Buy-bush campaign ‘changed fortunes’, says Grace Brennan

In September, Grace Brennan sat at her kitchen table feeling small, with her town and farmer husband Jack struggling under the weight of the drought.

Grace Brennan delivers the 2020 Australia Day Address at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music on Tuesday. Picture: Getty Images

In September, Grace Brennan sat at her kitchen table feeling small, with her town and farmer husband Jack struggling under the weight of the drought.

Resolving to do something to help, she created an Instagram account called @buyfromthebush to help promote regional businesses doing it tough.

Months later, she became the first woman from regional Australia to deliver the Australia Day Address.

Speaking at Sydney’s Conservatorium of Music on Tuesday, she told how a life dedicated to finding the “inspiring in the ordinary” created a homegrown movement with 207,000 followers that had changed the fortunes of regional Australians.

A Sydneysider by birth, Ms Brennan moved to the bush to be with her husband, soon learning that many things happen outside capital cities. “Country towns have been built on what I would call a foundation of ‘doers’,” she said. “On any day, an Australian farmer is an amateur scientist, vet, builder or mechanic … They might trade commodities before lunch and genetically test their sheep flock after lunch.”

She also found regional Australia was home to brilliant small-businesspeople selling world-quality products to a market reliant on “cashflow from farming communities that weren’t spending”. Ever practical, she said she knew cash had to be attracted to declining communities, and social media provided the solution. In the first six weeks of the #buyfromthebush campaign, $2.6m of revenue was generated for businesses featured on her Instagram account.

Ms Brennan said businesspeople had contacted her to say @buyfromthebush saved their small enterprises from collapse, but she’s not letting it get to her. “The very foundation of Australian identity, so present in the bush, is about doing,” she said.