You can’t take the country out of the girl. 

My name is Anthea Brown, and I’m a farmer. I run a property in the Avon Valley in Western Australia. And we run sheep, cattle and goats. And we have a paddock-to-plate operation, where the food that we grow is sold directly by us to customers in the city. The farm that we now farm is not the farm that I grew up on. I grew up further out in The Wheatbelt of Western Australia. It was flat, dry, less trees than we have now. It was … I don’t know, but it was home. It was still, you know, it was it was a good lifestyle. My brother and I grew up, I guess, as typical farming children. We were able to run, play, be free and enjoy all the things that being out in the open offers you.  

As a child I just couldn’t fathom why. I didn’t understand why they’d want to sell your home and everything that had been your life. Everything basically that you knew and moving to the city, well the only times we’d ever come to the city were for holidays or to visit, you know, the relatives in the city and grandparents. Don’t know so much that it was about the house, as in the four walls. It’s more than that. It was more about we left sheepdogs. It was the right thing to do, they were never going to love coming to live in the city and be cooped up in a small block.  

So, we left our animals. That was harder. I mean, it sounds strange, but your routine changed, because you left the chooks, so you weren’t collecting the eggs, you know, you didn’t look lock them up at night. You left the sheep dogs with puppies. We’d grown up with them, they’d grown up with us, you left them behind. You know, had they gone to a good home, would they look after them as well as you did? So, it wasn’t so much about four walls, as it was about what the place meant to me. 

Well, I think I grew up quite quickly, you had to become independent. And you changed from one lifestyle to another. I got a job working in a law firm. And from then on, I enjoyed what it meant. You know I enjoyed doing background of the law. I had contemplated doing it studying law after I left school, but it was my gran who always said that she thought it was quite a harsh profession, not really a profession for a lady. As I grew older, it didn’t sit with me, you know, billing every six minute unit, but I thought that there was a fair price for the job that was done and often that didn’t relate in any way to the amount of time that had been spent on the preparing whatever it be, the advice or the work, and that didn’t sit particularly well with me.  

Jakarta was not as organised. Definitely not as organised as New York. I mean New York was the way the colour of the food so the cheese is very yellow, and the fat on the meat was very yellow. It was it was it resonated with me because this is not what it looks like at home. This is not what we grew up eating or producing.  

Jakarta, well Jakarta was, from a health perspective, you could see the lovely food, but it was, you know, what the fresh food that was coming in for the markets and they were, you know, it was on the back of a motorbike that was spewing out a whole lot of black smoke or the bus or you know, and they’d have chickens on the back. You know there’d be chickens hanging off the side of the motorbike and it was being smoked, not quite in the way that we like to see things smoked.  

Living in both cities, it gelled with me that we’re very lucky with what we had been producing, and we had the product that we had access to, a clean product that we had access to back in in Australia. I can’t bag the law because it actually afforded me the opportunity to be doing what I’m doing now.  

So, we purchased a farm, Dad had never really given up farming, notwithstanding that, you know, however many years before he’d left. We purchased a property which is an hour and a half from the city, and we had started off with the view that we would farm it on a more conventional basis. So, we would run livestock, it is a grazing property, and it had sheep running on it. So, we would run it in a more conventional way in that we would grow a small crop, we would deliver, we would keep for feed, we would deliver surplus to the bin. We would run the stock and sell them through the ordinary market system, whether that be direct processes or through the sale yards.  

We didn’t believe, as a family because, it was a family enterprise. We didn’t believe that that was sustainable for the farm. Nor in the best interest of the farm going forward, or our little operation. We’ve gone away from what I call a more conventional system. We are now using microbes and humates, so a more sustainable going back to more natural ways of farming. And then in relation to the stock we’re now taking them directly to the market. So, we produce the stock, we then take them to the abattoir. We can’t control that process. We are currently having the stock butchered, we engage your butcher to break them down for us and then we sell at a farmers market every week.  

I view farming as a profession. And I kind of stand on a bit of a soapbox and it frustrates me more that we put, not that they’re not fantastic at what they do, but we put celebrity chefs on pedestals. You know, restaurants, fantastic names and people will pay exorbitant amounts of money. But without the producer, they would not exist and the recognition is in fact not for the producer. The recognition is for what the chef or what the restaurant has done with the product. And that frustrates me more. We’re classified as parkland grazing so it means we’re in rocky, hilly country with lots of trees, and so it’s fairly inaccessible in places if a bushfire starts, it’s going to be hard to hard to stop. And around us in the last five or six years we’ve had some very nasty, nasty fires, and you know, with the loss of life and homes. The most recent one that could have affected us was probably a kilometre away before it would have hit our boundaries. So yeah, one of the things about country is the amazing community when it comes to, you know, pulling together for, particularly in natural disaster situations, and the community all pulls together in relation to bushfires. And, you know, you just can’t thank them enough.  

Home is more than material things. It’s driving up the driveway, and the goats see the car and come running. It’s the dogs – drives us up the wall – but the dogs run out to greet you and bark. Their tails are wagging, they’re happy to see you. You know there is acknowledgement from your animals. It’s the stars and in the night sky. It’s the, you know, the lovely red sunsets, stormy weather. It’s how it makes me feel when I get back to that place at that time.