New horizons

When you’re stuck in a job rut it can be easy to admit you’re not happy, but difficult to actually make a change. Kylie Bartholomew meets three women who swapped careers and couldn’t be happier.

Alex O’Neill, 54, lives near Mundubbera, Queensland
Former career: solicitor. New career: grazier

Alex O’Neill qualified as a solicitor in the mid 1970s in Brisbane. It was a time when women were rare in the legal profession. “They’d just blink at us and think: ‘What are women doing in law?’ So we were coming into that game at a time when, I think only the year before, they did away with women having to wear hats in court. Can you imagine? And wearing a pants suit in the courthouse was very risqué,” she recalls with a hearty chuckle.

After working for a Brisbane firm, Alex moved about 300 kilometres north of Brisbane to work in two small towns, Childers and Gayndah. “My mother grew up on the Barcoo in the 20s and 30s, so I grew up with stories of the bush and the west, but I never had any experience of it. When I came to the bush to work as a solicitor I really loved the interaction within a smaller community.”

She went into partnership at a practice at nearby Mundubbera and worked full-time until marrying in 1985. At 33, the marriage to her grazier husband also meant another kind of union – marrying the land. “I married a bloke whose hobby is work; whose every other interest is the land and his cattle,” says Alex. Their ‘Doondoon’ cattle property is 75 kilometres west of Mundubbera. The travel to ‘town’ was one of the reasons she reduced her workload to part-time for the next five years. She also sold out of the partnership at the practice.

Then in 1990, just 14 years after qualifying as a solicitor, she gave it away altogether. She found her life was full with other things; she didn’t need it any more. “Growing up in the city and then coming out here and learning how to work on a property, there’s lots of things you don’t know, from learning how to ride and muster and brand, to fencing… and all the little things you have to do,” she says.

Since going bush, Alex has taken active roles in various committees and groups including the Cattleman’s Union, state and national Landcare bodies, and AgForce. As comfortable as she is with her life on the land, it’s hard to believe it was a place even she wouldn’t have thought she’d end up. “If someone had told me that while I was working in Brisbane, I would have shaken my head because I had no experience in the bush,” she says.

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