For Matilda Ferguson, there was no greater calling than the remote communities and landscapes she came from, lived for, and was called back to. In 2024 Matilda lost her life in an accident while working in the rugged environs she was so passionate about. While making sense of her passing is impossible, creating meaning from her life is what those who loved her are striving to do.
Together with her inspiring mum, Chris Ferguson, her partner Lachie, her brother Will and stepdad Greg, the Australian Rural Leadership Foundation (ARLF) are pleased to launch an appeal to raise $12,000 to fully fund a scholarship in Matilda’s memory that will support a young female leader to participate in the TRAIL Emerging Leaders Program
Forged way out west
As time passed, I began to recognise that there was something drawing me to my country, a pull that came from some dark place inside of me. A certain love of the bush that cannot be taught, a certain love that morphs into a condition where an existence outside of it is no existence at all. My mum is the same, so is her mum. And who knows, maybe my great-grandmother was and all of the women who came before us, perhaps they paved that red dirt road and lined it with blossoming Wattle and Mulga trees for us.
Matilda Ferguson moved to the red dirt of Wanaaring in North Western NSW when she was nine. It was as though the place had been waiting for her. As her family had contemplated uprooting from their home on the outskirts of Bathurst, it was Matilda whose sage childhood insight sealed the deal.
“If we don’t do it, we’ll never know if we could have done it.”
For her mother, Chris, it was a return to the lifestyle on the land that she had known as a child. And it would begin a process of putting down roots, far and deep into the soil of a place that had captivated her just as much as it would her daughter. The move was the start of a consuming and rewarding chapter running Myrnong Station at Wanaaring, forging a goat breeding and backgrounding enterprise across more than 61,000 acres and working hard to improve the land through their stewardship.
For a young Matilda, it was a dramatic and defining change. Education meant studying through Broken Hill School of the Air 450km away and grappling with isolation. But as she developed a skill and affinity with all-things farming, her great love for the natural world took flight.
“She loved mustering and stock work – being in the thick of it,” Chris says.
In Matilda’s teens, she decided she wanted to experience boarding school, where her chief learning was just how important her connection to station life, family bonds and agriculture was. Keen to leave school early and head north for an adventure as a ringer, Chris’s compromise with her strong-willed daughter was that Matilda complete year ten, which she did, before returning home to the station, where she gained a certificate 3 in agriculture. It was a wonderful year in which Matilda worked alongside her mum, dad and brother.
When not long afterwards Matilda’s parents separated, she was once more instrumental as Chris’s 2IC, supporting her mum to continue running the property alone. As well as being spellbound by the wild land they had chosen as home, Matilda and Chris were kindred in their love of literature, reading and good art and poetry.
In the raw pain of life without Matilda, Chris’s eloquence about the significance of her daughter’s relationship with rural Australia – in particular the Far West – is striking:
“Trying to distil it was something that Matilda and I often spoke about. It was just life… It was all one. Just by being alive you were connected to the spirit of the place; connected to all other beings that were there. It was simply by breathing that we were part of it. I still very much feel Matilda here, and she’s part of it all.”
Leaving home to find her place
In a Roo smudged car,
With an Esky of Home grown meat
And a bag of Lemons
On the backseat.
Over a Puddled road,
To a faraway City
And a sedate Job
And her University Life.
She left today.
My Daughter.
Long Way Gone.
And me;
Standing
By the Lemon tree
Cool breeze on a Wet face
I turn and get back
On with things
On with things.
Distance.
This tyranny of distance.
Matilda completed a Bachelor of International Studies with the University of New England, while in the thick of contract mustering and helping Chris on Myrnong. In 2016, she jumped in the car and headed for Canberra to study a Graduate Diploma of International Affairs. In typical style, she knuckled down to working night shifts at a local Maccas to support herself during her studies.
But then, a job as a program coordinator with the Australian Rural Leadership Foundation caught her eye, and she joined the ARLF team in late 2016. Her colleague, Gemma Gordon, remembers reading Matilda’s impressive and eclectic resume.
“The picture I had was not the articulate, quietly spoken, stunning and gentle soul that walked in,” Gemma laughs.
It was a meeting of minds that quickly transmuted into a strong and beautiful friendship – “two country kids living in Canberra.” And for all the “polish and professionalism” Matilda demonstrated in her office role in the Capital, Gemma says “she had the soul of a cheeky old bushy.”
