These farming women are bursting with creative pursuits. Just don’t call them ‘trad wives’

It was only 30 years ago that female farmers became professionally recognised in Australia – at least by official measures. Before 1994, according to earlier census questionnaires, they were deemed “domestics”, “farmer’s wives” or “sleeping partner, non-productive”.

Despite being statistically invisible, Australian women have been making invaluable contributions to the country’s agriculture sector for centuries, both on and off the farm.

And the wider community is now noticing. Not only is consumer interest in all things “slow and local” paying more attention to farm-based businesses, pop culture’s fixation with the “trad wife” movement – both the positive and negative aspects – has also put more focus on the demands of regional and rural life.

Whitney Spicer’s art has parlayed into a clothing and homewares line that taps into her life on the farm.

The last census count showed 88,000 women were involved in Australia’s agricultural industry. For many of these women, life on the land is about more than the physical demands of agriculture or the logistical juggle of running a farming household; many have tapped into a growing artistic movement inspired by their rural experience. Here, three women share how farming helps fuel their creativity, and vice-versa.

“We’re just rolling with it”: Whitney Spicer, 35

A bookkeeper by trade, Whitney Spicer moved to Orange, NSW, 14 years ago, where her husband, Tim, and his family have lived for generations. The Gold Coast native had long loved painting, but it wasn’t until maternity leave following the birth of her eldest son, now 11, that she picked up her brushes with gusto, dipping them into leftover Bunnings sample pots to capture life around her 600-acre Manildra property.

Her sister encouraged her to put her art online and a direct message led to her selling her first piece. Spicer now has more than 30,000 Instagram followers and a global audience watching her capture the rural experience, on canvas and beyond.

“I was painting a lot of landscapes back then, cattle and livestock, things like that. It was well received, which was nice, so I kept doing it,” she says. “It was very much correlated to the way we live.”

Surrounded by 350 sheep, three young sons and golden paddocks, Spicer doesn’t lack inspiration; the floor-to-ceiling windows of her purpose-built studio overlook the plains. While her sons are at school, she comes here to paint, pack orders and plan her art exhibitions.

In 2022, she expanded into homewares, a “bit of a gamble” to make her art more accessible, and last year launched a separate clothing business called Far Mer., which features her Wild West-centric art and its rodeo motifs, sepia colours and the occasional Stetson.

In the middle of it all, she uploads snippets to Instagram: a short natter about pop culture while she’s reversing the ute for Tim, footage of their three sons chasing each other around the yard in gumboots as the peachy sun blooms, her unedited thoughts on Married at First Sight (which screens on Nine, owner of this masthead) or the “trad wife” movement, which Spicer finds thoroughly entertaining.

The growing cultural awareness of country life, spurred in part by those earnest homemaking women, Yellowstone’s success and Beyonce’s timely switch to Nashville-happy beats, is a source of inspiration for Spicer, whose edgy cotton tees, vibrant bandanas and pastel sarongs sit on shelves in rural boutiques and inner-city stores.

“I really don’t know what the future holds, but we’re just rolling with it,” she says. “I definitely feel a huge support from women in rural communities. [My business] started with a rural base, and they’re still there. Living in a rural town has not been a hindrance to my business at all; it’s because of it that I’ve been so successful. Rural women just get behind other rural women.”

“I’m happier in the country”: Meg Bignell, 50

Before marrying into a big farming family in Tasmania’s Bream Creek, 45 minutes from Hobart, author Meg Bignell, whose own father is a hops farmer, worked as a nurse, TV producer and medical adviser for Australian hospital dramas. Dairy cows were not necessarily on her radar.

Author Meg Bignell writes her books on her family’s Tasmanian dairy farm.

These days, when she’s not busy with farm life and raising her three children, Bignell writes novels inspired by the Tasmanian experience. Her latest, The Good Losers, out in July, is loosely inspired by Bignell’s weekly journey to Hobart to support her daughter’s rowing and schooling. Her previous book, The Angry Women’s Choir, captured the power, fury and wonder of the Tasmanian spirit through the voices of 10 passionate women.

Writing for both took place on the family’s dairy farm, at a small desk in her bedroom overlooking Marion Bay and the milking sheds. While her books don’t directly cover agricultural experiences, Bignell says the peace of this landscape, the rhythm of farming operations, and the time she has to herself when the dairy churns to life before the sun rises, enables ideas to flow more freely.

“You can’t get much more of a set routine than a dairy farm. You milk twice a day, calving happens twice a year, harvest in the summer, harvest in the autumn; it’s just so set,” she says. “[But] no two days are the same … the busier you are, the more you get done. I do tend to go around in circles if I’ve got too much time, and also I just would never have had any inspiration [for the books] if I didn’t have my domestic side.”

When it comes to her role on the 2000-acre property, which includes running the family’s consumer dairy business, market stall and occasionally moving cattle, Bignell admits to still feeling some imposter syndrome.

“I don’t put the cups on the cows to milk them, but in later years it’s become clear to me that a farm has to operate with both the farmers as well as the support network that allows the farmers to do what they do,” she says. “Being the mother and the person who picks up the [machinery] parts from Hobart, and the person who makes sure there’s food in the fridge – that is a part of the farm operation.

“When I’m working at the farmer’s market, I know that I’m going to see my community, and they’re doing the same things. That’s so comforting, and I think that’s part of the reason why I’m happier in the country. People are just doing their thing.”

“We are not invisible any more”: Lisa Addinsall, 64

Creativity and resourcefulness run in the veins of proud sixth-generation farmer Lisa Addinsall. Every morning, on her 2½-acre property in Tarrington, 300 kilometres west of Melbourne, she toils over swelling gardens of dahlias, snapdragons and cosmos.

Flowers are one of the great loves of her life, alongside art, teaching and her family. Hours before she welcomes students, who will paint still-lifes of the blooms they pick in these paddocks, she’s preparing bouquets for the farmgate store, tending to vegetables, running her floristry business and meeting orders for weddings, events and locals. She documents moments on social media, educating followers about the rural experience (and gardening 101) with humour, grace and colour.

Lisa Addinsall has diversified her flower business to include art classes.Credit: Em Leonard Photo

“What I’m doing – and other people are doing this as well – is creating connections between the community and people, so they see farming in a different way,” she says.

“It was a bit of a closed gate [before]; you never got to get on a farm if you didn’t have farming friends. I think women have been the leaders of this changing – we have diversified what being in agriculture means.”

A lifelong teacher, Addinsall ran art retreats in a woolshed in the 1980s, a natural precursor to the classes she launched on her current farm in 2021. She hosts bouquet-crafting, wreath-making and painting classes alongside flower-growing lessons and farm tours, through which she demonstrates mulching, seed-saving, water preservation, slow and low-tillage farming practices – the same methods that keep her gardens bountiful and replenish the store that sits outside her front gate. A paintbrush and notebook are never far away.

“They’re traditional cultural things [in farming], and I’m still working in that way, but I’m using Instagram and Facebook and modern ways of bringing people in to see what I’m doing,” she says.

It’s a different agricultural industry than the one her mother experienced, and will be different again for her eight grandchildren. “Behind the scenes, women were always farmers, but it was always the male farmer who was the ‘seen’ person,” she says. “My mum had times when the bank manager would only talk to my dad. You can see women in agriculture now – they’re not invisible any more.”

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