BUY FROM THE BUSH
Hope for rural communities facing the drought
Sweating through one of country’s three hottest summers on record, Australia has now entered yet another year of crippling drought. As the unprecedented conditions continue, the country has already experienced recordbreaking temperatures, with 2019 the hottest and driest year ever. The drought hit rural Australia the hardest, and money quickly dried up in farming communities. So in a bid to increase cashflow and urge citysiders to support those doing it tough, a farmer’s wife in the small town of Warren in NSW’s Central West started the
Instagram account @buyfromthebush to advertise local shops and producers. Seemingly overnight, Grace Brennan’s simple social media page took off and, thanks to the Christmas rush, generated more than $2 million for struggling country towns.
“I really just wanted to be productive and help in a pretty helpless situation with the drought,” Brennan tells WHO. “When my sisters come out from the city, they often want to pop into the local boutique and shop. So I had this idea that if we could just broadcast all the beautiful things that are here to the masses, I knew there’d be a market for them.”
To her, the success of Buy From the Bush was almost too good to be
true. After just five months, the page now has more than 200,000 followers, and has increased some businesses’ revenue by as much as 300 per cent, created jobs and put ‘locally made’ back on the market.
“I think there’s a move towards caring about where your things come from,” Brennan explains of the movement’s achievements. “I kept hearing from people who were using Buy From the Bush that they loved knowing their money was going towards a particular business owner and knowing a little bit about their story. I think that’s probably a broader trend that Buy From the Bush is tapping into; people might be a bit over the aggregate online shopping with the little shopping cart in the corner.”
While media coverage and campaigns such as Buy a Bale, and Fiver for a Farmer, are incredible ways to help the community, people often don’t fully understand the impact of these extended periods of drought, says Brennan. For her hometown of Warren, the whole mood of the community has changed.
“Often when we think or feel about drought it’s about a farmer in the paddock, but the impact is so much broader than that. Small businesses in rural communities that aren’t focused on agriculture are often the first casualties because they are relying on cashflow from farming communities, and those farming communities stop spending because they have stopped making money,” she explains of the knock-on effects of the climate emergency.
“There’s this feeling that hope was evaporating a little bit. Little things, like the school fundraiser being cancelled because nobody was buying tickets, and people moving away and husbands going looking for work. Everyone is ‘head down and get the job done’, but at the same time there’s this growing feeling of ‘Oh my god, when is this thing going to end?’”
Last year, all of NSW was declared droughtaffected, and 65 per cent of Queensland was impacted, along with parts of the Murray-Darling Basin in South Australia and parts of Western Australia. With almost the entire nation engulfed by these hot and dry conditions, shocking footage emerged of struggling farmers and emaciated animals.
But what really brought Australia to its knees was the apparent link between the drought and people taking their own lives. In 2018, the suicide rate for agricultural workers was about double the general male population, sitting at 32.2 compared with 16.6 per 10,000. According to BeyondBlue, the suicide rate in very remote areas of Australia is more than double that of major cities. The drought was, and still is,
“I wanted to be productive in a … helpless situation”
shattering entire towns.
“Often, the conversation is around what the government can do, but I think there was a real appetite at the community level to help with the drought and help rural communities – but not knowing how to,” Brennan says.
By giving those who wanted to help a hub from which to launch their efforts, Buy From The Bush was an instant success. “That’s what drought does – it makes you have a crack,” Brennan says of starting the Insta account.
But despite Brennan’s success, she extends a poignant reminder that the drought’s not over yet. “We got some unbelievable, transformative rain recently and there is such a shift in energy, but the impact of the last few years is going to play out for some time yet,” she explains. “It’s not as though the drought’s over as soon as it rains; it’s a slow graft back. Buy From the Bush is less about crisis relief and more about long-term investment in rural communities, and celebrating what they have to offer beyond the drought.”
If you or someone you know needs support, help is available from Lifeline on 13 11 14.