Stories from the Silo Towns.
STORIES FROM THE SILO TOWNS
Stories from the Silo Towns. Katanning, two hundred and seventy kilometres south-east of Perth; a former backup singer to Cat Stevens (Yusuf Islam) translates at the local Shire for the forty different nationalities that call this small farming town home. Albany, a port city on Western Australia’s southernmost coast; an anonymous group of locals stealthily yarn-bomb a significant local landmark, adorning it with Aboriginal colours and motifs under cover of night. Northam, a rambling heritage town on the banks of the Avon River; a nationally celebrated architect returns to his rural hometown to open a sleek wine bar at the gateway to sheep and wheat country. Here are some of the places, people and the stories behind the Western Australian Wheatbelt. A sheer blond expanse of sprawling grain fields, sky-filled salt lakes and open scrubland; lonely highways and harvest headers cutting swathes through to sleepy, sunbaked towns. A region which seems, at first blush, defined by its distance from anywhere.
Wheatbelt towns are dwindling. As technology lifts efficiency and supplants manual labour, and small scale farmers make way for larger operations, towns shrink, services dry up and people chase jobs to the bigger cities. Grappling with degrading land, international competition and the staggering costs of capital inputs, each year farmers gamble millions on the whims of Mother Nature. What kinds of people make this region home? What draws them to this broad stark vastness, and what sustains them here? Cataloguing stories of the Wheatbelt, Stories from the Silo Towns seeks to explore this loyalty, by mapping a distinctive regional culture and way of life through the words and the eyes of the people who live there.
Stories from the Silo Towns is a social documentary project that seeks to hold to the light the imagination and compassion, the entrepreneurialism and the collective resilience that has defined Western Australia’s tenacious Wheatbelt communities from the days of early land clearing right up to today’s broadacre agriculture.
Newdegate, Stories from the Silo Towns, 2019. Photograph by Em Louise Photography.
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Through first-person interviews, footage and imagery, the project seeks to capture the intimate values and everyday experiences that form the robustness of place for those people who call the Wheatbelt home. Presented together, these unique stories become a catalogue of the interconnectedness and generational continuity of life on the land, mediated by distance and nourished by community. They are stories that allow us an insight into the people and the industries that form the fabric of regional Western Australia.
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The PUBLIC Silo Trail & Stories from the Silo Towns. In 2015 Perth cultural agency FORM and CBH Group; Western Australia’s premier grain growers’ cooperative, joined forces to create the first ever mural painted on an Australian grain silo. The thirty eight metre high artwork by internationally renowned street artists became a unique cultural waypost offering an experience of Western Australia’s agricultural heartland to the world. Four years, several thousand kilometres and gallons and gallons of paint later, the project has resulted in an innovative cultural tourism experience: a self-drive tourism trail spanning regional Western Australia in six towering silo murals. Travelling FORM’s PUBLIC Silo Trail from the regional hub of Northam to the old railway town of Merredin, via heritage rich Katanning to the small farming outposts of Pingrup and Newdegate; across to beautiful Ravensthorpe and, finally, finishing in the port city of Albany, Stories from the Silo Towns casts a light on the people behind some of Western Australia’s most distinctive regional towns, and works to reveal something of who they are, and what their communities mean to the rest of the State. Stories in this series have been gathered during the painting of the silo murals in 2017 and 2018,
NORTHAM
Page 1-22
MERREDIN
Page 23 - 48
KATANNING
Page 49 - 76
PINGRUP
Page 77 - 96
NEWDEGATE
Page 97 - 120
RAVENSTHORPE
Page 121 - 148
ALBANY
Page 149 - 182
PERTH
STORIES FROM THE SILO TOWNS
Rochell Walker - Newdegate
Rochell Walker with family and friends, Stories from the Silo Towns, Newdegate, 2018. Photograph by Bewley Shaylor.
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STORIES FROM THE SILO TOWNS
The main titles I identify with at the moment are Mum and wife. It’s taken me a little while to work out where I am in that spectrum. I’m not a farmer, I’m not a farmer’s wife; I’m a farming wife. This is where I’m currently sitting at the moment. I help out on the farm, I do bookwork, meals, bits and pieces in between. I have an active role in the farm, but I’m not a farmer, because in my role as a Mum I do quite a few committee roles, helping at the school, sporting clubs and community groups. Not being tied to being that “farm-er” work, as such, I’ve got time to do the other things. I grew up in Hyden, which is eighty kilometres north of Newdegate, went to high school in Narrogin, and then moved to Perth for university. I studied psychology and later worked out of Katanning in early intervention. My original intention was criminal psychology, I like to understand why people do things. But along came my husband Pete, and criminal psychology in a small town was never going to work. I met him at nineteen. So that, quite early on, changed the path of where I was going. It’s amazing what love can do to you. Blows your plans well out of the water. Pete and I met through my high school best friend; we all holidayed together on the coast, It all began one balmy summer evening in Hopetoun, with a bit of help from the local pub, and I moved down there in 2003, following my then boyfriend, now-husband. His family have farmed here since 1926, so being in a relationship with him meant being here, not anywhere else. We’ve got crops: wheat, barley, oats, canola, and sheep. We run a Merino flock for wool, and we have two studs which produce terminal sires for crossbred lambs. Farming is a challenge, but you choose to take on the challenge and you get to do it with people you love and do what you enjoy.
