ISLAND LIFE

Anne Heazlewood runs Merseybank Jersey Stud with her husband Geoff at Latrobe.

Her family has had the 56ha farm for several generations and it seems caring for cows is in Heazlewood’s blood.

A talented photographer, she has captured award-winning photographs of her cows on film for many years and developed the prints in her darkroom prior to it being flooded in a storm in 2016. Her framed images have been sold locally and also published on calendars and in farming and photography magazines in Australia and overseas.

More recently the cow whisperer, who has about 220 milking cows on her property, has attracted attention for using homeopathic remedies to keep her cows calm, applying a diluted spray to their muzzle to pacify them during calving time.

It is just one of the udderly unconventional approaches she has taken while working with cows, which she describes as “endearing” and “peaceful” creatures who are “nice to be around’’.

In 2006 one of Heazlewood’s cows, a two-year-old heifer called Theresa, had a hind leg amputated after falling down an embankment. During a radio interview Anne and Geoff put out a lighthearted call for someone to make a prosthetic leg for their prized cow and were surprisingly swamped with offers. Theresa ended up being fitted with a timber and fibreglass limb. She later fell pregnant and went on to birth a healthy calf and lived happily for several years before her pelvis and other hind leg grew weak and she was unable to stand.

Heazlewood’s dad started the jersey stud the year she was born.

“I was in the pram … out in the paddock before I could walk,’’ she says. “My parents always said the reason my hair is so funny is because it was licked by cows and calves as soon as it grew.”