Outback Heroines

The Outback is a definitive part of what makes Australia such a unique place, just as the people who live there add something very special to what makes us all Australians.

 

It's wild, it's beautiful and it can be a terribly harsh environment, but many of its residents are even more extraordinary – taking each fresh challenge in their stride, and overcoming countless hurdles to build great lives for themselves and their families.

 

I've always loved the country ever since I was a little girl growing up in what were then the outer suburbs of Sydney. On trips to the bush, I'd always relish its exhilarating sense of freedom, of space and of untamed splendour. It was the start of a lifelong love affair with the country, and the Outback.

 

Since then, I've had the good fortune to work on a number of projects set in the Australian bush. My first-ever role was in the 1988 TV movie Danger Down Under, with American star Lee Majors. The project itself might have been forgettable, but the experience of working on it never was! After that came The Man from Snowy River and the long-running classic A Country Practice – both periods of my life I came to truly cherish.

 

I'm lucky enough to be able to visit the country regularly, too, as my sister is a community nurse, married to a farmer, and has lived on the land for around 25 years. So I was thrilled at being given the chance to write the foreword to Outback Heroines, after admiring the amazing cast of the first two books, Women of the Outback and Outback Spirit. I come from a family of strong women, and the women in this latest book simply took my breath away with the kind of courage, daring and resilience that have seen them live in some of the most remote parts of this earth and overcome sometimes crushing difficulties just to keep going.

 

All the women featured in the pages of this book are remarkable. Australia is a country that defines you, so it's astounding that they've managed to make their mark – and what a mark! – in such an unforgiving environment.

 

Together they make up the backbone of our nation today, and exhibit the kind of fortitude, daring and entrepreneurial spirit that will keep the Outback rich and colourful for the future of all Australians. Respect!

 

 

Stories from 16 amazing women, drawn from the very best the Australian outback can offer. And we're spoilt for choice. So many women over the years have arrived almost as ingénues in the Outback, yet have adapted and flourished in a way few could ever have predicted.

 

Some were beset by tragedy – enduring the deaths of husbands or children – yet have struggled on, often even with young families, to pluck victory from the jaws of disaster. Some simply came from nowhere to achieve huge success in their chosen fields. But all of them, along the way, have kept uppermost in their minds their contribution to the community in which they live, and all have made the world around them a better place … for family, friends, neighbours and the areas as a whole.

 

There's Janelle Pugh who runs an isolated crocodile farm on the Victoria River in the Northern Territory. She goes out regularly on the most dangerous missions on earth: to collect the eggs of wild saltwater crocs to keep down their numbers in the wild and protect local communities living along the river. When she returns, she then intensively feedlots around 8000 of the reptiles to supply the growing number of crocodile farms and industries throughout the country. Her near misses with the ferocious beasts are legendary.

 

There's the former Miss World Belinda Green caring for young kangaroos and wallabies at the 1896 Cowra farmhouse she left Sydney for. She now spends most of her days on the land, caring for orphaned joeys before they are released into the bush or raising money for WIRES, the animal rescue and care volunteer group which trained her to raise marsupials. She says it's so much more satisfying than winning the title in 1972, being a TV celebrity, being married to John Singleton or being named one of Australia's 100 most beautiful women …

 

There's Frauke Bolten-Boshammer, who came to Kununurra from Germany in 1984, the mother of four young children and a wife of 22 years, with plans to develop a 'dream farm' with her husband. The dry, hot wilderness of the Kimberley was the complete opposite of the lush rural farmlands she knew and just three years after their arrival, her husband shot himself. A few years on, one of her sons went missing, and was later found dead. Against all the odds, she decided to stay and started to sell jewellery from the Argyle Diamond Mine from the veranda of her home. Now her store in Kununurra is world-renowned as home to one of the world's largest collections of Argyle Pink Diamonds, and she's loved as one of the most enterprising and flamboyant pioneers of the outback. Her motto? Never begin to give up and never give up beginning.

