Queen Mandy

Sometimes fate take you places you could never have imagined. We meet Mandy who ditched drizzly England on a whim, for the parched paddocks of Australia. 

Brought to you by The Queensland Writers Centre and supported by the Queensland Government through Arts Queensland.

Produced by F&K Media.

Transcript

Telling Our Stories to the World is a series from Queensland Writers Center. We acknowledge the traditional owners of the land on which this podcast was made. Heads up. There's a bit of language in this episode, so if you have little big ears listening in, pop on your headphones.  Welcome to Queens of the Land, a series about women carving out their best life on the land.

Brought to you by the Queensland Writer Center. I'm Jane Hultgren. And I'm Helen Roche. This is one of my colleagues at school, Mandy. Women of the land or women on the land, you are on it and you're of it. Women land, good or bad?

Uh, how would I describe Mandy? She is a bloody legend. She's the oldest serving staff member at Dalby State High School, and she runs rings around all of us. She is iconic and I love her. And no sort of fuzzy wuzzy questions. I'm not good on that. How do you feel on the land, Mandy? No. I grabbed her in the staff room.

Where is your farm?  Where's my farm? Yeah. Well, you want to know the actual address or what? Yeah, I know. I've got the address in my Google Maps. What is on your farm? Cattle. We have 70 breeders and 400 steers to be fattened. Holy shit. We've got all improved pastures, so all the… all the ground's been raked up and put human poo on it.

Human poo, yeah. Is that just a big party you just invite everyone to… No, it's actually, you get it for free poo. I love how she just said that, like, oh cool.  Of course. Have you ever heard of that? No, I haven't. Human poo. Human poo. I didn't think you were supposed to put human poo. I thought there was like some kind of law, but apparently when I go out to her farm and she shows me the bountiful human pooed on land. Mm-hmm. Everyone does it. Does it stink? Well, it didn't, it was it, it was post poo, so it was, yeah. Well, like when they dump it there, yeah. She says, yep. Smells like shit. What are you gonna do?  So you're gonna have to tell me about the human poo. Human poo, it's free, free fertilizer.

It's bought by trucks bringing it in from Brisbane.  Everybody uses it around here. Yeah. Yeah. And then they spread it for free for you. All you have to pay for is carrying it in and it lasts for seven years. None of it's smelling now. I think the last bit we had done was about  six months ago. Yeah.

And it's incredibly effective. Yes. Yeah. As long as you get the rain. Yeah.  Oh, so you have to time it for when you or you just hope? Just hope, yeah. Basic. Cool. Yeah. Cool. Wow. Just wanna check this down. 

So, Mandy took me for a ride around the property. First stop was a place they call the top tit.  Oh, yes. Interesting. Mm. Could tell me. What do you imagine the top tit to look like? Well, is it a mountain with a blob on the top? Breasts? Breast-like. Yeah. Like, yeah. Pretty much but not top tits. No. Yes.

Just one nice pickup of the singular. Yeah, just the one. 

I can see why. So there's a big boulder, a big like boob shaped boulder with,  um, it even has an erola, it anatomically, anatomically like correct. And then a boulder, um, shaped areola quite large. And yeah. And then a nipple of a hefty,  hefty nip, a hefty nipple. You can watch the best sunsets from the top of the tit.

Oh, beautiful. And I really want to climb it, but I was trying to drop those hints, like can we climb the tit right now? Yeah. But we were on a mission and so that's okay. Will she told me I could come back to the tit. Okay. Yeah. So I'm excited. I'll bring the wine. Yeah, join me on the areola. Are you gonna talk to us girls?

Hey gal. Was the boys. Sorry boys. Do you, you? These is Charolais. These ones, the white, the pretty white ones. They're the French boys. Charolais. Wow. Yeah, we turn the engine off, they're come and see. 

Are they ever aggressive with you? Very, very rarely. Very. You'll find the odd one. They're incredibly smart, really. They're an amazing animal and they are so resilient. They're probably the most resilient farm animal there is. They can put up with so much pain and they are just amazing, and they heal so well. 

You know, that like you'll just chop off a big lump off the side of their faces and two days later it's all healed over like a superhero. Yeah, they're superhero animals. Aren't you guys? Hey. You guys need a rebranding. Underestimated, yeah, totally underestimated. They're my favorite animal, I must admit. And they're all individuals.

