ONE is Victoria's Commissioner for Environmental Sustainability and the other is a soulful singer.
Both have made their mark on public life.
Yet the Auty sisters, Kate and Kelly, have never shared the same stage.
Until now.
At Stawell next Saturday, July 17, Kate, 54 and Kelly 52, will be part of Dinner Dames and Divas, a forum for women in rural communities.
The sisters have been blazing trails for three decades.
Both live in Melbourne but as kids they lived on a research station near Kununurra in Western Australia's Kimberley region and attended a one-room school with a mix of white and Aboriginal students.
Kelly, who some would recall as the singer in a show called Wild Women, ran a program called Noisy Girls at Maryborough, in central Victoria, with Year 9 girls.
"I'd get them to write songs, talk about their feelings and connect with each other so they knew they weren't on their own," Kelly says.
Eventually that work gave way to recording her own music.
At Stawell she and her band will perform songs of great women from the 1920s to the 1970s from Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday, Edith Piaf and Patsy Cline through to Janis Joplin.
Just before Kelly kicks off, Kate will deliver the forum's keynote address.
Kate established Victoria's first Koori Court and acted as the inaugural Koori magistrate.
She chaired the Victorian Ministerial Reference Council for Climate Change Adaptation until she took up her current post.
Now she's responsible for Victoria's State of the Environment Report, the next one of which will focus heavily on climate change and how it's affecting city and country regions.
As the Commissioner, Kate also examines the environmental record of government departments to check they're reducing their carbon footprint, which means getting them to buy green products and her other major role is to encourage people to think about how to be more environmentally sustainable.
Kate says this work gives her a real focus on rural concerns and how farmers can adapt their agricultural enterprises to climate change and become more sustainable.
It seems a long way from the women's welfare service she once ran, or being a magistrate, or working with Aboriginal communities in the Western Desert and around Kalgoorlie.
But she reckons it's all about learning to work effectively with people.
"If they appointed me to this job for any reason at all I think it's because I have a fairly intense people focus," Kate says.
A sense of community and developing people, she believes, are vital building blocks for change and I suspect we'll be facing more of that - so it'll be interesting to hear Kate's perspectives.
Organiser Meg Blake says the forum marks 35 years since Stawell's Y-Zetts was formed.
"We were a bunch of young women with babies having coffee in the afternoons and we couldn't join the hospital auxiliary because we had too many noisy kids so we started our own group," Meg says.
"We were pretty risque in those days.
"We served alcohol at our functions. Back then one of the doctors complained about one of our film fundraisers because the film, Apes in the Mist, had sex in it!"
Stawell might be a long way to go for a girls day/night out, but with a function record like this, plus a blast from those Auty sisters and some words from Farm Day founder Deb Bain and the owner of Melbourne's Grossi Florentino restaurant Melissa Grossi, I reckon it'll be worth it.
I'll be there.
- For details on Dinner Dames and Divas phone Meg Blake (03) 5358 8513.
