IT MIGHT be optimistic to hope that the women who penned letters to this column in the earlier part of last century are still alive but if they are, La Trobe University history lecturer Dr Ruth Ford wants to talk to you.
Ruth is researching farm women's lives and the letters they wrote to the women's pages of rural newspapers from 1924-1945. She plans to write a book around them.
Her goal is to create a more rounded picture of Australia's agricultural and rural history in that period, one that includes an insight into women's lives as much as it includes men's stories.
Think about it.
Our popular earliest recitations honour Clancy of the Overflow and The Jolly Swagman and such like, but apart from The Drover's Wife there's nary a gal in any of these iconographic images.
Even when we moved on to the 20th century we continued to celebrate the likes of Dad and Dave, the Gallipoli Digger and Banjo Paterson, but few female icons are associated with the bush at this time.
It's true we know plenty about the man on the land - the shearer, the drover and the seasonal farm worker, how they endured hard times and sat around camp fires and did all manner of outdoors things. But I often wonder about the women on the land.
What were they doing all that time?
Am I wrong to assume they stayed home or did they drive harvesters and sow crops and pick grapes?
What hours did they work?
What joys and hardships did they face?
How did they grieve when they lost their children as so many did?
Did they farm too?
Were they humping their blueys in hard times?
Ruth reckons that despite being absent from most agricultural and rural history, women were very much involved in farming and food production in the early 1900s.
"They milked cows, tended poultry, stoked hay, marked lambs, pruned fruit trees and picked fruit," she says.
She knows this because she's read letters, hundreds of them, in back issues of columns in newspapers like this.
"The letters are so powerful. I can't believe how well they wrote, so movingly, given that many had left school by the age of 12 to 14."
Take Mabella, for example, who wrote to Miranda in the spring of 1931, declaring "the drudgery starts when I have to carry three four-gallon buckets of milk up to the separator, and when separated, out to the pigs and calves."
Or Many Hard Times, writing in 1932 who said: "I have lived in the Mallee for over 20 years I work out in the paddock.
"I can drive a team in the plough as well as my husband.
"I cut shoots and do any farm work, but I have not driven a stripper."
"The letters tell a fascinating story about the lives of women on the land and it would be wonderful to add depth and colour to these stories by finding out about the actual women who wrote them," Ruth says.
"I'd love to hear from women over 80 years old who wrote letters before 1945 or from people whose mother, aunt or grandmother wrote letters in that period, if they know their (deceased) relative's pen name."
- If you think you can help Ruth, phone her on (03) 5444 7981, email r.ford@latrobe.edu.au or write to her c/o History Program, La Trobe University, PO Box 199, Bendigo, Victoria 3552.
