Rachel Ward finds purpose and freedom as a regenerative farmer

Back when Rachel Ward was a model hanging out with the 1970s New York jet set, pop art legend Andy Warhol gave her a painting of a cow.

She wasn't too chuffed about the gift then, she tells Australian Story, thinking, "A cow? I don't want a picture of a bloody cow".

But art and life often find a way of intertwining and that yellow and blue version of Warhol's iconic Cow series now hangs in the homestead kitchen of Rachel's beef cattle property, the place where the former model, actor and director has found the purpose she has long craved.

"How clever of him," says Rachel of the famous artist, "to have known I was gonna end up as a cow hand."

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In fact, Rachel now manages the 350-hectare property she owns with actor husband Bryan Brown in the New South Wales Nambucca Valley and has converted its land management methods to regenerative farming.

The fire that changed Rachel's course

Her embrace of this farming "revolution" followed a depressive episode she suffered in the wake of the devastating Black Summer bushfires of 2019-2020 that came after years of drought.

While some fences and fringing forest were lost, the farm largely escaped the fire, but the frightening experience left Rachel racked with worry about climate change and the type of planet her grandchildren would grow up in.

"I felt very impotent to do anything, and I think that was why I had a bit of a crumble because I just could not see the way forward to change it, to take real responsibility about what was going on now," she says.

"It's a major existential issue that we are dealing with."

So, with the help of neighbours and farming mentors, Rachel has been busily restoring the farm's soil health and biodiversity by guarding against overgrazing and drastically reducing chemical use.

She's "bloody loving it" and very hands-on, says Bryan, who fell for the aristocratic-born Brit when they starred in The Thorn Birds, released in 1983. That same year, Rachel was voted one of the 10 most beautiful women in the world.

Her beauty has always been an uneasy crown for Rachel, who felt her worth was reduced to how she looked. "You were really not of any value unless it was your sexuality," she says.

So, it has been liberating for her, now 68, to embrace aging, eschewing perfect hair and make-up to focus on living a healthy, active life on the farm.

"I'm so past caring about what people think about one's appearance or age," Rachel says. "All I want to hear is, 'Actually, Rachel's cows are looking pretty good.'"

That wasn't the internet chatter, though, after Rachel uploaded an Instagram reel late last year, committing the sin of worrying more about providing water for her cattle than how she looked.

'Pretty enough to marry rich'

The currency of a woman's good looks was explained very clearly to Rachel from a young age by her largely absent father, Peter, a close friend of the late Princess Margaret.

"What do you need an education for?" asked the man who would leave all his assets to his son, with nothing for his two daughters. "You are pretty enough to marry someone very rich."

Women were lesser, to be admired but not heard. Her actor friend and fellow model from that time, Greta Scacchi, says Rachel "was offended" by such attitudes.

"Because she's bright and sparky and she's got a sort of courage that can be called ambition," Scacchi says. "She's driven to achieve."

Rachel says she never felt any ownership of her beauty because that's a genetic luck of the draw, but having been born with what she calls "the pretty ticket", she swapped modelling for acting and set off for Hollywood in 1982.

Breasts and skimpy bathing suits

She had hopes of emulating Julie Christie, an actor whose roles were "romance rather than sexuality", but by the time she got to LA, the focus for female actors was on breasts and skimpy bathing suits.

"You soon find it's a very vacuous place to inhabit … it's very empty and it's very unsatisfying," Rachel says. "I was just make-up, I was fantasy."

But her role in The Thorn Birds would change the course of her life, bringing her face-to-face with Bryan Brown.

Rosie Brown, the eldest of their three children, says her mother tells that when Bryan showed up on set dressed as a sheep shearer, "She was like, 'Whoa, that is a hot man.'"

Rachel was less enamoured of his penchant for "Aussie larrikin shirts" when he was off set, but, despite that, they hit it off.

It was his values, says Rachel, that impressed her. Raised by a single mother alongside a sister he adored, Bryan was respectful of women and "I felt that his morality was in there". They married quickly, and Rachel moved to Australia.

Bryan says, although he was attracted by Rachel's beauty, "she's never, ever cared about how she looks. So she ain't gonna worry about what she looks like [on] the farm."

Going viral for aging gracefully

So, it was normal for Rachel to be on the farm buggy that day just before Christmas last year with no make-up, her short, grey hair tousled by the wind, her skin bearing the wrinkles of a 68-year-old.

She decided to make an Instagram reel to spruik her paddock-to-plate, grass-fed meat venture, FarmThru, and thank her neighbours, one of whom had arrived to fix a pesky water pump.

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She posted it — and the comments came in.

"Omg! What the hell happened to her. Wow!! She has aged really bad," wrote one. "I wish I never saw her like this!" and "She looks ravaged", said others.

Rachel was somewhat surprised by the response but shrugged it off.

"A few trolls were a bit shocked about my grey hair, who maybe hadn't seen me since I was 24, and then went, 'Oh my God, that's what you end up looking like,'" she jokes.

Her daughter Matilda recalls her mother reading the comments out and laughing, but Matilda says, "I couldn't believe what people had focused on or written".

The women fight back

Matilda picked up her phone and made her own reel. She told viewers that if they found aging naturally shocking, they should prepare to be shocked before sharing photos of a relaxed and happy Rachel hugging her grandchildren and wearing silly party hats with Bryan.

"Mum is a 68-year-old woman, aging naturally, but also gorgeous, beautiful, loving," says Matilda.