Yeah. You can sort of talk to them. How much do they sleep? They sleep most of the night. They're very quiet at night and in the daytime they'll just sit under the trees and. You know, 'cause they, they regurgitate their food and re chew it.  Oh, wow. Chewing the cud. It's called. So they've got four stomachs.

So the first, first thing they do is they just go out and graze for a while and that goes down into their first stomach. And then they go and sit under a bush and they regurgitate that into their mouths and they re-eat it, and then it goes down through their first stomach, straight into their second stomach, and then third, and then fourth, and then out.

So they basically go out and graze twice a day. If you see them grazing all day, that means they're not getting enough to fill up their first stomach. Their stomach. Yeah. Okay. So they're having to graze for longer. So if they're all sitting happily under the trees, which these were till we disturbed them.

And are they, do they form connections with each other? Very much so. Mm-hmm. Like these have been together now, well, almost since they've been here. And if Jack will sometimes say, right, we're gonna split them all. Put the heavy ones in one paddock and the lighter ones in the other. And if, if one's mate is not quite as heavy and it's been put in the wrong paddock. They'll literally walk the fence up and down, or they stand there bawling and until you have to give in and say, okay, you can go in with the heavies. They're not really heavy enough, but you can go in there. Oh, okay dear. You can go in with a light one.

What about the mums and calves? Do they stick together? When they've got calves they have auntie duty, like they'll have one cow that looks after all the babies for the day.  What really?  Even though you saw a, you know, like two calves here, two calves over there by the, there'll be one mum that's watching out for all of them, making sure that they're all right and while the other's graze and then they'll swap over. 

Yeah. It's like a creche.  The cows are living the dream. I wanna do that with my sisters.  Yeah. So they literally have a creche. That is incredible. I had no idea cows were like that. I just thought they were kind of in a herd and I didn't know they made friends. I didn't either, and I That's so cool. That whole Auntie duty. 

I know. Isn't that like good? Yeah, I had it sorted. Yeah. Mum gets a break. Yeah, my auntie looks after the babies. Oh my. Then she comes back. She's happy. Great idea. Yeah. Yeah. You can learn a lot from cows. I think we can. Hmm. Let's listen to it though. It's so peaceful up here.  When I used to have a bit more time, dunno when, when that was, but I used to walk up here and just go and sit up, walk from the house up to here and sit up there  for, you know, in early in the mornings and then again in the evenings.

'cause it's just beautiful. The sun comes up over those hills over there. Wow. Talk about big skies, you know? Yeah. Yeah. Had you been to Australia before you met Mark? No, I went to California to be with my cousin 'cause I was traveling the world and the chap chap I was traveling with got sooky and went home to England.

So I was left on my own. Is he your boyfriend? Oh he, no, he wasn't really a boyfriend. He was just a really good mate. Yeah. And we were traveling together and he, oh, he was quite a bit older than me and he just, I think he just missed home. He was Cornish and Cornwall people are a bit…  I dunno. Very homely Uhhuh.

Yeah. So anyway. Oh, I didn't blame him. He just wanted to go home. Yeah, yeah. I said that was fine. Yeah. So I continued traveling on my own, but my mom was sort of a bit worried about me, so she sort of said, why don't you head for Charlie? He's in California. So I said, okay, I'll do that. So I did that and Charlie got me a job on a farm, so I was working with her and Mark worked on the nextdoor farm.

Ah. And one day we finished our paddock and the next one wasn't ready, so we went and helped the neighbor next door. So Mark was driving the header and I was driving the, you know, the bank out wagon, which takes the grain outta the header and takes it to the trucks, and that's where we met. Wow. How old were you? 

I was now, sorry. I met him in 1981, so I was 27 and he was 24. Mm-hmm. And so you were mates first? Yeah. Oh good. That's what we really still are. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I think any good marriage is isn't it? Yeah. But we were just the best, best of mates. Ah, yeah, we just get on really, and we still do, although he drives me into distraction sometimes. 

And so what's his story? Where did he grow up? He grew up in the north of England on a dairy farm. Ah-huh. His dad was a dairy farmer. And then, um, he left school early to help his dad on the farm. And that bloody English government, they lived fairly near to a town and they were, what was it? Compulsory purchase… the farm was to building an industrial estate or something like that.

