Motherland Australia

Gemma Sisia grew up on a sheep and cattle property in northern New South Wales, as one of eight children. After finishing school, she went to Africa to teach... that was 22 years ago and she's never looked back! Gemma met her husband on safari (that's a cracking story) and had four children. You'll hear about the incredible cultural differences and how she was treated after having h...

Alice Greenup grew up in Melbourne, and when she finished school, she went travelling on a gap year, got a job as a governess on a cattle station, where she fell in love with a jackaroo. At the time, she couldn't tell tell a cow from a bull, and how things have changed! Today Alice and her husband, Rick who have three teenage children, run one of Australia’s largest seedstock businesses, supp...

Sue Barclay lives 500 kilometres west of Sydney and over the past 12 months she's visited the big smoke far more than she'd like. Sue got out of the shower one night with a frightening symptom that changed her life. She was diagnosed with untreatable ovarian cancer, but refused to give up and sought a second opinion at Sydney's Royal Hospital for Women. Since then, she's made t...

In the 1980's, Sally Warriner returned to Australia after backpacking overseas, and she hitchhiked to the far north. It's there, she fell in love and married a cowboy, and spent the next 25 years managing pastoral properties in the top end while raising seven children, including three of her own. Sally wore so many hats. As a trained nurse, she was at the scene of many emergencies and ac...

Cassie Norris lives on her family cattle station in the far south west corner of Queensland. Right now, life looks picture perfect with her and her husband raising their two beautiful little girls. But there is an extraordinary and heartbreaking story behind the happy smiles you see today. Cassie was 15 years old when she discovered she born without ovaries- and her condition meant she'd have...

In 2010, when Dr Alison Jones applied to be a contestant on Farmer Wants a Wife, she did it for a bit of a laugh, and had no idea just how seriously the show would impact her life. Fast forward to today and her and Charlie are busy raising three young boys from their property in Walcha, New South Wales. Alison is a long way from inner-west Sydney where she grew up, and admits it took her two years...

Keiley Noble met her future husband when she was 20, and initially thought it was just a summer fling. But before they knew it, life was moving very, very quickly when Keiley unexpectedly fell pregnant. Incredibly, Keiley didn't know she was having a baby until she was 22 and a half weeks along, and what followed was a whirlwind journey. She faced judgement and doubts as she tried to face her...

Anna Toland is a survivor. She was born with a facial hemangioma the size of her head and as a newborn was given just a 10% chance of living. When she was in her 20s, it felt like her life was finally falling into place. She met her first husband, fell head over heels, and then fell pregnant with their little boy Charlie. But when Anna was just 26 years old, her husband Dan died unexpectedly after...

Joss West was born in the Northern Territory and grew up on cattle stations. She's always been an animal lover and brought all kinds of creatures home when she was a little girl, from dingo pups, to injured brumby foals. It wasn't a surprise to her family then when she went on to become a vet, and she now manages a pre-export quarantine property in Victoria. Joss met her husband in a ver...

Julia Spicer is so many things. She's a business owner, a step mum, and she's a big part of Motherland and sits on our charity's board. She's also Queensland's Chief Entrepreneur, a prestigious position she's been in since late last year.  From the outside, Jules has got a lot going on. From the inside, boy, where to start! Today's interview is the first time Jul...

Angelica Arnott had never stepped foot on a farm until she started dating her now husband Charlie. The pair met in an extraordinarily vulnerable way and in an instant, Angelica's life changed forever. She already had two children from a previous relationship which ended when her partner left her when she was pregnant with their second child while they were living in New York. Angelica was a T...

Kristy McGregor grew up on a small block on the outskirts of Sydney, before falling in love with the outback. She once lived on a remote cattle station in western Queensland and co-founded the Channel Country Ladies Day, an incredible annual event in the bush. Life is very different now though after Kristy fell in love with a Kiwi and moved to a sixth generation family farm in New Zealand. It was...

