn't they?
We wouldn't only be aiming to interview women. So, looking at the Rural Women's Movement, there were a couple of really significant movers and shakers, men that were involved in the network. So, we're not specifically only targeting women, but it is a story that's focused on other female farmers.
Sorry, I was more asking the question about who writes the history, you know that thing Liza was saying about histories are the stories we choose to remember.
Yes. And that's why that community, the opportunity to create some sort of portal that allows for women to tell their own stories, or to tell the stories of other women that they know. And part of the invisibility issue we're dealing with here is that, of course, women are not terribly good at coming forward with sharing their life story. So, it might be that it does have to come through some other portal, some other perspective on that person's life and the contribution as they perceive it. But we encourage all types of stories. And that will one them.