Well, they were supposed to, the farm land is actually still there. Mark goes and looks it, you know, it's never been built on, although they took, took it off the, his dad, so his dad. Sold it and then he had too much money and he, he was, yeah, always about money. So he left the country and went to tax havens.

He went and lived in the Channel Islands. Okay. So Mark really didn't have a base after that. He was only 15 or 16,  and they literally moved outta the country and said. Yeah. And, and Mark said, I don't wanna live on the bloody Channel Island. Wow. So he was, he went and got jobs in England and then he decided to do this exchange thing in America.

And that's when I met him in the second year of doing that. But then his dad spent the money that he'd saved on all that tax to buy this place. So we forgave him in the end.  Yeah. So why Australia? What made you to then? Well, we traveled, we looked at lots of places. We thought we'd go to Canada 'cause we both loved the States and we loved that sort of way of life.

But Charlie, my cousin, was going to South Africa and Charlie was very pushy and I never got on very well with him. I got on really well with his brother. But Uhhuh, he was saying, right, if you wanna come with me, I'm going to South Africa and I'm going in two weeks time. And Mark was saying, well, if you wanna come with me, I'm going to Australia.

And I thought, shit, which way do I go? And I thought, no, I can't put up with Charlie. Mum was saying, go with Charlie. 'cause you know what he's like. And I said, yeah, I know what he's like, I'll go with Mark.  How so? How long did you know Mark for that? Oh, we traveled around the stage together. Yeah. Probably nine or 10 months.

Yeah, I suppose you were like, I'll just go with this guy because Yeah, I'm going with this guy. Yeah. And then there were other people there that were Australians as well that I got quite friendly with and I thought, yeah, we'll go over there and have a look around so that, that's so straight. That defining moment.

Hey, like the crossroads. Yeah. That was fate. And otherwise I could have ended up in South Africa for 40 years. I don't think far out, but I ended up in Australia for 40 years. Did you think when you were traveling around that that would be a finite period and you would go back to England  or would you Yeah, I thought that would, um, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Just fate carries you. Wow. I've traveled, but I can't imagine living in another country for the rest of your life away from, you know. My culture, I, I, I love going away, but I love coming back to Australia and also to follow someone after nine or 10 months. Yeah. Charlie must've been a real shit. Hey, he must have been.

Yeah. That's a big deal. It is a really big deal. And then to end up in country Australia. Yes. Very cool. So for Mandy. She's tougher than I am. So they came over to Australia and she was actually living out of her Toyota Corolla. Oh goodness. Yeah, I know. You hear that and you're like, oh, no, homeless. But she was like, it's fun.

We lived in a Toyota Corolla.  Basically, we traveled around doing odd jobs. We traveled right round. We tried picking fruit in bloody Shepparton, and we gave that away. We just got enough petrol money to get across to Western Australia, and then we ran outta money, we just had enough fuel to get to Perth and I had friends in Perth, but we wanted to go Esperance round, so we were literally living off  every morning we'd wait for, or evening whenever it was. We'd wait for the locals to come down and do their herring, catch their herrings off the piers, and we'd just sit down and we had herrings 10 days. That's all we had. You just gabbed herring? No, we were fishing. You fished too. We just spend the day right here.

They come right there. And then we cooked the herrings on the barbecue, on the park barbecue, you know the, with the wood and the thing that you provide very nicely in Australia that we provide wood for us people that haven't got any other form of food. Yeah. And we dig pippies off out outta the sand for our bait.

So that was free. Wow. We did that for 10 days and would travel all the way around because there's herring runs on all those little towns all the way around till you get to Margaret River. And then we had friends in Perth who put us up for a while and then we got a job.  So that was it. Worked out on the, in the wheat belt in Western Australia for six months I suppose, and got enough money to go all the way around and then back to Mitchell. And it was literally just like the next job kind of thing. Yeah. Where there would be a job. Well, the boss that we had in Western Australia also had a farm in Mitchell, so… Okay. He said when you get around to Queensland you can work there.

Okay, cool. Yeah, so we worked there and then, um, visas ran out 'cause we were on working holiday visa, so then we had to leave the country. We went back to England for a while. Were you married yet? No. And Mark had to go back to England to get a business visa. Okay. So he and his dad came, bought the farm and then I came over.