Frauke Bolten-Boshammer is from Germany and arrived in Australia in 1981 with her husband Friedrich and their children. They called Kununurra in the Kimberley home, and while Frauke felt the pang of isolation, she had no idea of the heartache that lay ahead. Three years later, she lost her husband to suicide and found herself living on 1000 hectares of remote farmland with four children to raise....

Mei Li was born in China but moved to the US when was 11. She married young, and had two children with her first husband, but when that relationship ended, she found herself torn between two worlds, co-parenting from the other side of the world. Mei was working for a law firm when she met her second husband Hugh, an Aussie bloke who was a long way from home. After having a daughter together, it wa...

Beth McRae has been a midwife for most of her life and she's delivered babies all over Australia. Ironically, she grew up on on a farm, in a very conservative household where the topic of cattle giving birth, let alone humans, was never spoken about. But years later, birth became became Beth's life. After more than 30 years working in hospitals, while in her 50s, she set out on an outbac...

Jenna Mouritz lives on a property in the wheatbelt of Western Australia. She's the local physio in a town of just 150 people and has dedicated so much of her time to improving access to services across her region. Jenna's journey especially when it comes to motherhood has been heartbreaking at times to say the least. From an injury, a miscarriage, and overcoming stage 2 melanoma, it hasn...

Toni Tapp Coutts grew up on a cattle station in the Northern Territory as the eldest of 10 children. She's an author who wrote a bestselling memoir about her childhood on the legendary Killarney cattle station. Her stepfather was cattle king Bill Tapp, and for the first few years of family life on the property there was no electricity and Toni and her siblings slept under the stars in swags....

Edwina Bartholemew has been a journalist for more than 20 years and I'm sure you're all familiar with her from Sunrise. What you might not know though is Edwina's growing connection to the country.  Her and her husband Neil bought a small farm in the Capertee valley of NSW which they set up as a boutique accommodation business. Neil, who has a background in tech, became an accidenta...

Bridget Johns once vowed she would never kiss a farmer, let alone fall in love with one and move to the land. But 18 years ago, a night at a country pub changed all that. She's now based on a property in the York Peninsula of South Australia and she wouldn't change a thing. Bridget has had her fair share of ups and downs. She suffered a miscarriage at someone else's house while she...

Amanda King is an Aussie who fell in love with a kiwi while on a sailing trip around Croatia. She now lives on a sheep and beef farm on the south island of New Zealand. The transition to life on the land was a rollercoaster for the former city girl. But it was the next chapter in her life that proved the hardest. Amanda and her husband tried to have a baby for three years, before turning to IVF. T...

When WA mum Heather Jones finished school, she wanted to be a motorcycle stunt woman, but a bike accident put the brakes on that dream.  She got married at 21, had two children and a step child, before a difficult divorce in the 90's left her to raise her daughters alone.  But for the self-professed tomboy- trucks saved her. An offer to drive big rigs for a transport company changed everythin...

Christine Elliot has been married for 32 years, and she has three adult children, one of them is Jackie- founder of Rural Women's Day, and my friend. She nominated her mum Christine for the podcast, and two minutes into recording, I knew exactly why. Christine's story is pretty incredible. She's one of eight children and grew up in a strict catholic family. Her childhood wasn't...

This is the chat that got Olympia Yarger all fired up! Olympia is the CEO of Goterra, a waste management company that manages food waste with robotic maggot farms. She's a farmer who calls herself the 'maggot lady', and boy is she kicking goals after being named the ACT's Australian of the Year 2023. Olympia's backstory is fascinating. After losing her first child in a tra...

Emma Hawkins is a mum of three, a business owner, and a digital influencer who lives on a farm just outside of Geelong. As a born and bred country girl, the land has become her quiet sanctuary away from the thundering roar of footy crowds and the prying eyes of the media. She had to get used to all that quickly after marrying her high school sweetheart, AFL star Tom Hawkins. I felt like Emma and I...

This week, we're throwing back to one of our most downloaded episodes, episode 100.  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 re...