From tragedy comes hope: the scholarship fund supporting young leaders

For Matilda Ferguson, there was no greater calling than the remote communities and landscapes she came from, lived for and was called back to.

In 2024 Matilda lost her life in an accident while working in the rugged environs she was so passionate about. While making sense of her passing is impossible, creating meaning from her life is what those who loved her are striving to do.

Matilda’s inspiring mum, Chris Ferguson, her partner, Lachie, her brother, Will, and stepdad, Greg, together with the Australian Rural Leadership Foundation (ARLF), have launched an appeal to raise $20,000 to fund two scholarships in Matilda’s memory, to support young leaders to participate in the TRAIL Emerging Leaders Program.

TRAIL is a cross-sector, challenge-based seven-day national leadership program for Australia’s emerging leaders. Matilda’s scholarships will support rural women to develop leadership, expand their horizons, gain exposure to role models and connect with a supportive peer network.

“She loved mustering and stock work — being in the thick of it,” Chris says.

In Matilda’s teens, she decided she wanted to experience boarding school, where her chief learning was just how important her connection to station life, family bonds and agriculture was. Keen to leave school and head north for an adventure as a ringer, Matilda completed Year 10 before returning home to the station, where she gained a Certificate III in agriculture. It was a wonderful year in which Matilda worked alongside her mum, dad and brother.

When, not long afterwards, Matilda’s parents separated, she was once more instrumental in supporting her mum to continue running the property alone. As well as being spellbound by the wild land they had chosen as home, Matilda and Chris were kindred in their love of literature, reading, good art and poetry.

In the raw pain of life without Matilda, Chris’s eloquence about the significance of her daughter’s relationship with rural Australia is striking:

“Trying to distil it was something that Matilda and I often spoke about. It was just life… It was all one. Just by being alive you were connected to the spirit of the place, connected to all other beings that were there. It was simply by breathing that we were part of it. I still very much feel Matilda here, and she’s part of it all.”

What we have now

I certainly hope that I’m not the last of our line to venture down this path, for maybe I have a daughter one day and maybe I don’t. But the future is not where the promise lies; it is in what we have now, in our scarred and weather-beaten hands that have unintentionally led each other to where we are at this moment in time. – Matilda

After the interminably long yet unbearably fast year that has passed since Matilda’s death, Gemma and some of Matilda’s other ARLF colleagues headed to Yantabulla to visit Chris and sit by Matilda’s final resting place in a very old country cemetery.

“The community have strung fairy lights up and she is tucked in under a mulga tree. It’s very beautiful.”

At Matilda’s funeral service, Gemma was awed to witness the community around Yantabulla come together in a village that Chris describes as “a hall, three street lights, a public telephone box and no residents”. Hundreds of cars bearing number plates from across state lines were parked, and “the hall was heaving” with people who loved Matilda.

To have all that she was and all that she was yet to do cut short at just 33 years of age has left all those who knew Matilda grappling with the heartbreaking and unanswerable riddle of how to be without her.

A scholarship legacy in Matilda’s name to support another young leader whose heart and soul is similarly enmeshed in the bush, is something that Chris is “chuffed” to see.

“This is not just about her. It’s about the people she’s left behind and how it can help all of us. It’s a way of honouring her, and it’s also something positive to be done in the wake of her death… It’s a way for the things that were so good about her to be carried on and continued in a small way,” Chris says.

Gemma feels this keenly as well.

“Matilda was creating a pathway for people like her to really live and embrace the life she so desperately wanted, living on the land and farming as a woman. There’s a strong maternal bloodline in her family, and she was the next chapter.

“When she died, we lost a profound contribution. It’s through these methods that we can try to capture some of the impact that she would have had herself.”

The Australian Rural Leadership Foundation is very close to achieving its fundraising goal of $24,000, which will enable the group to launch the Remembering Matilda scholarship. Please consider making a donation and sharing this story with your circles. Donations can be made at donate.rural-leaders.org.au.

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