‘Starting from scratch’: Rugby union powerhouse Charlotte Caslick reveals surprising new role
She’s a superstar of the sport, but rugby union superstar Charlotte Caslick has revealed her surprising new choice of career.
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The globally renowned conductor of one of the world’s most celebrated musicals. The most decorated captain of one of the toughest games in town. The hammer-wielding boss of a boys’ zone building site. The chief winemaker with the degree in chemistry and a nose for perfection.
And while, on the surface, Laura Tiripa Rawinia Tipoki, Charlotte Caslick, Steffani Cooper, and Jessica Ferguson may come from very different worlds, these four remarkable women share some basic commonalities.
They all absolutely love what they do, and they all, at one stage or another, had to work that little bit harder to do it.
Today, as Qweekend celebrates the upcoming March 8 International Women’s Day, we speak to Tiripa Rawinia Tipoki, Caslick, Cooper and Ferguson, each at the top of what are traditionally male-dominated professions – and each determined to encourage other women to take the road less travelled.
As Tipoki, conductor of Hamilton, guiding the orchestra through all the intricacies of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s epic musical says, “the best path to here is to be the best you can be, no matter where your starting point is”.
For Tipoki, that starting point to the world’s stage was the somewhat sleepier Moffat Beach on Queensland’s Sunshine Coast; for Caslick, it was playing touch footy with her brothers in Brisbane’s western suburbs; for Cooper it was a roundabout journey from a Queensland university to a work site when she realised she’d rather be on the tools than behind a computer screen; and for Ferguson it was via the rich red soils of the Redlands and the vineyards of the Granite Belt. A quartet of trailblazing Queensland women to raise our glasses to.
CHARLOTTE CASLICK
27, CO-CAPTAIN, AUSTRALIAN RUGBY SEVENS TEAM/PART TIME CATTLE FARMER
‘Run like a girl’ used to be tossed about as an insult, but it’s increasingly lost its sting. In any case, if that girl happens to be Caslick bearing down on you, then you’d better run out of her way, as fast as you can.
Caslick is a superstar of her sport, a two- time World Women’s Sevens Player of the Year (2016, 2022), she is one of only two players in Sevens history (male or female) to have won (in a team) the Sevens World Cup, the World Series, and individual Commonwealth and Olympic Games Gold. Recently, she became the most-capped player in the Sevens, with 250 games under her belt. She is the literal poster girl for would-be players, with young women around the world hoping to emulate her style on and off the field.
With almost 140,000 followers on Instagram, Caslick says she is well aware of her place as a torchbearer for the sport.
“In women’s rugby when I first started, there were a lot of stereotypes about what players looked like, what their interests were, what their sexuality was, what their body type was, what they wore, how they wore their hair, but it has really shifted over the past 10 years, and nobody cares about any of that stuff. My teammates come from so many different backgrounds, we are such an assortment of women and if young girls ask me what you need to get into this sport, the only answer is ‘all you have to do is love rugby’.”
And Caslick loves rugby – one of the best things about watching her play is her absolute enjoyment of her game, and her absolute delight when one of her teammates does well.
“We are a sisterhood, and we talk a lot about that. I like to lead by example, so I talk with the girls about the importance of caring for each other. When we are playing we have to put our bodies on the line for each other, we have to protect each other, so together we are a pretty strong machine.”
Caslick’s love affair with rugby began in the backyard of her suburban Brisbane home, playing touch footy with her older brothers – “I never asked, neither did they, I just joined in”. She has also enjoyed national success in touch and rugby league – Caslick was reportedly the NRLW’s No.1 target for the 2022-23 season, before she focused on the Sevens.
Engaged to rugby Sevens player Lewis Holland, 30, the couple have a 142ha cattle property in Stanthorpe, southwest of Brisbane, running 120 cattle.
“We’ve learnt so much,” Caslick says, “we are first generation farmers starting from scratch, and we are learning from other people our age who are third or fourth generation, who have been really welcoming to us. We try to get there about twice a month, and it is just a different world. We’ve had some wild times since we bought it in 2016 – bushfires, drought, floods, and I think the drought brought me more pressure than rugby. Rugby is second nature to me, but the drought was a challenge – I don’t mind a challenge, though.”
Caslick says she would like other young women to know that “it’s a great time to be a female athlete, so don’t let anyone try to tell you what you can or can’t do”.
LAURA TIRIPA RAWINIA TIPOKI
40, MUSIC DIRECTOR/CONDUCTOR, HAMILTON, THE MUSICAL
Apart from the action on the main stage, there’s another mesmerising performance going on during Hamilton, the record-breaking musical currently playing at Brisbane’s QPAC Lyric Theatre.