Wow. We're still not married, but engaged so I could stay as longer 'cause I was in a relationship, a permanent relationship with a Australian resident. So, which was Mark. Far out. You traveled around, how did you go? Oh, actually let's buy a farm back in Australia. Like Yeah, well we had great friends that lived in Toowoomba.

Okay.  And we spent a lot of time there and we just liked. This area. Mm-hmm. Yeah. You felt like a Yeah. Sort of a bit of pull to it. Pull to this sort area. Yeah. Yeah. Were there any other places in all of those travels in competition? Well, not really. No. What do you think the pull was about? What, like, I don't know.

I think it's because we knew people here. Yeah. And they were still here when we came back, you know? And they still live here. They're godparents of, of Sally. Oh wow. And then this came up. It was just what was on the market at the time too. Mm-hmm. Yeah, so. So is his dad a farmer? Yeah, he was a dairy farmer.

A dairy. Oh, okay, cool. Yep. So he's always, and then you, I was a teacher. But your mum and dad didn't farm. You were just a, you were just a hippie going, working in fields and you know, being one with nature. Yeah, being one with nature.  Where did you grow up in England, Bedford, just north of London. Okay. Mum still lives there.

Dad was born there. Anyway, we might wend our way back. Mm.  It must be hard to  leave sometimes. Like Yeah.  Yeah. It is. It's hard to leave. You could,  yeah. It is so quiet. 

I love the, how she said, let's wend our way back. It's so whimsical and it's kind of English, but you can imagine the scenery when she says that word. I loved that. I loved that.  Yeah, it was, it seemed peaceful and she sounded like it's a place she loved being. It sounded like she was really happy. And that was contagious.

I felt  so at peace there. And the way that Mandy talks about how fate led her to her current reality sort of reminds me how much of it is to do with your perspective and a certain amount of acceptance with what is, I suppose, rather than fighting against it. That was exactly the word that came to my mind was acceptance, fate, and acceptance.

So that was her sliding doors moment. Like as in, do I go this way? Do I go that way? Do you have one that you look back on, say if you were to map out your life, like is there one where it was like, oh, if I did this thing I would've, oh, I would've worked out differently. The thing for me it was having children. Yeah. I was never, ever having children.

Really. I got invited to my girlfriend's birth because she said, you're not gonna have a baby. Why don't you come and and see my child be born. Whoa. I saw that child born and then went straight home to my husband and said, I've changed my mind. I want a baby. And he's gone now. Right this minute. Right now.

Well, usually it's the opposite, as in that was gonna turn you off even more. What was it about that experience that made you go, I'm in. Just watching a woman do what a woman's body is made to do. Wow. I just found that so incredible and I thought I have to be a part of that. I have to have some of that for me.

That's amazing. And best thing, two kids, so lucky, so happy. Uh, my sliding doors moment when I graduated from uni and I was sick of Brisbane. And I finished my teaching degree and I thought, I wanna just do something totally different for just a couple of years and I ticked the anywhere box. Back then when you graduated and you wanted to do country service, uh, you tick the anywhere box.

And I was like adventure. My brother got married in Colorado and I got back from the holiday and to all of these missed calls. And then the first one I answered was from Dalby like this. Yeah. The deputy principal. And he said, we've got a job for you. And I said, where is Dalby? Uh, and he went. Yep. Look it up and see you tomorrow.

And how many years has those couple of years turned into in Dalby? 17, man. Yes. Very many times in my life. I've felt like fate has gotten me to the, to the next point, and I think embrace change. Just go with it. Have the next adventure. Mm-hmm. Go on the journey. Yeah. It's exciting. It's exciting. That's what we are here for once.

Oh my God. Yeah.  Next week on Queens of the Land, we are meeting an award-winning business lady who isn't afraid to share her journey warts and all. Everyone's ringing me going, oh wow. You know, and I'm just going, you have no idea what, what's actually going on. I'm a fraud.

You are listening to Queens of the Land, a season of the Telling Our Stories to the World Podcast, brought to you by the Queensland Writers Center.

