Claudia Caporn, Women Of The Land (PORTRAIT 2021)

Women Of The Land is an ongoing series documenting the many female farmers working, often invisibly, in Australia's agriculture industry. Historically, the public face of Australian agriculture has been represented by white, heterosexual men, substantiated by hegemonic discourses of masculinity and traditional gender relations. The almost exclusively male representations of agriculture have silenced and marginalised women, and constructed a female farming identity of domesticated, rational and subservient femininity. Before 1994 women in Australia weren't even legally allowed to list their occupation as ‘farmer’. Instead they were merely seen as ‘silent partners’, or even just ‘farmer's wives’. But even after this change, women on farms remain invisible, being severely misrepresented, undervalued, and dismissed. This project is a response to the systemic ignorance towards women's participation in farming, and is spurred from my upbringing as a sixth generation farmer on my family's 12,000-acre farm in the Wheatbelt of Australia, where for my entire life I have existed within a community of determined, tough, and physically and emotionally unwavering women, who despite all their work and input into their farms, are pushed into the shadows of their husbands, sons or partners. These images are my attempt at redefining the identity and narratives of rural farming women, and subverting the sexist, conventional representations that have stripped women of their contributions.

Images have been resized for web display, which may cause some loss of image quality. Note: Original high-resolution images are used for judging.