 

There's Di Zischke, otherwise known as 'the Camel Lady' who, unlike Robyn Davidson, trekked completely alone with her camels to complete an historic trek retracing Burke and Wills' route. She ran camel safaris for 25 years around the desert regions of the country and has travelled more than 37 000 kilometres on camel back during her career. Outback people always talk about seeing a woman, alone with a train of camels, suddenly appear out of the desert, having been away with them for months. Now 68, she still breaks in and sells camels, and teaches people how to handle them, in between running a cattle property in Queensland.

 

There's Sarah Cook who lives on the most isolated cattle property in Australia, Suplejack Downs Station, which is 730 kilometres from the nearest town Alice Springs, the same distance from Katherine and 1,000 kilometres from Darwin. Her husband Rob, her high-school sweetheart and former champion rodeo rider, grew up on the property and Sarah, a former nurse, went to join him there and had their two sons. But in 2008, the helicopter he was mustering in dropped 200 feet out of the sky and crashed into trees. He broke his neck. He now has no feeling or movement from the shoulders down. But Sarah, as well as looking after the children, has dedicated her life to staying on the property and helping Rob still play a huge role, investigating voice-activated calf cradles and cattle crushers, and being able to remotely monitor bores and water allocation with a modified computer. She travelled the world with him for six weeks looking at different farming systems for his Nuffield scholarship. Then she helped him ride in his wheelchair with the children in a modified horse float 730 kilometres to Alice Springs along the corrugated and dusty Tanami Road partly to raise money for his Nuffield scholarship and to prove disability need never hold you back. With her support, he became the first person to ride a wheelchair across the Tanami.

 

There's Lyn Litchfield from Marree, South Australia. She runs the remote Wilpoorina Station, south of Lake Eyre, organises cattle drives, breeds horses, teaches people to ride and, as a horse-whisperer, uses equine therapy to help locals and children overcome their problems. She also – surprisingly for the outback, but showing how ideas that work are pounced on by people living there – practises Bowen therapy and Reiki.

 

There's GP Dr Ann Ward who's been practising for over 25 years and spends most of her time working as a rural doctor in the Kimberley region of Western Australia, based in Kununurra. Previously, she spent three years in the centre of Western Australia working for the Royal Flying Doctor Service in Meekatharra and was responsible for an area covering 390,000 square kilometres. For the past 18 years she has worked in the spectacular Kimberley region, flying weekly to service the Warmun Aboriginal community. Ann has also worked in the Himalaya both as a doctor and trek leader to remote areas. In 1990, she was expedition doctor for a successful expedition to Mt Everest. In 1992, she worked as a volunteer doctor for the Himalayan Rescue Association in Manang at 3,400 metres in the Annapurna region of Nepal. Ann has also spent nine summer seasons in Antarctica working both inland and on ships to the coast of Antarctica. She has also worked with Aurora in the Arctic and in Papua New Guinea.

 

There's Jo Fort who went from nursing in Kings Cross, Sydney, to nursing in Birdsville, the most isolated major town in the Outback. There, she fell in love with the life, and the people. Today, she's become a modern hero of the Outback by founding a new route via the Strzelecki Track and Birdsville Track, past two of the most famous hotel icons – the Birdsville Hotel and the Innamincka Hotel, close to the famed Dig Tree. Along the way she's been transformed herself from a city slicker to a new wave Outback pioneer. 

 

There's Libby Maulder who, with her husband Greg, had a dream of setting up an organic herb farm in the pure wilds of Tasmania's central highlands. For the first few years, she struggled, living in a tent while she had their first baby and tended plants by hand during long hot days in summer, and bitter cold in the winters. It was backbreaking work. But today, their remote plot of land has been developed into a 210-hectare farm, and Highland Herbs is recognised as a provider of high quality herbs and teas, with visitors arriving regularly to help them work their herbs. 

 

There's Deb Bain, a wool and lamb producer in Western Victoria, who founded national Farm Day, to reconnect urban and rural Australians. A pharmacist by trade, this Canadian-born city woman has embraced her rural life and has often managed the seemingly impossible in helping urban Australians understand the country much better, and helping those in the bush realise what an enormous contribution they're making. As a result of Deb's vision and dedication, as well as through her service to her local community, she's been awarded a number of prizes as one of our most unlikely success stories.