And supported by the Queensland Government through Arts Queensland, produced by F&K Media. Stick around to hear what we've got planned for next season of telling our stories to the world.  Hi, Lori-Jay, welcome to the podcast. Thanks, Helen. Thanks for having me. You are the CEO for the Queensland Writers Center.

Can you tell us what's in the works for next season of telling our stories to the world? Well, it's fingers crossed at the moment. We are desperately looking for that kind of funding for it, but we are very excited by this one. It's Mornington Island. We are looking up in the Torres Strait. We are looking at Indigenous and First Nations writers, capturing their stories, how they wanna capture them.

Really excited. This is, uh, a long way away. So we've gotta get our bums up there, get our writers up there, put the tools up in place for those people to be able to capture their stories and then to disseminate them and share it with people. Wow, that sounds so exciting and hot. Exciting. And hot and hot.

Yes. I'm very excited to be part of that.  Now, what's the idea behind Telling Our Stories to the World and how long have you been doing it for? So this cycle is number three. Mornington will be number four. We started off with Telling Our Stories to the World as social prescription with Department of Health in Queensland.

So we went out into Longreach and Barcaldine and we were looking for people who were struggling with mental health and using the small act of writing to be able to get them talking about their stories. We quickly understood that there's gonna be people who can write a postcard for us or tell us a story.

And then we found a couple of people who are writers and that was very exciting. We've got a couple of people now, or published authors from that first wave, and that's from finding them, giving them the tools, like I said, and then they're just off and running with their own stories. Uh, so with the postcards, I did this first session myself, and we took a book about the lost crayons, and when the crayons got lost, they sent a postcard back home.

So I had all the little kids. And in these towns you've got children from like four years old up to 14, 15 in the same classroom. So you need something that everyone's gonna be able to do. So we had them just write one or two sentences about, I love living in Longreach because, and this is what I do with my family.

Then we told them we were gonna share this postcards we're gonna post them, uh, around the world. And the first year we went to Germany and Japan and we sent them to classrooms over there and they wrote stories back as well that we then sent back to those schools. So it really was like a postcard exchange, uh, between two different very different groups of children across the world. This allows us to talk to the children and the children. Go, mum, I really liked this. Take me to the library this afternoon where those trainers are gonna be. Then we get to speak to the parents. So it's really a double kind of you know, it's a folded environment where we start off here with the aim of like, let's speak to the parents about what their worlds are like out here, and do they have any in this particular instant mental health issues that we needed to tackle.

Second Wave was working with climate deniers, so the Department of Science and Environment. Really exciting. You're talking to kids in schools. Trying to beat their parents so that we can have that really deep conversation about what does it look like when we tackle climate, when we have to endure it, when we are living with it, it's not going anywhere.

So what are those changes? Using the kids to get their mums and dads down to the libraries. And again, the small acts of writing. And we found some great stories that we shared through anthologies and things like that.  And then last yeah? Well last year was Helen's year.  We met with camels. We met with women on their farms, women in rural and regional Queensland, in that southeast region.

And I think what's really important here was these stories need to be told in their voices, we haven't homogenised these stories. They are very clearly coming from the land of those, um, people and sharing it with, uh, the rest of the state, the rest of the country. And now on our podcast.  We're very excited.

What a wonderful project, Lori-Jay, and I think everyone should get on board with it. Now, if people do have an idea for any seasons, would you like to hear from them? We would love to. In particular, if you know something about your region that the rest of us think we know. But we probably have the wrong end of the stick.

'cause you know, we are from the city or we're from, you know, the coast or something like that. We really wanna find, did you know that this is what happens out here? One of the things that was very exciting with the first telling our stories to the world was we asked kids, what's it like to live in Barcaldine?

And they'd be like, I go pigging with dad and we have meat and three veg. And we, we were like, from the city, we were like, oh really? And is that the same when we send those postcards to the children in Japan? And the kids were like, yes. I'm like, do you think they've got guns?  Oh, wouldn't they? Do you think they go pigging?

Do you think? And it was very much this broadening of their world as well as they come in. And that's something we wanna keep their stories, but share them with, uh, the rest of the world. And then vice versa. So I think that's one of the most powerful things that this project does is share those stories.

Thanks so much for that, Lori-Jay It's a really exciting project and I'm very, um, interested in seeing where it goes to next. Well, if anyone calls from Hamilton Island, we are free to also help with those stories. Definitely.