BUY FROM THE BUSH

AFTER SUFFERING THROUGH ONE OF THE WORST DROUGHTS IN MEMORY, ONE WOMAN IS BRINGING NEW HOPE TO RURAL COMMUNITIES.

- Jacqueline Mey

Sweating through one of country’s three hottest summers on record, Australia has now entered yet another year of crippling drought. As the unprecedented conditions continue, the country has already experienced record-breaking temperatures, with 2019 the hottest and driest year ever.

The drought hit rural Australia the hardest, and money quickly dried up in farming communities. So in a bid to increase cashflow and urge citysiders to support those doing it tough, a farmer’s wife in the small town of Warren in NSW’s Central West started the Instagram account @buyfromthebush to advertise local shops and producers. Seemingly overnight, Grace Brennan’s simple social media page took off and, thanks to the Christmas rush, generated more than $2 million for struggling country towns.

“I really just wanted to be productive and help in a pretty helpless situation with the drought,” Brennan tells WHO. “When my sisters come out from the city, they often want to pop into the local boutique and shop. So I had this idea that if we could just broadcast all the beautiful things that are here to the masses, I knew there’d be a market for them.”

To her, the success of Buy From the Bush was almost too good to be true. After just five months, the page now has more than 200,000 followers, and has increased some businesses’ revenue by as much as 300 per cent, created jobs and put ‘locally made’ back on the market.