"It was about Mum, but it was also about women coming to other women's defence and just saying, 'We should be allowed to look 68 if we want to.'"

Matilda's post went viral, amassing almost 40,000 comments from people, mostly women, railing against the unrealistic expectations regarding women's beauty and aging.

Media here and in the UK picked up the story, and homegrown actors Rebecca Gibney and Debra Lawrance put up photos of their natural, aging faces in solidarity.

Rachel believes her story was a catalyst for older women who felt they "weren't allowed to have a wrinkle, weren't allowed to go grey, weren't allowed to not care".

"That whole harping … that we still have to be sexual beings is terrifying," Rachel says. "To have to have our bums lifted and our breasts lifted and our faces drawn back. It just becomes grotesque.

"All I can say is that it's great to put that behind you, how you should look and be."

She ponders the matter for a moment, then jokes: "How ironic that my going grey actually garnered me more attention than if I'd taken my top off."

Shiny happy cows

Rachel is standing at a cattle fence, admiring the 80 breeders she has just let in to graze on a lush paddock on the property she has been regenerating for six years now, three as manager.

"Would you look how shiny and happy they are! Did you see them run into here?" she says. "They're definitely expressing pleasure; they love a new field of grass."

Those who love Rachel see a symmetry in the life she is giving the cattle and the life that regenerative farming has given her.

Says Matilda: "She got onto this regenerating of the land and in doing so, regenerated herself and came back to life."

For a while after the 2019-2020 fires, Rachel's outlook was grim. She was distressed by the march of climate change and, having plateaued in her post-acting career of directing and writing, was lacking in purpose.

"Purpose gives everybody a sense of life, doesn't it? And a passion," Rachel says. "I definitely went through stages when I just didn't really feel I had any kind of purpose, any reason for getting up in the mornings."

Bouts of depression

Rachel has had mental health issues through the years, the first big bout of depression occurring when she was a young mother raising her children in a foreign land.

"Changes are confronting and hard … and then you get right to the bottom, and then you just have to change, and that's what happened to me just around when the fires hit," she says.

"My film career had really not delivered quite as I had hoped it would. I probably thought I was better than I really was, and I questioned why I wasn't working more."

The nadir came when Rachel took herself off anti-depressants too quickly and ended up in hospital after crashing her car.

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"That was a pretty big moment," Matilda says. "I think she scared herself."

It was around this time that a confluence of events led Rachel to her new life as a farmer. She was reading Charles Massy's seminal book about regenerative farming, Call of the Reed Warbler, at the same time as her farm manager, Mick Green Jnr, was exploring new ways of farming in the wake of the fires.

"We started to talk about how we could change the management of the farm," she says. She learned about regularly moving stock from pasture to allow grasses to regenerate, known as rotational grazing, and how to use bio-fertiliser and reduce chemicals.

"It was exciting because it was new," she says. "The fires were the catalyst to go, 'We have to change, we have to start doing things differently.'"

Her worries about the impact of cow methane emissions were allayed, Rachel says, when she learned that in the regenerative system, cattle work as mobile composters, helping to improve the soil and, as a result, store more carbon. "So, I can only see them being a positive."

Rachel says she watched her ground go from compacted dirt to soil teeming with life, worms and insects, able to hold more rainfall. The richer soils, which can pull carbon down from the atmosphere, helped Rachel feel she was doing her bit to combat climate change.

So buoyed by this adventure was Rachel that she dusted off her film directing hat and bundled all her new-found knowledge and passion into a documentary, Rachel's Farm, released in 2023.

And early this year, she hosted Voices of Australian Farmers: A Love Story at Adelaide Fringe, joking that the viral storm about her aging looks had "made me relevant for a moment, so I'm using that to push my message".

But those are just brief forays. Rachel's life now is as a farmer — even if she is a little rough on farm vehicles.

"We've lost a few bits of machinery," Bryan says, dryly. "We've ended up with a ute in the dam and the roof off a tractor, but we put those down to learning.

"She's bloody loving it and fully involved," he says. "I can't get over how much she does, but she loves it. That's all that counts."

'She's calling the shots'

Bryan splits his time between Sydney and the farm, but Rachel has settled in Nambucca Valley, with help from their son Joe, who lives on another nearby property the family owns. Joe helps with the paddock-to-plate business FarmThru, which Rachel has a stake in with partners, selling meat from regenerative or organic farms directly to consumers.

"In the cities, we're so disconnected from where our food has grown and how it's grown that we've just put the blinkers on and we've stopped looking," Rachel says.

Paddock-to-plate distribution cuts out the middleman and allows the consumer to order online directly, she says.

"You can go, 'I like the way they're treating their animals, I like what they're doing with their land,'" Rachel says. "You can buy that meat that has come through a system that you approve of."

Farming is a lot of work but Matilda says her mother has never been good at being idle and "now she has somewhere to put all that energy".

"The farm is this place where she's powerful and she's in control and she's calling the shots and she's busy and challenged," Matilda says.

"It's her without all the chatter and noise and all the stuff that she's contended with. She doesn't change her clothes for a week. She swims in the dam.

"She's free at the farm."

Rachel says she is more content than she has ever been. At various times through her life, she has fretted about acting and directing jobs, pined for the English countryside, and wondered if she would ever feel like she belonged in Australia.

Now, with the country wind in her grey hair, cow dung on her boots and not a skerrick of make-up, Rachel Ward knows she has found home.

Watch Rachel Ward's Australian Story 'Regeneration', Monday 8:00pm (AEST), on ABCTV and ABC iview.