FEATURE - A WOMAN OF SUSTENANCE

by Louise Tasker

Deb Davis, President of the Montville Village Association, is a long-term local with a love of community, farming, and nature. Her contributions to the hinterland have been valuable, vital and nurturing, and it’s high time she was recognised for her wisdom and worth!

In the cool of a weekday afternoon, on the Montville Village Hall deck, I meet with Deb Davis who is the new President of the Montville Village Association (MVA). I want to get to know her better.

I ask Deb if she can recall an early time of joy, and she jumps up and walks to the edge of the deck and points me in the direction of a white house far away.   

She remembers being very young and running full tilt, arms spread wide, feeling she could fly down the very steep hill from her home to her grandparents’ house which still sits midway down the slope. And as she speaks, she holds her arms out to show me how she flew.

This is how Deb talks – with hands, arms, face. She is thought in motion. 

Her very first memory, however, is when she was two years old, staying with her grandparents on their Dulong farm and being taken to hospital to see her new baby brother.  

Deb is a local girl. She went to school in Burnside and it was during this time that she noticed another local, John Davis, on the school bus. When their schools were being evacuated because of bad weather they ended up in the bus shelter chatting, and they’ve never stopped.  

“Actually, there’s never been a time in our lives together when we haven’t been able to talk to each other,” she tells me.   

Deb and John continued their studies in Brisbane, she becoming a Geography and Science Teacher and John an engineer. When their studies were over, they worked across the country, but always with the mutual understanding that they would return to the hinterland. 

During their decade away, they had their three children, Jess, Michael and Patrick. Eventually, as planned, they returned to the Sunshine Coast Hinterland in 1999, and here John would build the home they now live in. 

Deb’s first connection with the Montville Village Hall was when she was on the P&C committee of the Montville State School when her children were at school in the late 1990s and early 2000s. 

“Back then, the school used the Hall for discos and concerts, plays and movie nights. It gave me an idea of how well the Hall could fit into the wider community.” She became a member of the MVA and began her journey into volunteering.  

Volunteering is part of Deb’s lifeblood. Growing up in a large extended farming family, there was the tacit expectation that everyone would help out. This taught her the power of co-operation and that together more can be achieved. 

She gives the example of having to move cattle from one paddock to another. 

“Everyone would be involved in this, and it brought a strong sense of collective identity.

After that, we would head over to Grandma’s and we would all pitch in with cooking and setting tables before sitting down to eat together.”  

This was part of the foundation of her belief in the power of co-operation.

For Deb, volunteering is a verb, to bring a community together, to give connection to everyone.  For her, it means being submerged in shared goals, shared values, and identifying what needs to happen.  

She feels community life is something to be contributed to rather than consumed. This kind of whole community volunteering gives everyone a chance to work with a wide range of people.

The Montville Village Hall is imbued with the volunteering spirit and continues this with offering a wide range of activities and events, including the monthly markets, showing how space can be created for everyone. 

The hall is interwoven into Deb’s own family’s stories – remembering her children performing in concerts, knowing her grandparents danced their nights away in the 1930s, her father and his siblings attending Junior Farmers’ Meetings there.  

She says, “I really want people to experience the same kind of joy here in the Hall that my family and I have experienced over many decades. I’d love it if everyone could make similar stories.” 

Deb is equally passionate about the hinterland landscape. She loves recognising the places that are attached to the stories of her life and that of her family.  

She sees the layers of history across its wide undulating topography and believes that we are not just moving through space in our own time, but also in the times of everyone who came before us. And this of course ties neatly back into the meaning of community.

I ask her what or who inspires her and she promptly replies, “The beauty of nature around me. My favourite place in the world is my garden. I believe you dream gardens into being. They are a long-term creation. I love the natural environment and how it evolves. Nature is so life-giving.”

The book, The One Straw Revolution, by Masanobu Fukuoka, changed Deb’s way of thinking about farming and growing and working with nature rather than against it. This book “advocates for natural farming methods and working with nature’s cycles” and Deb is a firm believer in working with, rather than against, nature.

There are turning point moments in everyone’s lives and for Deb becoming a parent at the age of 23 and, later, losing her grandfather, were two such times that brought home the awareness that families are forever changing shape and structure, and that nurture can also have an impact on a person’s understanding of the world.  

Storytelling is important to Deb and she is an exceptional speaker – passionate, erudite. She tells me she gets this from her grandmother, who connected Deb to other places beyond the horizon, both in time and geographically. 

Finally, I ask Deb what she feels she has learned in her life. She says, “Not to judge quickly. To always try to find common ground with others. You don’t have to agree about everything but you can make space for multiple perspectives and people who don’t necessarily think the same way.”

With global discontent so high at the moment, this feels like an ethos we could all draw strength from.