GEORGINA Gubbins’ resume gives the impression of a high-flying corporate executive, but the reality of the newly-inducted Medal of the Order of Australia (OAM) recipient in the General Division at this year’s Australia Day Awards, could not be further from that picture and her story is truly inspirational.

Starting life as a student nurse at the Alfred Hospital, Ms Gubbins is now a well-known prime lamb producer, her input to industry and industry-related bodies – from education, to water and international food and fibre promotion – highly-sought.

Raised near Mortlake and becoming a student nurse before marrying and having two children, Ms Gubbins said she had no aspirations to be anything more in life, until she became a single mother and landholder in 2000.

“Growing up, the boys were raised to be farmers and the girls were raised to get married, have children and look after their husband, so that’s what I was going to be,” she said.

“After my husband left, I started rebuilding myself; the first thing I did, I tried to get into the Rural Leadership Program, but they told me I had no profile, told me I had no profile.

“I’d been looking for a business course, so I applied for a Master of Agribusiness at Melbourne Uni; at the time I had a seven-year-old and a nine-year-old (daughters), so I did the masters in two years … it was a real eye-opener or me, because I concentrated on the global red meat industry.”

Operating what had been a family lamb and beef property near Heywood, Ms Gubbins’ first opportunity to take the lead in an industry setting came on a grasslands society study to tour to New Zealand, where she was approached to hold a related conference in Hamilton, Victoria.

“I got tapped on the shoulder to run the grasslands conference in Hamilton; we had moved to Warrnambool by then, because I was finding it too hard on the farm with the girls and their school and sport and everything.

“I said okay, but I’ll do it in Warrnambool, thinking they’d say no, but they said okay.

“I have suffered from a lot of foot-in-mouth in that way, over my time,” she said, laughing.

“Those things really helped me gain confidence in myself.”

Still hands-on operating the farm, now trading under the name Maneroo, she determined to not just be a farmer, but a business operator.

“From a business perspective, I started benchmarking and you know how there’s people out there who will say, “I’ve achieved … some ridiculous figure” … I thought that’s what everyone was doing, that’s how naïve I was, so then I set out working on how to achieve that, whether it was lambing percentage, weaning percentage, how much grass you can grow.

“So they were my targets, that was the best of what everyone was doing; I was lucky I was so naïve, because that’s what I was aiming for.”

She said the glass ceiling for women in agriculture was still firmly in place at that time, but her quiet determination to crack it eventually bore fruit.

“Back in 2000, for a female it was tough in the ag industry; they would always say, can I speak to your husband – well I didn’t have a husband,” she said.

“All those sort of things and as a female voice, no one wanted to listen to what I had to say, so with benchmarking I was able to show, hey guys, I’m probably doing better than most of you and I started to get a bit of credibility form a production point of view.

“So then you start getting tapped on the shoulder to go onto research advisory bodies and things like that and it just snowballed from there.”

That snowball grew into positions including the Sheep and Goat Identification Advisory Committee with the Victorian Government, director of South West TAFE, president of the Grasslands Society of Southern Australia, chairwoman of LambEx 2020 and 2021 conferences, founding member of Food and Fibre Great South Coast and deputy chair of Wannon Water.

Ms Gubbins worked on extending herself and took every opportunity available to promote and develop not just her business, but Australian agriculture – and particularly the prime lamb industry – as a whole.

“I love learning new things, so I’m always out there looking for the next thing to learn, I’m not happy just sitting with the way things are and the committees I’ve been on, the organisations I have been a part of, they’re all integrated, they relate to every aspect of the industry I am a part of,” she said.

“I wanted board experience, it was local, it was water, being on farm, you know about water, water conservation and how to budget water.

“And I’m also a small business person, which a lot of large corporations don’t understand, so it’s bringing that small business perspective to a water corporation.

“I applied, never thinking for a million years I would get a seat on (the board), but there I was, it was a great opportunity and led to so many other things.”

Ms Gubbins said the recognition in this year’s Australia Day awards for her service to primary industry and community was “humbling and exciting”.

“The work that I’ve done … it’s not for these accolades, but it is always nice when someone appreciates what you are doing, what you have achieved.”