 

There's Lynne Sawyers, a dearly-loved second mum to over 200 youngsters, who is always ready to foster and to help any child who needs a helping hand. Her start came in 1992 when her husband reported he'd met a young girl standing by the side of the road in tears, who's just been kicked out of her foster home. Having had a happy childhood herself, the girl's plight touched Lynne deeply and she resolved to do whatever she could to help other kids in need. On Australia Day 2012, Lynne was presented with the Local Hero award by the Governor-General.  

 

There's Heather Jones who, when her husband left her alone with two young daughters to raise, realised she'd have to do something dramatic to earn enough money to keep them all. So she resigned from her job as a secretary with a WA mining company and went long-haul truck driving across some of the most remote stretches of Australia, with her daughters in the cab alongside her as their own mobile home, while she schooled them as they went. It began to provide such a good income, she mortgaged her house to set up her own multi-truck company and, within two years, had up to 20 trucks on the road and won business awards for her Success Transport. She had to overcome huge prejudice, however, from men who'd refuse to speak to her, sometimes to conduct business with her, or even pay after they'd done business. Then the GFC hit her hard, she lost many of her trucks and drivers, and faced ruin, going back out on the road again in her own trucks.

 

There's Jeanette Brown who lives at Cherbourg, 7 kilometres from Murgon. The town had a shocking start in the early 1900s when the Queensland State government herded Aboriginal people from all corners of the State into the one place – regardless of the fact that they were from up to 55 distinctive language groups. Many, as a result, couldn't even communicate with each other, often had conflicting matriarchal and patriarchal lineages and came from radically different cultural backgrounds. To confound the confusion and misery, State officials then took away their children and put them in dormitories behind barbed wire, forbidding mothers and fathers to see them without permission, and keeping everyone in barbaric prison camp-like conditions. Jeanette and her sister Sandra were both born there and had tough childhoods but, after seeking out an education and having full careers elsewhere, have returned to Cherbourg to help the place prosper. Jeanette now runs a newspaper and radio station in the settlement, and Sandra works at an award-winning museum she's helped set up there, to honour the past and rebuild the future.

 

There's Marie Muldoon, the daughter of outback legends Terry and John Underwood, who now both manages the family property Midway, a cattle station two hours south of Darwin, with husband Chris, and sells pearl jewellery to Paspaley clients around the world from her hi-tech 'virtual' showroom at her home. She grew up on the incredibly isolated Riveren, went to boarding school in Sydney, then worked in hospitality and events management in Darwin and Singapore before moving to sales management at Paspaley. It was a big decision for her to go back to the land but, after meeting and marrying a stock agent, she agreed to return to the world she'd grown up in to look after her parents' Midway. Now she manages to balance both the high pressure pearls sales work, and a life on the land.

 

There's Sister Theresa Morellini, who moved to the Kimberley in the early 1970s to work with Aboriginal youngsters at school. She then started a school in a remote Aboriginal community at Warmun which now has over 100 students from pre-primary to high school while, for 30 years, the Josephite nun, in the spirit of Mary MacKillop, has worked also as a pastoral caregiver, counsellor, and even went to Canada to train as a drug and alcohol worker with indigenous people, while in her spare time acting as an interpreter in court matters, legal dealings and family meetings. She's also been recognised with an OAM and has been tireless in her work trying to stop the sly grog runners from outside who bring alcohol into the dry community.

 

There's Lurlene Ebborn, just outside Gympie, Queensland, who's another woman with an amazing story to tell of hardship, heartbreak and resilience. As a kid, she worked with her granddad constructing the Coolullah boundary fence through the Argylla Ranges, near Mount Isa, camping along the way. When she grew up, she took on fencing jobs herself, having to camp and cook for all the workers over an open fire, and cart water from long distances away. Later she worked on railway construction working with dynamite to break down rocks. When she married and had kids, she bought a piece of land at Mt Isa for $20 and built a shed of pipe posts and tarp.

 

Because, quite apart from their fascinating stories, all these women feel they have learned so much from their experiences, and are eager to pass on their wisdom, their hopes and their dreams for the future of the Australian outback. And the reader longs to share them.