"THE world will be saved by the Western woman."
That's His Holiness the Dalai Lama, chief Buddhist, talking at a Peace Summit in Vancouver.
So it has been reported.
Let's go with his assumption and say the world does need saving.
Should we believe that the Western woman will be the saving force?
Well, if the rumblings, some yet barely audible, around rural areas are any sign, then maybe the Western woman is at least beginning to come into her own.
Once barely recognised as farmers, the nation's female food-producers and their town-dwelling colleagues got together on Thursday to mark World Rural Women's Day.
Launched at the United Nations Conference for Women in Beijing in September 1995, it aims to "bring rural women - the world's invisible workers - into the limelight".
Urged on with funding that's dribbling down from governments into gender-specific programs, women in Victoria - from Benalla to Beverford and from Corryong to Campbells Forest - came together to share stories and to acknowledge their contribution.
Some, like Toni Shea, a 37-year-old single mother, had never heard of Rural Women's Day.
Farm-raised Toni, daughter of Campbells Forest farmers Robyn and Fred Shea, lives on the fringes of Bendigo, but her heart lies out on her parents' farm, north of the regional city where she has become secretary of the hall committee.
"I didn't know anything about it until I went to the recent launch of a local rural women's network," Toni said.
"Did you know that Victorian rural women's day started in 1986?
"I'd never heard of it."
Yet through droughty years, she's observed farm women in the area withstand incredible hardship.
They're out there, shoulders to the wheel, Toni told me.
"You see them out on tractors, feeding the sheep, carting water, in the stockyards, in shearing sheds.
"Then they're preparing lunch, getting the kids to school, doing bookwork, paying bills, organising things for the kids, babysitting."
Just 15 women turned out to the Rural Women's Day event Toni organised at the Campbell's Forest Hall.
Some including Joy Keating and Judy Wilson dressed in purple, perhaps in homage to the poem that suggests sobriety and tradition should be dumped in later years.
But was she disheartened? Not on your Nellie.
Best part of the day was the string game. Those present had to pass a bit of baling twine down their shirts and pants to the next person to do the same.
Perhaps it was a reference to how connected rural women are, or perhaps an urging for them to get more connected.
At Beverford, 14km north of Swan Hill, founding member of Australian Women in Agriculture and stonefruit-grower Ann Young, gathered fellow horticultural women for dinner.
Ann would like to see more women leading debates in horticulture and involved in horticulture groups, but she says they're not interested in the way the politics is traditionally played out.
They find it difficult.
"Women are not as competitive as men," says Ann.
"They are more open, more communicative and a lot less guarded than men."
I wonder if the Dalai Lama is right.
I wonder what might happen if this co-operative, open-hearted aspect of humanity were given free reign and greater import, whether we might have progress on the world-saving front.
Who knows? What do we have to lose?
