THE DRESSMAKER
TO SUPPORT HER FAMILY FARM THROUGH THE DROUGHT, ANNABELLE KENNEDY BEGAN A CHILDREN’S CLOTHING LABEL IN NYNGAN, NSW.
Annabelle Kennedy founded a children’s wear label to help support her family’s farm near Nyngan in NSW through the drought.
THE KENNEDYS HAVE lived near Nyngan for three generations and have experienced almost everything nature can throw at them. But when Duck Creek ceased to flow earlier this year as part of a drought mitigation project to extend supply, it was a first for this resilient farming family. While the dry creek bed that snakes through their property became a novel place for Dom and Annabelle Kennedy’s children to explore, it’s a sign of how dire things had become in this remote part of NSW about 550 kilometres north-west of Sydney.
Dom and Annabelle and their three children Max, seven, Lola, three, and 18-month-old Florence live at Half Moon, a mixed farm 60 kilometres north-west of Nyngan that has been in drought for over three years. Together, the extended Kennedy family farm 16,000 hectares of land and usually grow wheat, barley and fava beans, as well as cattle and fat lambs on the rich black soil floodplains. However, to cope with the ongoing dry, the family completely destocked 200 head of cattle and reduced the 11,000 Dorper flock down to 5500 breeding ewes, hand feeding them for two years. But even in these tough times, there has been a silver lining.
While the paddocks have been bare, Annabelle’s clothing business, Kennedy the Label, has been thriving. She launched in 2017 after struggling to find quality clothing for her own young family and now sells a collection of linen pieces online. “I just couldn’t find those classic pieces that my mum bought for me as a child, without writing and imagery and with good quality fibres. And, when I did find them, they were really expensive,” Annabelle explains.
During the planning process to create the brand, the 30-year-old encountered “plenty of ups and downs” before eventually finding the right manufacturer. Her early pieces were sold at Christmas pop-up shops in Nyngan and Dubbo, but after the release of her second summer collection online, sales began to climb. More recently, the successful Buy from the Bush social media campaign sent sales skyrocketing.
“It is such a thrill to put pen to paper in my studio on our property and then have little girls and boys all over Australia and around the world wearing my designs,” she explains. “That blows my mind!”
Annabelle packs each item in her studio at Half Moon and delivers them to the post office in Nyngan when she does the school run. Rather than being a barrier, her remote location has become part of the label’s story and she has discovered many customers are curious about their life on the land. “It must make us a little more relatable and
I get a lot of feedback. So many people email and say: ‘I really hope you get rain.’ The personal contact is really important to me and the best part of it.”>
“There are a lot of young farmers in our area and before we turned 30, we’d seen the worst drought in 100 years...”
Establishing the business and immersing herself in the local community has also helped Annabelle transition to country living. She grew up on the NSW South Coast at Bateman’s Bay and met Dom when they were both only 15 and going to boarding schools in Sydney. After school, Dom worked with Elders in Wagga Wagga while Annabelle pursued a career in performing arts, studying at the New York Film Academy and the University of California in Los Angeles.
“I had wonderful opportunities but I learnt more than anything that it wasn’t what I wanted to do with my life.
At 18 years old, I realised I’d rather be with my friends and Dom,” she explains.
The couple married in 2012 , moved to Half Moon and Max was born the following year. “All of a sudden I was a 23-year-old girl in the middle of nowhere, 10 hours’ drive from my family with no friends and a newborn baby,” she recalls. “But we made a lot of lifelong friends through our local rugby club and mobile playgroup service.”
The couple relish raising their young family in the bush. They spend time together doing sheep and cattle work and sharing smoko or having a bush barbecue with the rest of the Kennedy family.
“I love the freedom it allows our children,” Annabelle says, explaining that Max now plays on the flying fox across Duck Creek that Dom and his brother built when they were boys. “It teaches them resilience; that even when times are tough there’s always a way forward.” Dom couldn’t agree more. “I appreciate the time we get to spend with our kids. I can take them out to work with me and it’s a great lifestyle for them to grow up with,” he says.
Fortunately, since we visited, the Kennedys received over 200 millimetres of rain. With fodder crops in the ground and Duck Creek is flowing once more, there’s a sense of hope.
It’s here that this young mum has found her purpose and community. “What makes living out here easy for me is being surrounded by awesome people. There are a lot of young farmers in our area and before we turned 30, we’d seen the worst drought in 100 years, as well as the birth of children and the loss of family members and friends. Together, as a community, we have picked up the pieces and I would choose to live here over anywhere else.”
For more information, visit kennedythelabel.com.au or follow @kennedythelabel on Instagram.
Read more about Annabelle in The Style Diaries on page 114.