A WOMAN’S PLACE
If you want some idea of the slice of Oz that 35-year-old Annabelle Coppin manages, picture a cattle station twice the size of the Australian Capital Territory. “But that’s not massive up here,” insists the fifth-generation pastoralist with typical understatement. “It’s actually pretty average.”
Annabelle has owned the remote 240,000-hectare Yarrie Station since 2015, when she bought the property from her parents, Lang and Ann. She has since leased a neighbouring 200,000 hectares, enabling her to run up to 6000 head of cattle in Western Australia’s remote Pilbara.
Succession planning was thorny for the Coppins. Throughout her youth, her father had a conservative view of “women’s work”.
“You could do the mustering, clean the house, keep the garden nice, do the books, do cattle work. But you shouldn’t have to weld or fix something,” she laughs. “To be fair, that was not just my old man, it was society in general.”
Initially, Lang was sceptical that his daughter was up to the job of running a cattle station, but she talked him around. “That was a victory,” she says, grinning. And to see Annabelle at work on Yarrie is to know that he made the right choice. Her authority is clear as she navigates stock through the cattle yards or sits by the campfire, quietly, confidently talking her team through the next day’s plan.
When she’s not in the yards, Annabelle can be found flying a chopper, fixing a bore, dumping out the sewage system, butchering, wet-season burning or strategic planning.“That’s the cool thing about my job,” she enthuses. “There is no typical day.”
Her team is largely female. “That’s not intentional, it just happens that way. Lots of women apply to work here,” she says, pointing out that around 80 per cent of applicants to the northern cattle industry are women. She’s not sure exactly why. “But there are now a lot of head stockwomen and women managing stations, so there are more role models.”
Annabelle hopes that the flood of women into the industry will finally normalise farming as a career choice. “It’d be nice to think that, if my daughters choose to work in ag, it’s not unusual. It doesn’t cause a raised eyebrow.” Although, Annabelle insists that for her girls – Tanami, three, and one-year-old Daisy – there will be no pressure to take the reins. “I want them to be able to do whatever they would like, as long as they’re doing something good in the world,” she says.
Juggling the demands of raising two daughters while running a cattle empire is, Annabelle says, her greatest challenge, but she has rock-solid support: her mum, Ann, who lives at Yarrie, and her husband, Thomas Fox, owner and publican at the historic Ironclad Hotel, 75km away in Marble Bar. The couple married in 2016 after “Foxy” proposed by spelling out the letters “Annabelle Marry Me” with giant rocks that she could see from her chopper.
With a farming pedigree like hers – Yarrie has been in her father’s family since the 1880s, while her maternal grandfather was the inspiration for the cattle station manager in novel/film A Town
Like Alice – Annabelle has her eye on the future of this wide, red land.
“My purpose is to produce good, natural, safe food,” she says. “And to leave this country in a better state for my girls.” And then, suddenly remembering her promise not to predetermine her girls’ future, she adds: “Or whoever’s kids it turns out to be.”