The invisible farmer: the forgotten history of Australian country women

It is hard to fathom that up until 1994 Australian farming women were legally defined as 'silent partners’.

The ramifications of this were huge, especially when it came to insurance, or lack thereof, if a woman was involved in a farm accident.

Legal discrimination is only partly responsible for the perception that agriculture is a male-dominated industry, however. The roots go back to our earliest farming records.

In 1891, the national census deliberately excluded farming women. Farm inheritance has traditionally favoured men, and women were not allowed to enrol in agricultural courses until the early 1970s.

Liza Dale-Hallett is the co-curator of The Invisible Farmer Project at Museum Victoria.

The project aims to collect stories of farming women and include them in the national historical narrative.

'It’s the myth of the bloke on the land that we, unconsciously as a culture, as a community, keep replicating over and over again,' says Dale-Hallett. 'Ask a friend to describe a farmer and I bet you they’ll describe a bloke.'

According to Dale-Hallett, women have played a critical and innovative role in Australian agriculture. She points out that today women generate 48 per cent of real farm income.

'The economic contribution to the farm—the functioning, practical, daily reality of managing that enterprise over generations of farming families—is enormous.'

In the late 1980s, however, some rural women decided they were sick of taking a back seat and began attending Women on Farms gatherings, which were an important part of the Rural Women’s Movement.

Joy Brand, a retired beef and seed farmer from Victoria’s Gippsland region, attended many such meetings.

‘I’m certainly not what I’d call a feminist,' she says, 'but when I read magazines from the Rural Women’s Movement, they were stories about farming women. They were probably activists, yes, because they wanted something more.’

Brand says that while some things have changed, there’s still room for improvement.

‘Women are out there doing their own thing, providing leadership in the communities, providing leadership on boards, but not 48 per cent of them.’

Liza Dale-Hallett says the response to The Invisible Farmer Project has been overwhelming and she hopes it will lead to funding for a long overdue Australia-wide study of the Rural Women’s Movement.

Retire to the eclectic environs of The Drawing Room on RN Drive, for music, musings and unexpected conversations.