Rose Nevinson was still learning to ride a motorbike when she started turning up to the yards at her family’s Booroorban property, tagging along behind her father as he mustered sheep.
Hold tight - we’re checking permissions before loading more content
She is not entirely sure, looking back, whether she was actually helping or simply underfoot.
“I don’t know if we were in the way and helping, or it was just a nuisance,” she said. “But we were there.”
Nearly two-and-a-half decades later, that early apprenticeship of sorts in the yards has carried her into a career as a sheep and wool specialist with AWN in Deniliquin.
She is one of the newest members of a team that services private wool buying, brokerage and shed visits for clients across the district.
Rose started with AWN on the first of June, and describes the role in plain terms.
There is a private wool buying store based in Deniliquin, private wool sales, and brokerage work that takes her out to properties for shed visits before the wool is sold in Melbourne at auction, or through the company’s other selling systems.
“Yeah, loving it,” she said of the job so far. “It’s been very busy.”
AWN itself is a familiar name in wool and livestock circles.
Founded in 1999 and privately owned, the company has grown into one of Australia’s larger agribusiness networks.
The company offers wool, livestock and rural property services through representatives based across the country, including a long-standing wool buying presence in Deniliquin.
Asked what shaped her more, her family upbringing or her time going through the Hay Inc rural education program, Rose said it was not really a choice between the two.
“A bit of both,” she said.
She grew up at Booroorban, spending every hour outside of school on the farm doing sheep work alongside her father, her grandfather and her uncle.
“I grew up with some really cool mentors,” she said, along with others outside her immediate family who taught her along the way.
Hay Inc, she said, broadened her horizons in a different way, by putting her alongside people running very different operations to her own family’s.
“You’re learning from so many different people,” she said.
“Everyone has a different operation, obviously, and you learn a lot that way.” Hay Inc Rural Education Program has been running out of Hay since 2014, built by a group of local agricultural volunteers who wanted to give young adults hands-on training, mentoring and industry networks in a real farm setting.
The program was designed in part for people without a traditional farming background.
It has since grown to send graduates into agricultural careers across the country, with strong support from Australian Wool Innovation and the local Hay community.
For Rose, the value of the program was less about the technical skills and more about the doors it opened.
“I think the opportunities Hay Inc gave me is how I got to where I am now,” she said. Through the program she landed a 12-month posting at Warwillah, working with the East Loddon Merino stud, before eventually returning to East Loddon last year, where she met the AWN team and was offered her current job.
“I think a lot of the time it’s the people you know,” she said. At the property she worked across all station duties, but her focus was on the livestock handling side, drafting and classing ewes and rams for sale through the Merino stud.
“It was quite labour intensive on the sheep side, so mainly livestock based, which was good,” she said.
“And then, yeah, just the general running of a farm, really.
“There wasn’t a job I didn't do.” Rose is 28, and reflects on the changing face of the industry with the perspective of someone who has watched it shift within her own working life.
Asked whether more young women coming into agriculture was a recent trend or something that had always been there, she did not hesitate.
“I definitely think it’s on the rise,” she said.
Rose remembers finishing school and coming home to contract herself out doing livestock work around Booroorban, in a district with almost no other young people working the land at the time.
Now, she said, there’s young people on every property she goes to.
She credits Hay Inc with playing a real part in that shift, alongside a broader generational return to the family farm.
“I think there was a big generational change there a little while ago, that Hay Inc’s done very well to fill,” she said. The trend she is describing shows up in the national data too.
ABARES, the federal government’s agricultural research and statistics agency, has reported a gradual but steady increase in the number of women and young people joining Australia’s agricultural workforce in recent years, describing it as a reflection of broader changes both within the industry and across the Australian workforce as a whole.
Rose is the middle of three children, with an older brother, Aaron, and a younger brother, Luke.
Her parents, David and Kerry, still run the family property at Booroorban, where Rose still keeps her own small flock of sheep, something she calls her passion project.
“I do spend a lot of time on the farm, but I love doing that,” she said.
“It doesn’t feel like work being out there.” Booroorban itself comes up often and warmly in conversation with Rose.
She remembers a childhood built around a shared school bus run, cousins nearby, and a tight group of friends close in age.
Community life revolved around the district’s small, steady rituals; tennis days and cricket matches held behind the local pub, Christmas gatherings, and Friday nights spent playing Auskick in Hay before the whole group headed back to the pub to watch the footy together.
“Our childhood, we spent lots of time together, which was nice, with friends and family,” she said.
Asked if that upbringing shaped who she is today, she answered simply.
“Definitely.”
School for Rose meant primary years in Hay, catching the bus in from Booroorban with a small group of friends, before moving on to Yanco Agricultural High School from year seven through to year twelve.
Yanco, one of only four government agricultural high schools in New South Wales, is unusual even among boarding schools in that it has no day students at all.
Every student, drawn mainly from southern New South Wales and Victoria, lives on site for the length of term, on a rural property along the Murrumbidgee River that includes working sheep and cattle studs alongside the classrooms.
“I don't think I’d ever call myself a true academic,” Rose said, “but I loved the practical side of Yanco, and getting out on the farm.”
She also found her footing in sport, eventually becoming a sporting house captain.
Leaving home for boarding school suited her more than she might have expected.
“I loved having my own independence,” she said, recalling weekends spent travelling to sheep and cattle shows with other students. “We weren’t always stuck at school.” These days Rose is based in Deniliquin, splitting her time between the AWN office, the family farm at Booroorban, and a local netball competition that keeps her busy outside of work.
She has a partner in Deniliquin, and much of her downtime in the warmer months is spent fishing or playing golf, or catching up with a close friendship group in town.
Looking ahead, Rose sees her future firmly within AWN and the broader wool and sheep industry.
Alongside her current wool broking and shed visit work, she is hoping to move further into the AuctionsPlus side of the business, along with ram selection and buying for clients.
She is already travelling to Melbourne most weeks to help prepare catalogues for the wool auctions.
“I think this is my long-term career, I hope,” she said.
“I think I’m finally settled into a bit of a career, in a way.”
For a young woman who once tagged along to the yards on a motorbike she could not yet properly ride, it is a career that, in her own telling, was never really in doubt.
It was simply a matter of finding her way back to it.