I love the people here. All small towns have a different group, a different psyche, a different kind of connect; Newdegate’s got an awesome one, I think. There are all sorts of people, all across the spectrum: on their own, old, young. Everyone says hello to everyone walking down the street. I think you’re accepted for who you are, not who someone wants you to be. The people are what makes this place. When I first moved to Newdegate I lived in town, and our neighbour was an older lady. Her name was Pearl, and every night she put on her light to say she’d had a good day, made it through the day, life was okay. And then when she’d go to bed, she’d turn off the light. So you could see in the morning that she’d also been okay. It’s just one of those ones, I think, to me that epitomises a bit of Newdegate. You can keep an eye out for your neighbour. I think it’s a drive to make where you are better. Everyone wants to feel like they’ve contributed something, given something, or left things in a better way than they’ve found them. You can have a lot of fun doing that with other people. We have our Field Day that runs every year, and it’s a lot of work in the lead up to the event to make it happen, but it’s a lot of fun. You get in, and you do the work together, but you laugh, you tell jokes. It’s just fun doing it, and so you don’t notice the hard work that happens while you’re doing it. I think we’re into our seventy fifth year of the Newdegate Field Day. It started off as a one day agricultural event. It’s meant to showcase machinery but then there’s some livestock, sheep, cows, there are family interests, clothing stores, bookstores, jewellery stores, wineries, all kinds of things. Usually ten to twelvethousand people come through over those two days. We usually make money out of it, and that money goes back into supporting projects in the town. 7
I have four children: two daughters and two sons. Elise, Sylvie, she would be eight; we lost her just prior to her turning four months old. Then Ben and Sam. We lost our daughter just before the Field Day, at the end of August. How our town managed to get through putting on a big event like the Field Day, as well as supporting us and each other… You’d never wish to see that again, but it’s something awesome to have seen and been through. It’s a pretty awesome town. My husband is the youngest of three, and he’s got two older sisters. We’re working towards taking over the farm. With us, we left it open for all three of our kids to say, “do you want to be a farmer?”, and sometimes they say yes, sometimes they say “ah, not today!” But all of them get to experience life being on the farm, and there’s no pressure for any of them to be on, but there’s an openness for all of them to be there. By and large, I suppose, if that’s the life you grow up with and the life you know, as a general rule, that’s what you would follow. I suppose you never know though, it depends on what each individual kid’s dream is.
“Every night our neighbor, Pearl, would put on her light to signal she’d made it through the day and was okay, and when she’d go to bed, she’d turn off the light. To me, things like that epitomise Newdegate. You keep an eye out for your neighbour.”
Tim Flanagan, Stories from the Silo Towns, Ravensthorpe, 2018. Photograph by Bewley Shaylor.
STORIES FROM THE SILO TOWNS
Tim Flanagan - Ravensthorpe
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STORIES FROM THE SILO TOWNS
My name is Tim Flanagan, and I’m eighty years of age. I live in Hopetoun now; we retired about eighteen months ago. We farmed in Jerdacuttup. It’s about thirty miles out, on the rabbit-proof fence. It was made mostly of conditional purchase farmers in the old days, where you were given land. You paid a dollar an acre and had to clear so much every year. They used to come and inspect how much land you’d cleared, and if you didn’t meet those commitments, they could come and take your land off you. But I didn’t know of anyone that didn’t meet their commitments. They were all very keen farmers in those days. I think there were eleven blocks that were up for allocation the year I went in; about four hundred people applied for them, so it was a bit like winning lotto when you got a block of land. I was working in Corrigin in those days. I was working on a farm and my wife said to me one day, “are you going to work on the farm all your life?” I said “no! I intend one day to get a block of land.” And she said “well, get off your tail, get down there and apply for a block.” Which we did, and we were lucky to get a block of land allocated to us. We had three little children and very little money, but we had big hearts. We had enough money to buy a tractor, a combine, and a plough, and to build a shed. When we first started off, I worked on a neighbouring station. We used to just have Sunday off in those days, so for years we’d work the Sunday and then come back and then clear land. We cleared about a hundred acres a year. We’re going back over fifty years now. In those days there were roughly fortyfive farmers out there, all roughly in the same boat. No-one was any better off than anyone else, so there was a truly wonderful community. We gradually got a few sheep, and my wife was the
