Victoria Brown Poet

SEPWA Ladies' Day 2009 and what a day it was! Great speakers throughout the day, including inspirational Kirsten Skraha the RIRDC Rural Women's Award Winner 2009; Rochelle Adonis, amazing Canadian French Pastry Chef with a fascinating life story; pigheaded (her own words) Sonja Johnson, Silver Medalist at the Beijing Olympics in the Equestrian competition and Sabrina Hahn, gardening guru and total nutter! We laughed, we cried. It was a fabulous day and night, and if you weren't there you missed a real treat.

There was quite an attractive photo of Sabrina & I taken at the dinner that evening, but we liked this one more, and I've called it "The Two Nuts", which seemed appropriate given Sabrina's Dinner Speech. She stood on a coffee table, as she is knee high to a grasshopper, with a glass of red in one hand (which no-one seemed able to prise off her, and as she has a black belt in kick boxing no-one seemed overly keen to either) and regaled us with wonderfully politically incorrect tales of her life up north. These sort of people really should be bottled. Note I say bottled, not pickled. We were all fairly pickled by the end of the night anyway.

Local girls who added to this wonderful day included Michelle Barrett from HomebodE who not only shared her business sucess story with us, but the emotional roller coaster she is currently on having a severely injured three year old in Princess Margaret Hospital at the moment. We had a 'Parky' style interview with author of 'Red Dust' Fleur McDonald, who absolutley loathes public speaking, but did a fabulous job. She has a great website.

"Just google Fleur McDonald and I come up in first spot" she said.

"Just google Victoria Brown and I come up as a 23 year old American pole dancer" I replied.

And the list of wonderful women continued with Gill and Mandy providing delicious morning and afternoon teas from their enterprise 'Biccies', to Gail Adamson-Reynolds talking about the indigenous culture tour and bush tucker business her family runs, Kepa Kurl. Gail is a great bird who had us in stitches telling us how they had tried to get grants from the government for various projects in their business. Cramming an hour and a half of info into forty minutes, she delivered some classic lines, including;

"We put in for one government grant thinking 'You beauty, we'll get it, we're black....but we didn't!"

One of her messages to us was 'If you haven't been on a local tourist trip offered by a business in your town you should. How else can you promote your region if you haven't experienced what's on offer?'

Mae Connelly from Farmanco spoke to us on Grain Marketing in the most entertaining and engaging way,if that is humanely possible, and Crawford Taylor from Diamond Sponsor Rabobank seemed an exceptionally happy chappy, particularly at the dinner where he was the only man in a room full of drop dead gorgeous women. Onya Crawford!

Congratulations to the SEPWA Ladies Committee once again. If you weren't there this year, make sure you are in 2010.