City Girl Goes Bush
Host: Anna Plains Station
Written by Helen Stoate – Owner, Anna Plains Station.
Born into and blinded by the bright lights of Sydney, all things waxed, bleached, brand named, and manicured were highly regarded. If you didn’t spend half an hour each morning putting on your Kate Moss endorsed war paint you stood out like a bad looking sore thumb.
So what next? Relocating over the opposite side of the country to a station two and a half hours from the nearest town seemed appropriate. Whatever it is, be it a not even quarter life crisis, I’ll be forever grateful it happened.
I’ve not been here on Anna very long. In this time though, I feel like I’ve gained more life lessons and moral values than any air conditioned, student packed classroom could ever teach me.
It’s about preg-testing a cow for the first time instead of getting pregnant. Fighting fires and battling the weather instead of hiding in the air-con at 32 degrees. It’s also handling the occasional snake and wishing your mum was here to age her a decade. It’s the important things like ensuring the poddy calves are fed, the cattle have water, the fences are secure, and the utes are packed, that matter.
I don’t even know what a 10am wake up is anymore. Sparrow fart o’clock seems the more appropriate way to describe it. Though watching beautiful sunrises together with the crew definitely makes it worthwhile. The lingo sounds like a foreign language but being part of such an amazing team, and getting to meet many other people considered family and friends to Anna, is a great highlight of my job.
My lunch is now eaten on a crate next to the yards to the sound of cows. My makeup time is down to five minutes. I don’t give a damn about my thighs and I’m not sure I know what a manicure is anymore, and I don’t care anyway. And it is “felfies” that are important rather than selfies. Go stick your makeup where the sun doesn’t shine Ms. Moss.
