Beauty in the Bush Collective forms friendships

Most had never met - under usual circumstances their daily paths could never have crossed - but on a corner of Instagram they forged a connection, which became a collective to showcase farming life in all its forms and highlight their blossoming careers as photographers and artists.

The Beauty in the Bush Collective comprises 10 women, from cane farms and cattle stations in Queensland, to sheep stations in New South Wales and Victoria, a vast Northern Territory cattle property and Western Australia's Wheatbelt.

To begin with, they aimed to share their rural lives and photography via the collective's hashtag - some practise as lifestyle-based photographers, some are commercial and some work in landscape.

But they have since gone more mainstream, within a few months of meeting up via Instagram, then Whatsapp and Zoom, they decided to produce a quarterly journal, which released its first issue in September 2021 and now has a print run of 3000 copies.

And from that has grown a bigger enterprise - the collective's first book Bush Life was released in October and it has just produced its second calendar.

The book and journal can be bought on the collective's website or may be ordered through local bookshops, along with all major retailers such as Kmart, Target and Big W.

Journalist, writer and photographer Jessica Howard, who manages the collective's written work and wrote and edited Bush Life, said last year the women were all loose Instagram followers, who were aware of and liked each other's work and regularly chatted via the app.

"We all moved around the same online world,'' said Ms Howard, who hails from a Central Queensland cattle station, but now lives on and works from an acreage on the Sunshine Coast.

"For the most part these were women that I had been following for quite a while and had been chatting to online for a while.

"So when we came together it felt very natural."

Ms Howard said the journal arose from the women's collective desire to tell the stories behind the photos they were posting to the Beauty in the Bush account.

"On the posts, we were trying to tell the story behind each image and that really resonated with people,'' Ms Howard said.

"We started to get quite a bit of traction when we started telling these stories.''

The collective quickly caught the attention of two publishers - with the collective ultimately joining forces with Affirm Press, in South Melbourne, in January to create the book, Bush Life.

"We alway knew that we could do a book, we knew the work was there and we were talking about that from the beginning,'' Ms Howard said.

"When we gathered from around the country on that first Zoom call we were all so excited.

"We all loved each other's work, so it was like 'let's do something, what can we do?'.

"It was then just about creating the glue to stick all the work together - which became my job.''

Western Australian photographer Ellie Morris is among the participants - which also includes Em Leonard and Georgie Mann from western Victoria, Elena Chalker from Cowra, in NSW, Kate Nelder in the Northern Territory, and Camilla French, Henrietta Attard, Lindy Hick and Lisa Alexander from north Queensland.

Ms Morris, a Farm Weekly Young Gun who regularly contributes stunning photographs to the news pages, said she appreciated the practical aspects of being part of the collective, which offered her feedback on her work, other professional advice and helped to deliver her photographs to a wider network.

"It is helping me to capture a different audience to what I was getting already,'' said Ms Morris, while driving a header last week at her other job on a farm at Perenjori.

"And it is really cool that we are all across Australia.

The 21-year-old said, at the moment, she typically spends one day a week on her photography business, but always has her camera next to her when she is out doing farming work.

"So I am always taking photos,'' she said.

"I feel like this collective can bring a more every-day perspective on bush life - in rural photography you often get the very glamorised stuff or the extremes of fires, flood and drought - but this is just the everyday of what we do.

"Some of my favourite photos at the minute are from shearing time, my boss and his family were in the yard and I got some photos of them, without them really knowing.

"It's just that candid stuff.''

Photographer Em Leonard is one of two collective members from south western Victoria.

Ms Leonard and her husband Jack, a livestock manager, have three children, aged 5 down to a 1-year-old, and together run a small farm on about 80 hectares, near Casterton.

"I worked full-time on the farm but got into photography after I had my eldest daughter Bess,'' Ms Leonard said.

"It has always been something that I did, I'd always been involved in the arts and photography at school, but I'd got pushed towards something else for a career."

Ms Leonard pulled her camera out again to document Bess's infancy, but paid work soon followed when she caught the attention of local farming families, who asked her to start taking portraits of them onfarm, and she is now also branching into commercial and freelance media work.

"This will be my fifth year as a working photographer,'' she said.

"I mainly do family photography or rural farming families, but I am getting more into business photography, with small local creative businesses.''

Ms Leonard said the collective and its work aimed to appeal to a wide audience.

"It is for anybody who appreciates Australia and the beauty and the diverse landscapes that we have, but it is also about connection,'' she said.

"We have connected with a lot of other photographers around Australia, which is really nice.

"People jump in on our hashtag, and we love sharing other people's work and creating that community around photographers and artists who are isolated as well.

"It is not just about us, it is beyond us, and is about involving other people when and where we can.

"I think it is for country people and city people, because what we share is quite diverse and it can interest a lot of people and a lot of different groups.''

Ms Howard said significantly, as more Australians moved to the regions during and post-COVID, the collective had proven that it was possible to build careers in rural areas.

"The fact is that we are 10 women who have never met, who have formed a collective to produce two calendars, a book and a publication and this all happens remotely,'' she said

"We do everything over whatsapp, except for the meetings, which are on zoom.

"It is definitely an example of a remote workplace in action."

All the collective participants also hope that the work will help address the growing city-country divide.

Ms Howard said during the development of the book, the publishers urged them to keep thinking of an urban audience.

"We hope country people will see the life they know and love in the work, but that it would also be appealing to an urban audience who might not know anything about the bush at all,'' she said.

"So it might be enlightening for them."

She said the collective members were often asked whether they were simplistically glorifying life in the bush.

"But we don't see it like that, drought has featured fairly heavily, but that is not all we document,'' Ms Howard said.

"I think in everyone's work there is a real vibrance in the kind of life they depict, which is what we are really trying to show.

"There is an element of the work, where we are trying to inform and educate people, that we are trying to speak to a general audience."

The women also get a real kick out of knowing that in local bookshops and department stores in Melbourne's CBD, someone from the suburbs might pick up Bush Life and learn something about rural life they didn't know before.

"I hope they learn something in the process," Ms Howard said.

"We talk all the time about people understanding where their food comes from and if beautiful photography is the way into that, I think we are all happy to be the vehicle of that.

"My entire family is back on a cattle property, their livelihood depends on that - and for all 10 women in the collective, their livelihoods also depend on that.

"I think if city people understand that a little bit more, it is a good thing."

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