The Invisible Farmer Project

The Invisible Farmer project seeks to address the historical and contemporary invisibility of Australian farming women and to celebrate the creative and vital role that women play in sustaining Australian farms and rural communities. The project involves a partnership between Museum Victoria and the University of Melbourne, as well as collaboration with a range of collecting institutions and community bodies.

Join PHA (Vic) members Dr. Nikki Henningham and Catherine Forge, and Liza Dale-Hallett from Museum Victoria, as they reflect on the complications and opportunities in saving rural women’s history.

• Members $3 / $5 (with pizza) 
• Non-members $6 / $10 (with pizza) 
• Please RSVP mail@phavic.org.au (please indicate if you are having pizza)

Liza Dale-Hallett is Senior Curator of Sustainable Futures at Museum Victoria. She has been actively involved in preserving the history of farming women since the 1980s and was instrumental in establishing the Victorian Women on Farms Collection at Museum Victoria in the early 2000s. She is the curatorial lead of the Invisible Farmer Project.

Catherine Forge was Curator of the Invisible Farmer Project in 2015 and has a strong interest in the history of farm women. She wrote her history honours thesis on the Victorian Women on Farms Gathering Collection in 2007 and has since worked as a Research Associate on the Collection as well as conducting a number of oral history interviews with rural women across Victoria.

Dr. Nikki Henningham is the Executive Officer of the Australian Women's Archives Project (AWAP), a collaborative digital project housed at the eScholarship Research Centre at the University of Melbourne. As well as conducting archival research for projects published by the AWAP, she has undertaken many oral history projects for the National Library of Australia’s Oral History and Folklore Branch.  She was a member of the team that in 2014 published the first online encyclopedia of Australian Women and Leadership, and is currently working on a project investigating the life narratives of Australian women lawyers. She received the National Archives of Australia’s Ian McLean award in 2005 for her work in locating records relating the experience of Australian migrant women.