We just had to watch ‘Find a Farmer a Wife’ on tv. Curiosity got the better of me, it just sounded so appalling.
I hope all the blokes who end up with a live-in arrangement as a result of this show, get a pre-nuptial/pre-defacto agreement. Because the odds are that more than one will end up accidentally choosing a ‘hectare hunter’ (in Imperial measurements, it’s ‘acre chaser’). (Interesting to note that it appeared to be all owners who featured in the tv programme, not rural employees; presumably they are considered to not have good enough prospects to entice a city girl to move out of the suburbs.)
When the novelty of the romantic life as the country squire’s wife wears off, and the reality sets in regarding farm life – the usual small business headaches plus extra hard work, more wildly fluctuating bank balances due to unpredictable seasons, commodity prices and interest rates, and the distance from fancy town luxuries (not to mention the reduced access to essentials such as education and healthcare) – look out for the family farm’s future.
There are scores of success stories of women who’ve decided to move from cities and make a permanent home in rural and remote areas, and genuinely taken to it like a duck to water. Especially amongst those who have made a deliberate decision to move to the bush to live and work because they prefer it to city life, i.e. there was no partner on the scene influencing their decision, when they decided to move to the bush. This is a solid foundation for living in the bush happily in the long term, should they end up meeting and marrying a local bloke later.
Younger generations of women tend to have higher expectations and are less willing to make career and other sacrifices; certainly in the long term. Women who have moved to the bush specifically because they’ve met a farmer often don’t end up happy in the long term. There are increasing numbers of heartbreak stories, concerning husbands persuaded to sell the farm that has been in the family for generations. The asset-rich/cash poor situation turns into a flash house on ‘acreage’ on the fringe of a city, because the wife is missing all she grew up with, and is sick of ‘going without’ due to lack of cash. Ironic, because the bloke she fell in love with, is like he is because of where he grew up and what he does. Most of the time, if you make a bloke move out of the bush, you leave a good slab of him behind. There’s a bit missing for the rest of his life.
There’s never any guarantees with marriage, but farmers greatly increase the odds of long term success by getting together with women who have chosen to move into the bush for reasons other than chasing a partner, or those who have grown up in rural areas, because they completely understand what life in the bush entails. It’s common sense. In the short term people with very different backgrounds and upbringing will get along, but usually cracks will start to appear as time goes by, particularly as kids get older, or when times are extra tough. They must share a fundamental love of the bush, or it’s a recipe for unhappiness.
So ‘Find a Farmer a Wife’ might be a short-term loneliness solution, but it looked more to me like a recipe for heartbreak sooner or later, nice though it would be to believe in the romantic ideal.
Tags: Living in the country and remote areas, Image of the bush, Australian outback TV and film