GTAg, CWIPPS and the Power of Storytelling via Social Media

By Annabelle Brayley

There have been lots of occasions in recent years when I’ve had reason to be grateful that we didn’t have social media when we were young. All those B&S Balls, back yard barbecues, epic road parties and Sunday sessions at the pubs were ours to treasure as precious memories with no fear they might be plastered all over the internet via our party-line telephones. 

And there is no doubt, some of today’s social media can be a quagmire of nastiness when misused and/or abused.

Used well and responsibly, it is also one of the most effective means of communicating useful, positive, educative, community connecting information.

I’ve been a Facebook user since 2011 but nine years ago, I ventured into Twitter to stalk doctors, searching for subjects for Bush Doctors. That very admission clearly has some prickles on it, but my intentions were good, and I found some cracking docs because, back then, it was a lane they used frequently to share medical information and updates. 

While I was there, initially watching from the brink, I noticed a woman called Norann Voll who posted beautiful, peaceful photographs of wonderful looking country, fabulous food and her Jack Russell, Bear, on Danthonia, her family’s Bruderhof community farm in northern NSW. Curiosity being a prerequisite to knowledge, following her was inevitable.

I learned to share sunset photos from South West Queensland (SWQ), video clips of my 90-year-old mother playing the piano and wishes for peace upon everyone’s houses. And I watched Norann quietly build an impressive cache of followers just as curious as I. Then Twitter became X and I spat the dummy and ran! 

Back on Facebook and Instagram, most people were - and still are - sharing good stories and behaving well as they exercised their right to write freely about whatever it is that prompts any of us to ‘share with the world’.

I was reading stories and enjoying posts from farmers, graziers and pastoralists who were beginning to recognise that the only way to address some of the misinformation shared by the more extreme environmentalists was to share what really happens on their farms.

Meanwhile, around Australia, a growing appreciation of the trend towards regenerative farming practices had been osmosing across the nation. Charles Massey, Peter Andrews, Terry McCosker are names synonymous with the term ‘regenerative farming’. Charles Massey’s Call of the Reed Warbler, gently ignited awareness of the advantages of farming in partnership with nature guided by the song lines of the land. 

Riding alongside a growing acceptance in agriculture that our climate is evolving is a rising awareness of the benefits of preventative and nutritive farming management rather than reactionary. 

In 2022, sitting in a meeting in St George (Queensland) discussing community navigation and social connectivity with Kate Venables (then the executive director of Catholic Care SWQ), Trish McKenzie, Liz Hill and Rosie Bryant, the subject of sharing women’s stories segued onto the agenda. Straight away Kate said, ‘We need to talk to Marlyn McInnerney. She’s a Research Fellow who works with Ben (Lyons) at RECoE’. 

Marlyn is a Canadian import who, before she lived in the Toowoomba area, spent many years living with her farming family in the Surat district, networking and engaging people in ways that brought them together and strengthened the fabric of their communities. 

In 2022, while we were discussing the possibilities, Marlyn was being awarded her PhD; her thesis Women in farming families in the Darling Downs and South West Queensland: navigating discourses towards wellbeing, resilience and empowerment reflected her fierce belief in the strength, tenacity and empathy of women in farming communities.

And so GTAg was born. Girls Talking Ag delivered an opportunity for women in the SWQ who were involved in sustainable production on their farms or in the region to attend a workshop in their local area that would strengthen their community network, identify their chosen medium and enhance their storytelling skills.

Four workshops and 34 women later, the project was deemed a resounding success. In the aftermath of the initial face-to-face sessions, the women were offered mentoring opportunities with Gillian Fennel, the social media whiz otherwise known as @stationmum101 (Instagram), Alice Armitage, journalist and founder of Pandaemonium, Shannon Crocker, podcaster and Thermomix superstar aka A Country Mum (Facebook), cameraman and film maker, Peter Murray (Facebook), or storytelling with me.

Not all of the women chose to be mentored and not all of those who were went on to build on their skills but all of them learned skills that developed their capacity and confidence to share their stories especially on social media. 

Two of the women, Andrea McKenzie from Cunnamulla and Nikki Thompson from Wallumbilla, have been published in print media; Andrea in Pandaemonium guided by Alice and Nikki, regularly, in Maranoa Today. As an upshot of the mentoring opportunity, Nikki had her first story published in OUTBACK Magazine in 2025.

As a result of the success of those workshops, some of the women were offered the opportunity to participate in a two-day film making workshop in Charleville, Queensland, facilitated by Pete Murray. Pete explained the need to identify their purpose and audience, and taught the participants how to work with lighting, how to record picture and voice effectively, how to compose, and edit.  

Via her Bulldust and Mulga pages, Wendy Sheehan from Trinidad Station, north of Quilpie, was already a pretty poised regular on Facebook and Instagram when she attended the initial storytelling workshop in Charleville. She credits a few tricks learned there and at the film-making workshop with honing her skills to a point where she confidently composed the story-reel entry that won her the RFDS and Elders 2024 Outback Explorer Competition. 

With a view to launching this platform under the management of Alice Armitage, GTAg evolved into Climate Women in Primary Production Stories (CWIPPS) under the Women for Food and Fibre (WfFF) label. The plan was to expand the parameters of the project and ramp up the opportunities for women to share their stories with a focus on regenerative farming and sustainability in the face drought.

Sometimes, the ducks line up and sometimes the timing is just not right. We were to launch the platform in March 2025 but then Cyclone Alfred blew into South East Queensland and scattered all the ducks! 

In May 2025, CWIPPS delivered a storytelling workshop in Guyra, New South Wales, in partnership with Southern New England Landcare. Having invited Norann Voll to present at the workshop, on the way to Guyra, Marlyn and I called in to Danthonia and I met Norann face-to-face for the first time. You’ll read Norann’s story elsewhere on the WfFF platform. Suffice to say, Danthonia is a regen farming success story and Norann brought both her excellent storytelling skills and a preview of the Danthonia regen story to the table. 

It transpired that, of the eight women who attended in Guyra, four had been encouraging and practicing regen farming principles for years within the context of their family farms. 

It became increasingly obvious that women have been underestimated and undervalued in the family farming landscape and it needs to change. And it will as more women step up and embrace the opportunity to influence perspective and change using the power of social media.

Although we were eventually able to share the successes of both GTAg and CWIPPS at the University of Southern Queensland’s Drought Forum in late May 2025, the ducks have stayed scattered. Nevertheless, it has been an absolute joy to work with all of the women who’ve been involved in the GTAg and CWIPPS projects.

I hope, sometime in future, someone might build on the foundations we’ve established and continue to empower women in agriculture to share their stories.