Motherland Australia

For the final episode of 2021, I catch up with new rural mum Claire Dunne, founder of Graziher. Claire lives on a farm in New Zealand, a long way from her family and home town in Queensland. We've heard a lot about her business baby, but this chat was a chance for me to get to know her a little more personally. You'll hear about her long distance relationship with the farmer she met on a...

This week, I catch up with rural mum Hayley Backhouse. Hayley is a horse trainer and competitor who recently won her first open futurity event. Hayley has two children from her first marriage, which heartbreakingly, ended in divorce. Today she shares her story on how she navigated her relationship breakdown, the shock of becoming a single mum with just $2,000 to her name, and how she found love ag...

This week, I catch up with rural mum Cindy Walsh. Just weeks before her son Thomas was born, she was told he had just a 2% chance of survival. After countless tests and thousands of kilometres of travel from their farm, at four months of age, he was finally diagnosed with an extremely rare disease called Hypophosphatasia (HPP), otherwise known as 'soft bones'. But thanks to a miracle tre...

This week, I catch up with rural mum Bess O’Connor. Within weeks of meeting a handsome farmer, she’d moved in with him and they began talking babies! But their ideal life on the land didn’t quite go as planned. After numerous miscarriages Bess was finally pregnant with their son. But at 26 weeks, she went into labor in a small country town, unable to deal with a baby born so prematurely. Bess and...

This week, I catch up with rural mum of four and dairy farmer, Natasha Yarrington. From homebirths to homeschooling, Natasha has taken many matters into her own hands when it comes to motherhood! Her commitment to her local community recently won her the NSW Women in Dairy 'Moover and Shaker' Award. Natasha spent countless hours helping neighbours during devastating bushfires that destro...

This week, I catch up with rural mum Annabelle Cleeland. Annabelle has been an agricultural journalist for over a decade. She's used to telling stories, but not her own, and not like this. In this powerful episode, Annabelle shares her deeply personal experience with birth trauma at a regional hospital. She says she was examined without consent and had an unnecessary c-section due to a lack o...

This week, I catch up with rural mum Pip Bryant-Hill. Pip has three children and lives on a Cherry orchard on her family's property in New South Wales. Pip was born deaf due to a genetic condition that runs in her family. And being in a rural community has had its challenges, particularly when it comes to motherhood. Pip's daughter Matilda was also born deaf, and although that didn'...

This week, I catch up with rural mum and author of @cowboyroyadventures Anna Nunn who's returned to share part two of her story. When we met way back on Episode 22, life was very different. Since then, Anna has been in the fight of her life. She was diagnosed with cancer at 34 weeks pregnant with her second child, and had major surgery just 10 days after giving birth to her baby girl. And it...

This week, I catch up with rural mum Karen O'Brien who spent 15 years on stations in the Kimberley. From one million acres to just five, Karen, her husband and their four kids eventually packed it all up for life in a quaint rural town on the other side of the country. Somewhere they'd never lived before, with no family ties. Why? Due to one big and very personal decision regarding how t...

THE 100TH EPISODE: An interview every rural mum needs to hear. In 2018 Kate Everett's beautiful daughter Amy, affectionately known as Dolly, made headlines for all the wrong reasons. After being relentlessly bullied at boarding school and online, Dolly took her own life. She was just 14 years old. There aren't many people in Australia who didn't hear or read about Dolly's death...

This week, I catch up with rural mum Kate Boshammer. Kate's story is utterly heartbreaking, but our interview and the awareness she's trying raise is incredibly important. Kate's baby girl Zara passed away last year at just seven months old. She'd been fighting numerous medical complications since birth, and was eventually diagnosed with an extremely rare and severe chromosomal...

This week, I catch up with rural mum and first generation farmer Jacynta Coffey. Jacynta is originally from Tassie and not from an ag background, but has since worked on big stations all over the country. Her motherhood journey, much like her professional life, has been full of twists and turns. She suffered two miscarriages in a row, one of which was a twin. If that wasn't hard enough, one o...

