Clover Hill Diaries – Join Me and Be the Change

Image credit Sylvia Liber

I am deep in the late 1800s for my novel, working through co-operative records, newspapers, council minutes, and the small details that tell you how people actually lived. The book is a historical novel set in a dairy valley on the NSW South Coast at the turn of the twentieth century. The further I go, the more familiar the patterns feel.

I grew up a sixth-generation dairy farmer. By the time I came along, technology was everywhere on the farm. The cows were unimpressed. They still needed milking 365 days a year, twice a day, sometimes three. The machines changed. The stories stayed.

My mother milked cows before and after school. Her mother did the same. I noticed how normal it all sounded.

My father had one rule. “Never ever ever learn to milk a cow.” He wasn’t joking. He made it clear to my sister and me that our younger brother would inherit the farm. There would be nothing for us to inherit. That rule came from his mother, who hated milking cows and moved heaven and earth to make sure her daughter had an education. He carried that lesson forward. That advice probably did more for my feminism than any book I read later.

My father’s logic belonged to the nineteenth century. Sons inherited. Daughters adjusted. It is now very outdated, and it deserves to be named as such.

My father is gone. My brother sold the farm. The logic did not survive either.

That family arrangement was not unusual. It sits squarely inside what the historical record shows.

The Illawarra co-operative story is usually told through factories, boards, and balance sheets. What sits underneath it is work done by whole families, organised around necessity rather than choice, as documented in Illawarra Co-operatives: The First One Hundred Years (University of Wollongong, 2014).

Most dairy farms in the late nineteenth century were small, around 30 to 60 hectares. Life for men, women, and children was exhausting and relentless, shaped by weather, seasons, and livestock. Every day, a family spent about four hours milking an average herd of thirty cows. There were no days off.

Men’s labour was constant and physical. They cleared land, fenced paddocks, planted and harvested feed, cared for stock, maintained buildings, and carted milk and butter to market over poor roads and long distances. Their work was visible.

Women’s labour ran alongside this. Women ran households, cooked and cleaned, bore and raised large families, drove herds, milked twice a day, sterilised equipment, tended poultry, pigs, and gardens, and rose as early as 2am in summer to prepare butter for market. In poorer families, women took on heavier outdoor work as well.

Children worked before and after school, when school was possible at all. At Kiama Public School, the timetable was adjusted to fit around milking. Education bent to agriculture, not the other way around.

Butter making was slow and physically demanding, but it mattered because butter paid the bills. Cream rose when it could. Sometimes it soured. It was still skimmed, ripened, churned by hand, and packed for market.

This is the pressure co-operation responded to.

From the late 1880s into the 1890s, factories shifted part of this work into shared systems. Separators, refrigeration, and rail transport mattered. So did the effect on daily life. Time pressure eased. Physical exhaustion reduced. Risk moved out of kitchens and sheds and into collective arrangements. The work still depended on women, but it no longer sat entirely on their backs.

Women were never named as founders or directors. Yet the system depended on their labour, endurance, and availability. Co-operation did not remove women’s work. It reorganised it.

This is where Joseph Weston enters the story.

As editor and proprietor of the Kiama Independent, Weston used the newspaper to argue for co-operation as a response to how work was actually being carried out in the district. He wrote about structure, not sentiment. He brought labour that had been treated as private into public discussion and made it part of the economic conversation.  After this much time in his columns, I have developed an entirely unreasonable fondness for him.

Local newspapers did more than report. They shaped what communities thought could change. Weston used the platform he had.

This is not about men granting permission. It is about who had access to the microphone, and what they chose to say into it.

A later layer of visibility comes from historical scholarship. The 2014 history Illawarra Co-operatives: The First One Hundred Years records women’s labour throughout the system. One pattern stands out. Women are named largely in contemporary chapters. In the foundational period, women’s labour is described in detail, but individual women are not identified. The work is present. The names are not.

My work begins there.

My book is relevant now because communities still decide who women are faster than they listen to who they might be. The Illawarra co-operative movement worked because entire families carried it. Some men used their access to make that visible at the time. The task now is to keep it visible.