Road well travelled: a million miles and stories told ... whatever the weather

It was the 1960s and Cushla (Irish for "beat of my heart") Woods cut a rather dashing figure among the conservative farming folk of the district.

Kim's parents had married young; Peter Woods hailed from Rennie and Cushla from Corowa (and the iconic Upton Engineering family business).

The couple, in their 20s, decided to go out on their own on a 5000-acre (2023-hectare) cattle and cropping property at Mendooran no less.

Cushla - who "always had this flair about her", according to her daughter - started up a boutique at Gilgandra an hour's drive away - all while juggling the farming business.

She'd drive the Cortina from the farm to the shop across the bumpy, all-dirt roads with two kids under four in tow.

"We just played in the shop or out the back (my brother Lex was still in nappies)," says Kim, who also attended preschool at Gilgandra.

"I remember the fashion parades to raise money for the Royal Children's Far West Health Scheme.

"(Mum) would go on buying trips to Melbourne and bring all these beautiful high fashion, trendy brands back for the women of Gil."

But it was the suede mini-skirt that really got the locals talking.

"One old farmer said to Dad down the street one day, 'That mini-skirt is like a single-strand barbed wire fence; it protects the property but doesn't obstruct the view'!" Kim laughingly recalls.

Cushla Woods had a "very strong personality" and was adored by her devoted and steady husband Peter.

"Dad was the most incredible back stop for Mum - you know he talked about her until the day he died," Kim reveals.

She was a fabulous fashionista, gardener and, as it turns out, agri-politician.

It was around 1972 that Cushla took on the secretary's role for the Central West Pig Marketing Co-operative, supplying pigs to Dandy Bacon.

She had previously trained as a book-keeper in her father's engineering business.

"We moved to Dubbo in February 1974 - it had been a wet year - and the cattle crash was in March so they sold out just in time," Kim reveals.

"We lived at a caravan park for a few months until the new home was settled (a hobby farm of 50 acres - 20 hectares - on the outskirts of Dubbo)."

Kim's enterprising mother went on to become a director on the NSW Pork and Bacon Council, spearheading the introduction of non-bruise stock crates for pigs in the 1970s.

She was the secretary of the Dubbo Chamber of Commerce and was the first female president of Jaycees in Australia (an organisation similar to Rotary).

"Later in life she studied interior design and worked at Albury; she died at the age of 55 when I was at The Border Mail," Kim says.

When the family moved to Dubbo, her dad sold agricultural machinery and Kim attended the local high school.

She'd always wanted to be a journalist and did a stint of work experience at the Daily Liberal newspaper.

But when she started her journalism degree at Bathurst, Kim didn't like it and switched to primary teaching instead.

In a strange twist of fate the Daily Liberal rang the young college student and offered her a cadetship - "they gave me one hour to decide", Kim reveals.

Needless to say she took the job and the rest, as they say, is history.

A fresh-faced Kim was given a camera, the keys to a Holden and the Peak Hill weekly newspaper to fill.

"In one day I had to run around and get enough stories and photographs to fill eight pages, then they sent me to the (twice-weekly) Narromine News," she recalls.

"It was the early '80s and I had to do it all by myself."

The one thing Kim vividly recalls is the heat; that and the fact the air conditioner had been pulled out from above the front door of the Narromine office.

"It was 38 degrees inside and all the birds flew in and would poo all over everything," she says.

Kim's early reporting days go back to the introduction of the computer by Macquarie Publications rural media mogul John Armati.

They were hard, heady days where Kim was expected to do everything - from the front page news to sport.

"It was full on," she recalls.

But it was the people - always the people - who fuelled her passion for the job.

One of her most memorable stories as a young reporter was on Peak Hill's Barbara Millgate - believed to be the first woman in the world to give birth to a baby while in an iron lung.

"One of the strongest things I remember from the visit to the old fibro house where Mrs Millgate lived was the noise of the machine," Kim says.

"I also wondered a lot about how on earth she'd conceived a baby in that iron lung - but I wasn't game to ask her!"

Kim, who turned 60 in December 2023, has now been a journalist for nearly four decades.

She's worked at publications including The Border Mail, The Herald and Weekly Times and The Murrumbidgee Irrigator, as well as a freelance journalist.

Kim was a mainstay of the features department at The Border Mail for 11 years, and ended up overseeing its Country Mail section.

"I loved The Border Mail, although it had some interesting editors," she reveals. "In 1987 newspapers were at their peak; the number of features sections was huge - from fashion to travel and everything in between.

"Then in 1988 they introduced real estate and I loved doing that ... and look at what that grew into."

Kim then took up a job offer at The Weekly Times as head of its Albury news bureau.

She would stay in the job 14 years, clocking up more than one million kilometres as a rural reporter traversing the length and breadth of the countryside - from Mansfield to the Upper Murray and as far afield as Braidwood, Orange and even Rockhampton.