Cast your eyes to the orchestra pit, and there is Tipoki, deftly and joyously conducting the strings, woodwinds, the percussion and brass sections – all the while playing the keyboards herself. Her hands never stop moving as she nods her head to the cellos or briefly lifts a finger to point to the horns.
Tipoki is telling the musical story of Hamilton with her hands, a story that, for her, began as a little girl based on the Sunshine Coast, travelling with her parents David and Vickie, her little sisters Patrice and Cookie, in a blue Volvo station wagon as they performed their show Journey to Paradise.
“My parents taught all forms of Polynesian song and dance all over the coast, and that’s where my love of music was built.” Leaving high school, Tipoki studied a classical piano performance degree at the Queensland Conservatorium of Music before, she laughs, “quickly realising I was not cut out to be a classical concert pianist”.
Instead, she was more attuned to playing with others – gigging all over Melbourne with singers and bands before getting her first big break with an audition in 2005 to play keyboards for the Australian season of Wicked.
Since then, Tipoki has built an impressive body of work, and has been at the keyboards, or the helm, and sometimes both, for some of the world’s biggest musicals, including Chicago, Mary Poppins, The Wizard of Oz, My Fair Lady, Les Miserables and most recently she was musical director for Andrew Lloyd Webber’s School of Rock. One of her favourite memories is spending International Women’s Day in 2017 side-by-side with Julie Andrews, while Andrews directed in the rehearsal room.
“I remember thinking ‘What is my life?’ It was so wonderful and so surreal.”
It was also hard earnt, with Tipoki handed the baton to conduct her first major show in 2009. Then, and to a large extent now, conducting was considered largely a male domain, and Tipoki knew it.
“My first conducting job was with Wicked again. By that stage I had played many shows, and the assistant musical director (MD) was leaving to work on a show in London. They asked me if I would be interested in stepping up and learning to conduct. The MD was a woman too and I remember she said to me ‘Just so you know, you will be the first woman to do this on this show and the creatives are already asking ‘are you sure she is going to be up for it?’ She was giving me the heads up that I needed to be the best, and together we proved we could do it.”
Tipoki says that while the number of female musical directors and conductors may be small, they are mighty. “We have a network of female artists and performers called Maestra (a play on the term Maestro) and we are highly supportive of each other.”
Supportive too, is Lin-Manuel Miranda, who is coming to Brisbane to watch the antipodean version of his show, and while it would be understandable if Tipoki felt nervous, she does not. Because she knows her stuff, this proud Maori woman, and she knows where she leads, the orchestra will follow, watching her ever moving, sure and steady hands. Tipoki, who is married to actor Mark Doggett (currently appearing in Harry Potter and the Cursed Child) and mother to three-year-old Lola, is keen to encourage other young women to tell their own musical stories from the orchestra pit.
“Know that there are others ready to support you, we do exist, and we are making our voices heard,” she smiles, ”come join us.”
STEFFANI COOPER
26, CARPENTER, LEADING HAND
Right now, Cooper is on a building site somewhere in northern NSW, alongside a 14-member, all-male crew of chippies, bricklayers, sparkies and labourers. She’s the only female onsite, she’s the leading hand, and she’s there for two reasons.
One, she never could sit still, and two, she never could take no for an answer.
“When I left school in Brisbane, I started studying communication at uni, but then left and did a ski season, went back to uni, then left again, did another ski season, went back to uni and started doing business instead, and that was more interesting but I still really hated sitting still behind a computer,” Cooper says.
“I remember being so stressed out because I knew I was on the wrong path.” A cut hand in a burger cafe, however, would set her on the right one. “My partner, Cass, was doing a reno on her burger shop and she was helping the tradies, but when she cut her hand, I stepped and I just loved it straight away. It felt exactly right. One of the chippies said to me ‘you’re really good at this, you should do an apprenticeship’.”
It was 2018, and so began Cooper’s quest to get on the tools. “It was so frustrating,” she says. “It took me about a year to find an apprenticeship. I sent out so many resumes, and I do think a lot of it was about me being a girl. I got a lot of knockbacks. It was ‘we’re not sure if you’re strong enough, not sure if you can handle this’. It was so disheartening not to even be given a shot.”
When Cooper saw a building company call out for volunteers to help build a laundromat for at-risk women, she was the first to sign up. Then she was the first person to turn up every day, and the last to leave. “I was determined to show them what I could do, and when that job finished, they took me on as a labourer.”