major worker on our plot, because I was working on the farm. Our little one wasn’t at school then, and the two would go to school. We used to start early, while the kids were still in bed, and then we’d go back home which was about twelve kilometres away and I’d go to work, and Eva would get the kids ready for school, and then she’d come back and plough until three o’clock, then she’d go home and be ready for when the kids came off the school bus. There were no successful farmers down here, really, without a good strong woman behind them. We were all pretty blessed, you know, that we had very strong, wonderful women. And that’s the backbone. They made the district. So we, over the years, we stuck at it. It was hard, we didn’t have two bob to bless ourselves with, but we just persevered, persevered and persevered. We had our income coming in every week from my job, and everyone else had to have some way of making their bread and butter, because we weren’t making it off the land, because it was all new land. When you’re young, all you see is the big dream out there. And that’s what you need to have; if you don’t have the dream, you don’t get to first base. You’ve got to have a dream, that eventually that land will be all cleared. We had a little one-teacher school with about forty children at it: the Jerdacuttup School. It started off in a little soapstone building on a farm, and then eventually the government built us a school at Jerdacuttup townsite. Over the years it went from a peak of about fifty down to what it is today: about eight. That’s typical of what’s happening in the country; there are just no people left in
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the country now. They’re moving away, and farms are getting bigger. Economies of scale: you need a bigger and bigger area to be able to maintain your business. Fifty years ago all the farms were roughly two thousand acres, and in that, there were two thousand acres of good country you could make a living off. Today, it’s ten, twenty thousand acres and maybe a lot bigger. I worked for ten years going backwards and forwards between the farms, and our kids got bigger, and they went away to college in Perth, and then we shifted over to our farm. It was ten years to the day when we shifted over to our farm. The whole district came for the celebration. We were like a big family. I still had to work, but I was at a stage where we wanted to be based from our own farm. So I became a mulesing contractor: cutting the wool off the tails of sheep to stop blowflies. I managed farms, when people were going away, we did all sorts of jobs to make a dollar. I’ve got three children, all in their fifties. One’s married to a farmer in Wyalkatchem, and she still teaches; I’ve got a son, who is a teacher, he’s taught all over the world, but now he’s a headmaster at a community about five miles east of Newman. And I’ve a son who’s been quite ill, it was cancer and he’s just getting over that. I would love to have had them back on the farm, but farming’s too small. I didn’t want to get bigger, and bigger, just to survive. My son wanted to come back to farm, but I said no; it was like putting a stone around his neck. We only had twenty-two or twenty-three hundred acres, it wasn’t big enough and I didn’t want to go into debt. I’ve been in debt developing our farm, we’d taken on loans so I said no. I had to make my way in life, and all my kids have done the same. But the beauty about all the kids growing
STORIES FROM THE SILO TOWNS
up down there, they all learnt to survive, and my three children have all been survivors, and successful at it. When we started off we had nothing. So you made a piece of wire do a hundred different things. Todd tells me now that when he’s up in Newman you’re five hours out from Newman, which is the nearest shopping centre you’ve got to make a piece of wire do a hundred things again. Now I’ve retired. I still work on a lot of farms, and I’m community-minded: I’m helping out round the district. And I trek. I have a dream to do the Camino Track. It started when I was in hospital and my son said “if you get through this, we’ll do the Camino together.” Well, I got through it, but he’s since gone. One thing led to another and we didn’t get there, but I still have this dream that I’m going to do the Camino. The trekking started as a way to get fit. I walk out to the Fitzgerald River National Park and along the beach. I’ve done it now seventy-three times I think. Bit crazy.
I always wanted to live on my farm until the day I died, but it just didn’t happen. I got ill, and I just couldn’t keep working. Eva said “after fifty farms and fifty years, I think it’s fair to me, and to everyone else that you move on.” But I’m mature enough to know that life moves on. And I’m mature enough to know that eventually we’ll have to move out of Hopetoun, because there aren’t the medical facilities down here to look after the very old. But for now, we’re in good health and every morning, I go down and I see the ocean, and I say to myself “well, how lucky are you to see this?”
My wife is still the backbone. A very, very wise woman. Always made decisions, but made it look as if I’d made them. And to this day, she was the best worker I ever had. I mean, we worked together, but she was the best worker. I met her at a dance in Quairading, where she came from. I sat behind her in the hall. I said to my mate “I wonder what that girl’s like?” And he said “well, if you don’t ask her for a dance, you’ll never find out.” That’d be sixty years ago. We’ve been married fifty-eight years. But, you back one another up over life. I think women back men far more than they’re given credit for.
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“There were no successful farmers down here, really, without a good strong woman behind them. We were all pretty blessed, you know, that we had very strong, wonderful women. And that’s the backbone. They made the district.”
Following a trail of epic painted silos created as part of the PUBLIC Silo Trail, this book travels from the regional hub of Northam to the old railway town of Merredin; via heritage rich and culturally diverse Katanning to the small farming outposts of Pingrup and Newdegate. The trail winds across to beautiful Ravensthorpe and, finally, finishes in the port city of Albany. It’s a course wheat grown for export will take from soil to sea, grown, harvested carted and shipped from Western Australian shores; and it reveals a little of life as it is lived along that trail. Using the epic murals of the PUBLIC Silo Trail as vibrant, larger-than-life wayposts, Stories from the Silo Towns casts a light on the people behind some of Western Australia’s most distinctive regional towns, and works to reveal something of who they are, and what their communities mean to the rest of the State.