This week, I catch up with rural mum of four and children's clothing designer Annabelle Kennedy from Kennedy the Label. From the coast to the country, Annabelle's life on the land is a long way from her home town where she grew up! Her passion for performing arts also saw her travel to LA and New York before she came home to be with her high school sweetheart. Annabelle opens up about he...

This week, I catch up with rural mum, regenerative farmer, and bestselling author, Rachael Treasure. Her first book, Jillaroo, became an iconic novel which changed the face of Australian publishing and kick-started a boom of rural women’s fiction. Rachael children are teenagers now, but her early motherhood journey is one hell of a story of resilience. Rachael's first marriage broke down, and...

This week, I catch up with rural mum Sabrina Davis who lives on Kangaroo Island. Sabrina's motherhood journey has been full of ups and downs, but by far her family's biggest challenge came last year during the devastating Black Summer fires. Overnight, Sabrina, her husband and their children became homeless. They lost everything. Fire ripped through their property, destroying their home,...

This week, I catch up with rural mum Kerrie Scott who lives on a remote cattle and buffalo station in the Northern Territory. Kerrie is the Katherine branch President of the Isolated Children's Parents' Association (ICPA) who advocate for equity of access to education for all children who live in rural and remote Australia. Kerrie's three kids have all studied through School of the...

This week, I catch up with rural mum Leanne Dillon. This is a bit of a different episode. Leanne has three children, but we didn't focus on her journey with them. Instead, you'll hear how Leanne has selflessly given two other families the greatest gift of all. Leanne is a passionate egg donor, and she's travelled many hours and spent many nights away from the farm for medical appoin...

This week, I catch up with rural mum and grandma Prue Campbell. Prue is 76 years old and is a fourth generation farmer with an incredible motherhood journey. At five months pregnant with her fourth baby, Prue lost her husband to cancer, and was left to raise their children alone. At the same time, she suddenly had to step up and learn how to run the farm herself. This year, Prue was awarded a Meda...

This week, I catch up with rural mum Mandy Heffernan. Mandy and her husband Toad were crowned the winners of the hit show House Rules in 2018, walking away with a newly renovated farmhouse! Mandy is a mum to almost five year old twins, and had to leave them for more than eight months while they were filming. Find out how it all worked! But behind her bubbly TV personality, Mandy has struggled with...

This week, I catch up with rural mum and Texan born Tori Kopke. When the GFC hit and she couldn't get a job, Tori packed up her life in the US and went backpacking across Australia. How she met her husband and ended up living on a farm in WA is something straight out of a Hollywood movie. She's now a rural business coach cheering other women on, and a mum of two little boys. But behind h...

This week, I catch up with rural mum Clare Warby. With all the talk about the latest season of Farmer Wants a Wife, I thought, who better to chat to than a woman who's been there, done that! Clare found love in Season 4 of the show when she fell for farmer Scott. Over a decade later, they're still together, raising their two kids on his family's farm in NSW. Clare shares why she app...

This week, I catch up with rural mum Georgina Simson. Georgina is originally from the UK, but moved out here permanently after falling in love with an Aussie farmer. Last year, she gave birth to her first child in the middle of a global pandemic, and was isolated from her family during her darkest times. Georgina fought crippling postnatal anxiety that was so severe, she couldn't even bring h...

This week, I catch up with Jennie McClelland. Jennie is a farmer and an army wife who has lived in military housing for more than 20 years. In that time, she's raised four children, and for many of those years, she raised them alone. Her husband was deployed oversees to places like Iraq and Afghanistan, and at one point, went to war and didn't come home for nine months. Jennie and her fa...

This week, I catch up with Mea Campbell, mum, and founder of ConnectedAU, an organisation that's combating loneliness one letter at a time. Mea opens up about life on the land, motherhood, and how a crippling drought forced her family to pack up their lives, and move to town. You might have already heard of her business, but now it's also time to hear about Mea, the mother. And she knows...

This week, I catch up with rural mum Shelley Piper. Shelley opens up about life as a mum of twins, and the dramatic early months of motherhood she faced with her family. When raging bushfires tore through their region, Shelley had to grab her 10 week old twins, and evacuate their property. Her husband stayed behind to fight, and she spent several hours not knowing if he was okay. While their home...