Six months later, they offered her an apprenticeship. Now a fully fledged chippie, her next step is to get her builder’s ticket, and complete her online drafting course. She also wants to encourage other women to join her on the tools.
“When I started out, I had to work so much harder than the other labourers, you know, to prove my worth. But once you have proven you can do the job, I’ve actually found the sites really friendly and a lot of fun. There’s a lot of banter, and I can give as good as I get. I haven’t met another female builder yet, but I’m hoping I will soon.
“Just give it a crack. If you are like me, and can’t sit still, then this is a great alternative. Female apprenticeships in the industry are becoming more normal, and even if you don’t go the whole way, it’s a great way to learn life skills. How to hang a shelf, or fix a door, or build a house, and not needing a man to rely on is a pretty good feeling.”
Some of the old-school tradies – the ones with a Coke in hand, a ciggie in their mouth, and the great Australian builder’s crack – have become Cooper’s biggest cheerleaders. “If someone new comes on site, they’ll say ‘she’s all right’, which is, you know, the ultimate compliment.”
Steff Cooper is all right, she’s better than all right, she’s up a ladder somewhere, hammer swinging, exactly where she should be.
JESSICA FERGUSON
49, CHIEF WINEMAKER, SIRROMET WINERY
Sometimes, when people drop in to the sublime Sirromet Winery, nestled between Brisbane and the Gold Coast at Mount Cotton, they like to have a chat with the chief winemaker. Sometimes, Ferguson chuckles, they’re surprised it’s her.
“It happens,” she says, “but I’m happy to say it happens less and less. I’ll be there with my assistant winemaker, Glen (Eaton), and they’ll start to talk to him, and he’ll say ‘talk to her, she’s the boss’ and we’ll all have a laugh.”
How Ferguson came to be the boss of Sirromet’s two vineyards at Ballandean near Stanthorpe, its 12 varieties of grapes producing between 250,000 and 300,000 litres of wine a year, the smaller vineyard at Sirromet itself, and all the grape crushing, pressing, fermenting, tasting, maturing, blending and bottling, is by way of a chemistry degree, hard yakka (Ferguson rolls her sleeves up come crushing time) and a little bit of serendipity.
“In 2004, I was working in Cleveland as a chemist for a vitamin company when I drove past this winery and I thought “Gosh, that’s so pretty, wouldn’t it be nice to work there?”
A couple of weeks later, she saw a job for someone to run Sirromet’s laboratory, and like a cab sav, and an aged cheddar, a match made in heaven was born.
A good deal of the winemaking process in steeped in chemistry – wastewater testing, acidity, and nutrient levels, making and adding yeast cultures to the crushed grapes, getting the temperature and sugar levels just right – and Ferguson had years of experience under her (very good wine sniffing) nose working in laboratories all over the world.
“After getting my chemistry degree in Tasmania, I had worked in Australia, Canada and the United Kingdom in labs in different industries – agriculture, environmental remediation and pharmaceuticals.”
Promoted to chief winemaker in 2021, Ferguson says she goes to work seven days a week during vintage (when the grapes arrive for crushing) to oversee the whole process.
“You have to make sure that everything is coming along as it should. So I take a glass, I’m testing the sugar levels, making sure the ferment is coming along nicely, that the sugar level is dropping, that the temperature is just right, and that you are making something that has that wow factor.”
Ferguson says her palate has really developed over the years – “I can now go ‘wow’ at juice level (before it becomes alcoholic) and I’m so proud of some of the wine we have produced. We introduced a premium chardonnay in 2013, called Le Sauvage which is just divine. We didn’t use any cultured yeast, it’s just delicious and people love it, and they also love the soft shiraz we do, it’s lighter, prettier and not as alcoholic as some others. It’s a great feeling when you see someone drinking and really enjoying a glass of wine that you have helped create from the very beginning.”
Ferguson has a young daughter and says Sirromet is very supportive of her working around her parenting duties.
“I think becoming a mother used to really stop a lot of female winemakers, they’d leave when they had children, because some wineries want you there 24/7 around vintage especially, but Sirromet has been great to me, and I believe other wineries are also recognising the need to support their female winemakers.”
They’re still few and far between though – Ferguson only knows of a handful of other female chief winemakers in the Australian industry.
“I’d love to encourage other women to do it, either through a chemistry degree or there are professional courses now. It’s such a wonderful job. It’s hard work, but it’s also a lot of fun and very rewarding. As a woman, you will have to prove yourself, because it is still a male dominated field, but what I’ve noticed is that female makers are very good at just getting on with it. They don’t have an ego – they just let the wine do the talking.”
Here’s cheers to that.
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