Ruth Chaplain and Em Hacon celebrate the soft side of station life

“Harsh” is the first word Ruth Chaplain uses to describe her local landscape, a sprawling pastoral holding 30 kilometres south-east of Cloncurry in north-west Queensland.

Life at Wynberg station is not for the faint-hearted. Ruth knows all about unforgiving heat and dust, punishing seasons and the physical toughness required to work with livestock. There’s another aspect to station life, though, and it is this more poetic side that Ruth is intent on capturing in her art.

“For the females out here working, there’s not necessarily a huge amount of softness that’s relished, applauded or appreciated,” she says. “But when you really stop to look, there is beauty and softness all around you, whether it’s the soft linen on the clothesline or the wildflowers that my husband considers weeds but which we use for table decorations at the races.”

It’s all a matter of perspective. The vivid bougainvillea that creeps across fencelines and outbuildings stirs Ruth’s heart, but back in the verdant canefields of tropical north Queensland near Ingham, where she was raised, her Finnish father considered the papery climber a weed. “Out here, bougainvillea is a welcome burst of colour,” she says. “And yet it’s so easy to walk past and take for granted, like the pinks and purples of sunset.”

It’s no wonder to learn that Ruth Chaplain, 44, and her friend Em Hacon, 34, a keen photographer who lives on another cattle property about two hours drive away on the other side of Cloncurry, called their recent art exhibition Blush in the Bush. 

Ruth took up painting in earnest five years ago after the birth of Walter, her third child. Her husband, Robert, is the fourth generation of his family to raise cattle on the 40,000 hectare station, part of a 280,000 hectare run in Queensland’s north west.

“I was taking photos of mustering and thinking how amazing the colours were,” Ruth says. “I wanted to capture it again on paper and give my brain a bit of therapy away from being a mum, grazier, bookkeeper, etcetera.”

She continues: “I was drawn to the sky and the vastness, as well as the animals. It’s hard to describe the sunsets over the red hills without exaggerating, but you can do that through painting.”

Turning to the canvas brought the multitasking mother of three full circle. Long ago, she’d planned to follow the artist’s path by applying for a university visual arts degree. That was until a military career officer visited her high school and essentially recruited her into the Australian Defence Force Academy in Canberra. She completed her army officer training at Duntroon. Ruth says the army powerfully shaped her approach to life. “It involved a lot of self-discipline and a lot of enforced discipline, and it shaped that belief in myself.”

She never forgot her art, though. “I always had my visual arts books and I would watercolour on the weekends,” she says.

Ruth believes the self-discipline she developed then helps her when she’s working on canvases in her garden studio, a converted shipping container. It’s quite a feat, given she is holding a new full-time job in community engagement for mining company Harmony Gold, as well as mothering Sidney, 10, Mary, eight, and Walter and tackling myriad farm jobs.

Ruth says discovering the imagery of Em Hacon on Instagram inspired her to reach out to the born-and-bred cattlewoman, who lives on her family’s Gleeson station, 130 kilometres north of Cloncurry, with her helicopter-pilot husband, Will, and their three children.

“The idea of Blush in the Bush, celebrating the softness, came from Em’s photos,” Ruth says. “In most of her photos I could recognise something from my own backyard or my kids’ lives. I thought I would love to celebrate that by painting some of her photos. I asked her on a race day and she cried.”

Speaking from the family homestead on the Leichhardt River, Em Hacon says she is enjoying her unexpected turn as an exhibiting photographer. “It’s the first thing like this I’ve done,” she says as she tries to peel her two-year-old son, Hamish, off her shoulders. “I was just taking some happy snaps and sharing some on Instagram. It certainly wasn’t something I’d pursued at all.

“When you are used to being really productive outside, and then looking after very magical,  very busy little people, you still need to get outside to get yourself a bit of sanity,” says Em, who is homeschooling her two eldest, Theo, six, and Ella, four. “I went from being on a horse and bike to joining the mustering in a vehicle and I’d always take my camera.”

Em says photographing family and station life has helped her see that the magic is in the little moments.

“For some people, it’s probably meditation or a gratitude journal, but for me, the camera lets me really see those moments. And it reminds me that’s the whole point of what we are doing out here, being with the land and the animals.”

Em and Ruth knew each other socially before they collaborated. Their shared vision has forged a kinship and stimulated many enriching conversations about the importance of finding the space and place for creativity. And they enjoy the synergy between their imagery.

“I think our pieces work really beautifully together,” Em says. “We both love the colours in the landscape. And we love this place, so rugged and untamed. Right from our first chat, what we wanted to share was the way our creativity lets us see threads of ourselves in a landscape that has traditionally been so male-dominated. The softness sits right beside the rough and that’s where we find beauty.”

Follow Ruth @thechaplaincreative and Em @cow.girl.mumma on Instagram. 

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