In last week's episode, we heard about Maddie's incredible highs and lows before she became a mum, and in Part 2, you'll hear about the rollercoaster she went through after birthing her little boy. She suffered a traumatic 24 hours after having her son, even passing out on the table in theatre. Her journey into motherhood wasn't what she imagined, and while things eventually go better, they, unbelievably, got a whole lot worse again. Last year, Maddie snapped her leg in two places and ended up i...
Aug 06, 2023•46 min
Maddie Staff lives on a station on the NT/WA border, and in this first part of her story, she opens up about losing her mother from breast cancer when she was just 18 months old, then years later finding out she was adopted. You'll hear what happened when she met her birth mother, plus how she found her birth father and slid into his DMs on Facebook. Maddie has also navigated two very toxic relationships, one that involved a miscarriage, and she also shares how she turned to alcohol to cope when...
Jul 30, 2023•43 min
Georgie Somerset is a rural industry leader and a trailblazer. While a lot of us know her as the president of AgForce, and her many board roles including the ABC, and the National Farmers Federation, it's what she did decades ago that I've loved digging up. Georgie is one of the pioneers of agri-tourism. Growing up the land, she was just 17 when she set up a farm stay business on her family farm, later establishing national farm tourism body. After working in the city for a while, she eventually...
Jul 23, 2023•40 min
Bronnie Taylor has been in the public life 10 years, four as a cabinet minister, and two as the most senior female in the NSW Government. Until her party lost the election in March, she was the Minister for Women, the Minister for Regional Health and the Minister for Mental Health. She's now the Deputy Leader of The NSW Nationals and the shadow Minister for Regional Health. But that's just a taste of her political CV. What I had the privilege of discovering is the real Bronnie Taylor, the Bronni...
Jul 16, 2023•55 min
At just 19, Georgie had finished school, bought a house, and met James... the man she wanted to spend her life with. Fast forward a few years, and her and James had gotten married, and were busy raising two beautiful boys on his family's farm. Life was pretty picture perfect, until it wasn't. In 2017, James was diagnosed with terminal cancer and was given just 6 to 12 months to live. In our chat, Georgia bravely shares her story including what it was like losing her husband, what she told her ki...
Jul 09, 2023•41 min
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 her babies over there. Amongst it all, Gemma had a dream to build a school that would support some of Africa's poore...
Jul 02, 2023•50 min
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, supplying bulls and cattle to the Australian beef industry. 10 years ago, Alice wrote a memoir detailing the ...
Jun 25, 2023•46 min
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 the trip back and forth to the hospital 17 times, in the fight of her life. At one stage, when her station succumbed to f...
Jun 18, 2023•45 min
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 accidents over the years. She was the station cook, her husband's business partner, and even a social secretary-...
Jun 11, 2023•55 min
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 to seek egg donors if she ever wanted to fall pregnant and start a family. Cassie went through IVF hell....
Jun 04, 2023•58 min
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 to adjust to life on the land after a 7 year long distance relationship with Charlie. After her thi...
May 28, 2023•48 min
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 new life as a young mum, while trying to finish uni, grow a career and do all the things people said she...
May 21, 2023•41 min
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 battling pneumonia- it was a complete shock to everyone. All of a sudden, Anna was a widow, with a ...
May 14, 2023•45 min
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 very romantic way....while preg testing cattle! When they decided to try for a family of their own though, they f...
May 07, 2023•43 min
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 Julia has opened up so publicly about some of the more personal parts of her live as a rural woman, and a proud stepmum...she doesn't have ...
Apr 30, 2023•57 min
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 TV actress and a model, turned popstar whose band The Chantoozies dominated the 80s and 90s with their par...
Apr 23, 2023•53 min
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 a tough transition and she felt more isolated there than she did living eight hours from the nearest...
Apr 16, 2023•42 min
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. She suffered another cruel blow years later, when her son Peter also took his own life. Frauke's sto...
Apr 09, 2023•47 min
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 was Mei's idea to uproot and move to Australia to Hugh's family farm in rural NSW. For Mei, the past f...
Apr 02, 2023•39 min
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 outback midwifery mission. She packed up and moved to a remote Aboriginal community and embarked on a whole new adve...
Mar 26, 2023•51 min
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't been an easy few years. But Jenna's toughest time came when at 20 weeks pregnant with one of her children, ...
Mar 19, 2023•44 min
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. She was just five. Toni went on to raise her own kids in the gulf country, 600km from town. She's had a v...
Mar 12, 2023•40 min
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 accidental farming after moving there for a whole year to set it all up. When covid hit, Edwina, Neil, and their little girl ...
Mar 05, 2023•46 min
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 was on holidays which was incredibly difficult. And like so many mums, she knows what it's like to feel overwhelmed...
Feb 26, 2023•41 min
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. Their first round was a success and Amanda discovered she was pregnant with twins. But at 17 weeks, s...
Feb 19, 2023•55 min
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 everything. For 7 years, Heather raised her two young girls in a truck on the road, travelling around the country. H...
Feb 12, 2023•43 min
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 always easy, in fact it was very toxic at times. Christine has loved and lost so much. Heartbreakingly, she lost twins ...
Feb 05, 2023•50 min
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 tragic accident on her farm, she moved to the US to escape, but ended up staying there for 14 years after she married a marine. ...
Jan 29, 2023•52 min
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 could have talked forever, so strap yourselves in because we cover a lot and we laugh a lot too! Yo...
Jan 22, 2023•57 min
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 read about Dolly's death. But what about her mum? What about the woman who loved her, raised her and mourned her? In this 1...
Jan 15, 2023•1 hr 1 min