Matilda became a highly valued part of the ARLF team, and she found a hospitable and aligned environment for her interest in helping rural people and places to be broadly represented, understood and supported.
“She loved the people that came through our doors for programs because she was them and they were her,” Gemma says.
“She started out as a program coordinator and ended up working with partnerships. She fundamentally understood where the organisations coming to the ARLF to fund leadership development were coming from. Seeing women represented in these programs mattered to her,” Gemma says.
After her time with the ARLF, Matilda headed to Forbes for a role working with the NSW Department of Primary Industries. But the compulsion of home was never far from her mind and heart. She pointed her car on the long return trip to Wanaaring time and again, and when a global pandemic struck, it was the catalyst Matilda needed to head west for good.
That lifeblood
Dusk offers a dim refuge from the scalding heat of the day, the water cooling on my skin. Water – that lifeblood of this landscape, providing life, and therefore beauty in places least expected.
While she travelled and worked, Matilda wore the red dirt of the semi-arid rangelands she and her family worked in a locket around her neck. The soil seemed to sing in her ears and wait for her to return. With Matilda’s family also running a property at Yantabulla in the Far North West corner of NSW, she was passionate about the people dedicated to caring for the land and creating opportunities in places many Australians can only imagine living. She was pulled not just by the land, but the people too.
“It was the deep need and understanding that you’re not going to be happy away. You have to give in to it. That point came for her, and it was just amazing to watch when she came back out here. She just got stronger and happier,” Chris recalls.
Part of that happiness included Matilda meeting her partner, Lachie, a contract fencer with whom she joined forces to build up a business and a team working on fencing projects out on the road. When this venture was thriving, Matilda stepped away in July 2023 to establish her own property management company, Outwest Management Group, whose ‘OMG’ acronym she took great delight in.
She put in some extraordinary hard yards “proving herself in a man’s world,” Gemma reflects.
“She was commuting between Yantabulla, Wanaaring and Salisbury Downs, where her business had taken her. Distance was irrelevant. She had no fear of getting in a not flash vehicle and wandering across the real backyards of Far West NSW. She had just got a great team together who were performing at their best,” Gemma says.
And, always looking for ways to give back, Matilda had just successfully nominated to join the board of Landcare NSW as a director.
For Chris, there was an immense sense of pride in Matilda, mingled with frustration that she couldn’t yet offer her daughter a sustainable place in their pastoral operations.
“She would say to me that she and Lachie were doing their own thing really well and not to worry … They were right on the brink, and that’s what brings us undone. She was so close.
What we have now
I certainly hope that I’m not the last of our line to venture down this path, for maybe I have a daughter one day and maybe I don’t. But the future is not where the promise lies; it is in what we have now, in our scarred and weather-beaten hands that have unintentionally led each other to where we are at this moment in time.
After the interminably long, yet unbearably fast year that has passed since Matilda’s death, Gemma and some of Matilda’s other ARLF colleagues headed to Yantabulla to visit Chris and sit by Matilda’s final resting place in a very old country cemetery (which has been immaculately re-fenced by Lachie).
“The community have strung fairy lights up and she is tucked in under a mulga tree. It’s very beautiful.” Gemma says.
At Matilda’s funeral service, Gemma was awed to witness the community around Yantabulla come together in a village that Chris describes as “a hall, three street lights, a public telephone box and no residents.” Hundreds of cars bearing number plates from across state lines were parked, and “the hall was heaving” with people who loved Matilda.
To have all that she was and all that she was yet to do cut short at just 33 years of age has left all those who knew Matilda grappling with the heart-breaking and unanswerable riddle of how to be without her.
A scholarship in Matilda’s name to support another young leader whose heart and soul is similarly enmeshed in the bush, is something that Chris is “chuffed” to see.
“Something like this is not just about her. It’s about the people she’s left behind and how it can help all of us. It’s a way of honouring her, and it’s also something positive to be done in the wake of her death … It’s a way for the things that were so good about her to be carried on and continued in a small way,” Chris says.
Gemma feels this keenly as well.
“Matilda was creating a pathway for people like her to really live and embrace the life she so desperately wanted, living on the land and farming as a woman. There’s a strong maternal bloodline in her family, and she was the next chapter of that … This idea of fundraising in her memory, this is us showing up for the young women she was paving the way for; keeping her spirit alive by ensuring all her hard work is not for nothing.
“When she died, we lost a profound contribution. It’s through these methods that we can try to capture some of the impact that she would have had herself.”
