Life on the Land: Three incredible stories of women living in rural Australia

CARA PEEK

Yawuru/Bunuba woman Cara Peek spent her childhood days in multicultural Melbourne. As a self-confessed ‘geek’, she was drawn to use her natural intellect to study law, but soon found it too slow and took matters into her own hands.

Now she lives closer to her ancestors in Broome in the Kimberley, where she runs her flagship not-for-profit events organisation Saltwater Country Inc. and consultancy The Cultural Intelligence Project. In 2020 she was named the AgriFutures WA Rural Woman of the Year.

Through our podcast we learned this girl has grit, with a natural inclination towards advocacy for her cultural roots. Cara is not about making people feel comfortable — quite the opposite — and what she’s achieving is extraordinary.

“The three things that get Indigenous people through are our connections to culture, our humour and our hope. It’s not a hopeless affair, but we deserve to be listened to and we deserve to design our own solutions.”

SAMMY LONGMORE
In 2013, then-20-year-old Sammy’s life changed forever when she had a car accident, then a second one when the ambulance she was travelling to hospital in crashed, sending her flying through the front windscreen. She was left paralysed down the right side of her body, a condition known as hemiparesis. Sammy spoke to us about her journey since then and her new life with partner Jude Bannister on a farm in Bowning, NSW, and her knitting business, Ohhbulldust. Here is an edited excerpt from her interview for our podcast, Life on the Land.

Sammy: I had my car accident the day after the Harden Picnic Races and I met Jude at the Harden Picnic Races 12 months later, which was really cool. I went there for a bit of a 12-month hurrah. I had sort of managed to get through the hardest part of that [12 months] and, you know, I wanted to spend it with my friends and to drink alcohol and all of that fun stuff.
Skye: How were you 12 months after the accident?
Sammy: Pretty good. Obviously, dealing with things like being able to get around was really hard because I wasn’t able to drive a car or anything like that, so that was really difficult, but it’s quite interesting – you find yourself with heaps of friends after a situation like that, heaps of people who want to be around you. So for the first 12 months, it was great. And, especially by that time, I just had a new lease on life. I had more of a will to live, I suppose. You just have a different mindset when something dramatic happens to you. You have so much time to think about yourself and how you want to live the rest of your life, so at that stage I was like, “Yes, one year down, however many more to go”. You don’t know what’s next, but also in the same breath, you’re hopeful that one day you’ll wake up and everything will be OK. It’s hard, to-ing and fro-ing a little bit in your own mind. At that point, I wasn’t looking for a boyfriend. I was looking to have some fun with my friends, and Jude just so happened to come along with a really good friend of mine, Ange, and some other mates, and I guess the rest is almost history. It’s interesting because it was over just a couple of weeks that Jude and I started chatting to each other and realising we had mutual friends and things like that, and it kind of just happened. And one night, he stayed over and he said, “So, do you want to be my girlfriend?” And we’ve been together ever since.
Skye: How long is that now?
Sammy: Six-and-a-half years. I was a bit nervous at first, because life was different. I didn’t know how to navigate a boyfriend. Those stupid thoughts that would come into my mind, like, “Why would he want to be with me? It would stop him from doing so many different things”, and that kind of thing, but it was kind of – I wouldn’t say the other way around – but we kind of encouraged each other to do more, which is great. I’m pretty headstrong too, so that was good for both of us.
Skye: He is too?
Sammy: Yeah, quietly headstrong. Quiet spoken, a pretty chilled-out kind of guy. I know when I get in a bit of a tizz, and life comes crashing down on my head, then he is able to pull me into line and it’s, “Alright. We can do this. We’ve done this now for six-and-a-half years, we can continue to do it,” which is really cool. So we live out here on the farm that he looks after. And it’s great.
Skye: What do you think your patchwork quilt of life is going to look like in 10 years’ time? What other big goals do you have for your future?
Sammy: I don’t know. I don’t know what 10 years’ time is going to look like. All I know is I don’t want to be where I am in 10 years’ time. I want to have, by then, connected to so many more people. I want to, in 10 years’ time, have been sharing my story every single day of my life, helping people move forward,
business-wise. I don’t know, maybe I’ll be teaching a [knitting] workshop every day! I’d love that. Maybe I’d love my own space, as well. Jude and I also have a harvesting contracting business, which is really cool. So maybe we’ll be doing that, too. I don’t know. I’ve always been a bit of a fly-by-the-seat-of-my-pants kind of person, and I believe, what you put out to the universe is generally what you’re going to get back in return. If I put out my love, my happiness, my strength, my resilience, you know, my adaptability, my absolutely everything into the universe as much as I can, then in 10 years’ time, I’m going to be surrounded by all of that. Hopefully, I’ll be running a business surrounded by the people I love. In 10 years’ time I’m hopefully going to be still very happy, and I believe that’s really important. Maybe we’ll have our own farm, who knows?

Skye: And my final question is, are you OK with being in a wheelchair now, or do you still wish that you weren’t?
Sammy: Some days I’m very OK with it. Other days, the wheelchair could fall into a pot of molten lava pretty well, and that’s going to be how it is for the rest of my life and that’s not a bad thing. Because, you know, just like everyone else, we all have highs and we all have lows for various reasons. I wish I could go for a jog with my dog, but I can go for a wheel with my dog, and that’s great, too. I think being put in this position has helped me become the person I probably always should have been. I should have always been this person. I had the means and I had everything that I needed to be able to help people. And this put me in a position to almost make me do that. And I love it. But man, I used to love doing so many other things as well – yeah, it really is a love-hate relationship.

For speaking engagements or workshops, email sam@ohhbulldust.com. Shop her products on her online store. 

ELISHA PARKER

From an unbridled childhood on a cattle station emerged a girl with a quiet confidence and an inimitable spark. Today, Elisha juggles her day job as a lawyer with night shifts running her innovative ag-tech website cattlesales.com.au, (co-founded with Annabelle Woods), and says she’s always excited to work.

“I lived a pretty innocent childhood, as most bush kids doing School of the Air did. I think I was more excited to get one of my business ventures off the ground. I was interested in sewing and I thought that one day I would have a successful business. Nothing ever took off, but it was a start. As a kid I remember Mum and Dad trying to help us train for sports day. Shot-put was a brick, I had this stupid dirt pad I used for long jump and I would sprint with no shoes on the dirt clay pan, so to be able to go to a rubber athletics track and a heated pool and do gymnastics was unlike anything I’d ever experienced.

The good thing about cattlesales.com.au being a website is that it runs itself in terms of the mechanics so we don’t have to be there for that. It’s just the marketing and the business building and the web development and other things, so we can slot that in from 2pm until midnight and weekends!”

Episodes of Life on the Land are released at 6am on Monday morning, hosted by Skye Manson and Emily Herbert. Find us on Apple podcasts, Spotify and all major podcast platforms.