Why Are We All Doing
This Separately?

HOW IT BEGAN

One conversation, one very practical question

The first Dubbo Women’s Festival did not begin in a boardroom, a funding round or a beautifully colour-coded strategy document.

It began because my friend Lorna Brennan was organising something for Mental Health Month and asked if I could do something.

I told her about Susanne North, one of my Sydney Writer clients. Susanne had done menopause talks and women’s events in Sydney, and I had been thinking it would be great to bring that kind of conversation to Dubbo.

Lorna and I kept talking.

And somewhere in that conversation came the question: why are we all doing separate International Women’s Day things?

Health had something on. Community organisations had something on. Businesses had something on. Arts people had something on. Everyone was working hard, everyone was trying to reach women, and everyone had their own little piece of budget, audience, expertise and energy.

What if we made one room and let people bring what they already did well?

That was really it.

Not: let’s invent another organisation.

Not: let’s own International Women’s Day.

Just: why are we all doing this separately?

THREE WOMEN

Three different doors into the same room

The first Dubbo Women’s Festival was built by Lorna Brennan, Joanne “Nurse Jo” Phillips and me.

None of us arrived empty-handed, and none of us brought the same thing.

Lorna brought years of trusted work with children, families and women. She understood the quiet networks that hold communities together because she had spent years inside them.

Joanne brought two decades of women’s-health experience and a deep network of local health professionals. She knew the women doing the work here, not speakers flown in to tell regional women what regional life was like.

I brought communications, promotion, the event idea and what I now recognise as the Better Together instinct: don’t duplicate what is already good. Find the common thread. Make it easier for people to participate. Give everyone more reach than they would have had alone.

Joanne helped bring together the health professionals who became the first Festival panelists, including Ange Conn, Melissa Matheson, Lucinda Ferguson and Marsha McBroom.

Dr Pethidia Mango came through another relationship. She was my own doctor, someone I trusted, and I asked her personally to be part of the perimenopause and menopause conversation.

That is still one of my favourite things about the way the Festival grew.

There was never one master contact list.

One person knew another person. Someone had an idea. Someone had a skill. Someone could offer a room, a microphone, an introduction, half an hour, a workshop, a film, a sponsorship or simply the confidence to say, “Yes, I think this could work.”

THE SEASONS OF A WOMAN’S LIFE

Health information without turning the day into an expo

The health panels sat under the loose idea of the seasons of a woman’s life.

We talked about periods. Pregnancy. Birth. Motherhood. Bodies. Mental health. Perimenopause. Menopause. The things women actually talk about with each other, Google at 11 o’clock at night, or mean to ask their doctor and then somehow don’t.

I compèred them.

Which meant I got to ask the serious questions, the embarrassing questions and the questions people were probably thinking but were too polite to ask.

The professionals were there. The services were there. The information was there.

But that wasn’t the whole event.

There was lunch. Music. Creativity. Women talking. Camilla Ward singing under the trees. Places to sit. Things to wander into and out of.

Because I have never been particularly interested in making another service expo.

Services already do expos.

What interested me was whether we could create a room a woman might enter because she wanted a lovely day with a friend — and then, if she happened to need a health professional, a conversation, family support or somewhere safe to ask a question, the right people were already there.

She did not have to announce a problem to enter the room.

She could come as she was and take what she needed.

BEFORE THERE WAS PROOF

The first believers and a little room upstairs

Then Rose Prout and Charnie Tuckey said yes.

They were the first two businesswomen to financially back the Festival before there were attendance figures, testimonials or years of photographs to point to.

That is why I still think of them as the First Believers.

They did more than sponsor something with their logos attached.

Together they helped shape the Moment Lounge: a quiet upstairs space where women could step away, breathe, stretch, watch guided wellbeing films or simply sit for a while.

Erifili Davies and Studio 138 brought the film layer. Local women became part of that creative wellbeing content.

And suddenly one little room contained almost the whole idea: local business, wellbeing, creativity, community participation and free access overlapping until the categories stopped mattering very much.

The Moment Lounge ran in both of those first single-day Festivals.

A useful community idea does not always need to be enormous. Sometimes it just needs to remove one small barrier.