Women all over the world gathered to celebrate the 2017 International Women's Day on Wednesday.
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This year, the campaign asked people to #BeBoldForChange, by either calling on themselves and others to help create a more inclusive, gender equal world.
Member for Gilmore Ann Sudmalis invited women from various community groups to her Nowra office to sit down and share their stories in the hope of inspiring others.
“Women don’t speak up often enough and because we don’t and because everything we do is behind the scenes nobody really knows what we do, so it’s time to celebrate what we do,” Ms Sudmalis said.
“That’s what today is all about – celebrating what you do and saying thank you.”
One of the many stories to come out of the morning tea was from Nowra’s Vivienne Henry, who moved here from New Zealand in 1961 and found herself heavily entrenched in a male dominated industry.
“I married an Australian dairy farmer and came to live here, unfortunately we only had 19 years of marriage and he passed away,” Mrs Henry said.
“I then had to decide if I would go back to New Zealand or stay here and so I decided to stay and run the farm, which was milking 120 cows at the time.”
Mrs Henry gave herself ten years to run the farm and raise her children.
“I had twin boys and two girls and the twins were 13, I thought by then they’ll be 23 and should know what they want to do,” she said.
“The 10 years went along and I could see they were keen about farming so I stayed and because of that I became very heavily involved with the dairy industry.”
Mrs Henry would attend dairying meetings where she was greatly outnumbered by her male counterparts.
“I could see women were not being well enough informed about what was happening in the industry,” she said.
“So we formed a Women in Dairying group and honestly it was the best thing we could have done because it embraced the women in the industry and they got to know what was happening.”
After Mrs Henry established the group she entered an ABC Rural Women Competition and won.
“That opened a lot of doors for me, then I then became involved in NSW Women in Agriculture and I became the president of that for five years,” she said.
“Once the boys were able to take over, we grew and grew and bought more land and now we are milking 300 cows.”