Bright fields of sunflowers, wheat and canola rustle on a gentle breeze. After months of flooding rains, pastures are iridescent green and chubby black Angus cattle are replete, happy and muddy-hoofed. This is Gomeroi country, and it’s also the landscape which Dorothea Mackellar wrote about in her iconic poem, My Country. A group of local women, who are at least as visionary and determined as the national poet, are coming together here today, in the NSW New England region, to share a powerful story of compassion and community with The Weekly.
These women all live in and around Gunnedah which, much like other similar sized country towns, has five pubs, five churches, a showground, a hospital, a police station, active branches of the Country Women’s Association (CWA) and Rotary. But until very recently, it didn’t have a women’s refuge, and it needed one.
People who live in regional Australia are 24 times more likely than