"There were a lot of saleyards around in those days - and I did them all," Kim says.

"I went through 13 Toyota Camrys working for The Weekly Times."

Kim became renowned as a specialist in livestock, agribusiness and agricultural reporting - and often that meant being out in the elements.

"I remember at Deni one year (it was during the Millennium drought of the early 2000s) the dust was so thick I couldn't see the sheep or my notepad," she says.

And she recalls trying to salvage pictures off the water damaged camera she was forced to stick under her armpit the day Corowa saleyards had 30 millimetres of rain in 20 minutes.

She always got the story - whatever the weather.

In between her rural rounds she has been on the scene for the odd spectacular news event - from a school bus explosion on the freeway to a runaway train crash at Narrandera when she was running late for a bull sale one day.

Carriages had become loose and careered down a railway track that hadn't been used for 30 years.

The intrepid reporter dashed off stories and filed photographs for the Herald Sun "who were all over stuff like that".

The year 2010 would herald the start of the 24-hour news cycle and digital media, according to Kim.

The pressure was on to serve up a continuous stream of stories - a lot of it on the fly.

When the Henty Machinery Field Days committee approached Kim and asked her to do some media work for them, it would prove a turning point.

"I thought maybe some other people out there could use my skills (and) I decided to go out on my own," she offers.

"It was a big step to leave the mother ship - I had a car, job I was well paid for and a profile - but I've enjoyed every minute of it since."

Now with her own media and communications business, Outcross Media, Kim has also been the mainstay of the media team for the Henty Machinery Field Days since 2012.

Kim loves Henty and the "tight-knit" all-women team who work tirelessly behind the scenes for most of the year to bring to life one of the biggest agricultural events on the calendar.

Among the many tasks Kim is charged with in promoting the event each year is coming up with a theme.

One of her favourites was in 2015 when John Deere celebrated its 100^th year in manufacturing.

And, if you'll pardon the pun, Kim had a field day with the ideas.

From tractor pulls and quirky cakes to a Mr and Mrs John Deere competition for the biggest die-hard JD fans, the whole thing "came off beautifully (thank God)", she laughs.

Unfortunately that was followed by a rather water-logged 2016 "when we got a bit too much rain" which saw tractors having to rescue bogged buses and vehicles from the car parks.

"At the time (long-standing HMFD committee member) Milton Taylor said to me, 'Don't worry about the rain, it means millions of dollars for local farmers'," Kim recalls.

"And you know, I've never much worried about the weather after that."

In 2023, a new 84-page coffee book, written by Kim, was launched at the Henty Machinery Field Days, tracing six decades of the event's history.

"The book is filled with images of the machinery demonstrations popular in the 1960s and where crowds were held back by a string line, through to the inventions, technology, machinery, fashions, exhibits and displays of the 21st century," Kim says.

"It traces the rapid growth of the field days, the decision to purchase an old travelling stock reserve on the Cookardinia Road and the many thousands of volunteer hours to transform it into a dedicated field days site.

"It is a remarkable story of how a bunch of growers having problems with their grain samples in 1961 was the catalyst for an event that is now iconic and an institution on the Australian agricultural calendar for farmers, exhibitors and the mainstream community."

As for Kim, well she intends to remain a part of the HMFD landscape into the foreseeable future.

"As long as they want me, I'll keep turning up," she laughs.

Life, love and COVID

Devastatingly for organisers, the arrival of a global pandemic on our shores saw the cancellation of the Henty field days two years in a row - in 2020 and 2021.

Kim, who lives at Leeton with her partner Barry Hehir, embraced a couple of interesting past-times during the lockdown periods.

The first was walking the couple's dog - a kelpie by the name of Suzie - around the township, clocking up about 3500 kilometres because the local gym shut down.

Not an unusual thing to do in itself except that Suzie is a working dog on Barry's fourth-generation family farm located about 15 kilometres out of town.

"She still loved walking with me even after she'd been working all day," Kim insists.

The other thing Kim decided on during COVID was a rather more ambitious project - to read every single book in her parents' vast library.

"It's taken me four years," Kim admits.

"I've read every book on everything you could imagine - given my Mum loved the classics and Dad preferred tales of the outback.

"The only book I couldn't get through was The Complete Works of Shakespeare; apologies to my year 12 3-unit English teacher Mr Blackett."

Kim can barely reconcile the shy girl who "used to have to force myself" to pick up the phone to ring someone for a story to the intrepid and respected journalist and media manager she's known as today.

"I learnt early on how to relate to people and draw the stories out of them," she explains.

"And while I've seen a lot of changes to the industry in my time, I believe there's always room for a good journo - particularly in country areas.

"At the end of the day it's about people ... and it's the ordinary people who have the most extraordinary stories to tell."