Korumburra finally gets its women’s shed
The Korumburra Women’s Shed finally have a place of their own!
You have to respect the resilience of the women in this town. For the past two years one group has been in limbo seeking a permanent space to run its popular Women on the Tools programs: teaching women to weld, metal-work, carpentry, mosaics and how to use power tools to create their works of art, or obtain skills to fix their properties.
So they formed the Korumburra Women’s Shed as an organisation, a painstakingly slow build which tested their belief in what they were doing and the resolve to keep pushing through to the end.
Vicki Evans from VicTrack hands the keys to Korumburra Women’s Shed president Jen Belsar last Friday.
Last week they were given the keys to the Goods Shed from VicTrack, in the area behind Kelly’s Bakery on a long-term lease that allows them to deliver on their vision into the future for generations of young women seeking these important life skills.
Korumburra Staying Strong sat down with President Jennifer Belsar and her committee over a couple of celebratory tall glasses of champagne to hear their story.
Women learn how to use power tools in the Korumburra Women’s Shed, and beautiful art like this starts to happen.
We are here with some of the committee members of the new Korumburra Women’s Shed. Welcome ladies. I know you’ve been fighting for a long time for your own venue. Now that they keys have been handed over today, what’s the feeling?
Marion Brown: It’s very exultant. We are so excited, we can’t believe it has happened after two years or more.
Jen: I’m relieved. I’m surprised by how I feel. I thought I would be excited, but at this stage it’s just a relief.
Kathryn Chapman: It’s a bit of an anti-climax to be honest. We are relieved but in a very positive way.
Another example of steel art from the Women’s Shed.
There was quite a process to secure this venue. Can you explain how that worked?
Kathryn: We were all connected, that’s what kept us going. We had many problems that we encountered, we faced many walls, but we climbed over them, dug around them, whatever we had to do we got there in the end.
Sue Whyte: This is more than just a women’s shed. We are a community and that is what also kept us going. The process unleashed a lot of creativity and hope and that is what is going to hold us together into the future.
Linda Fisher is a member of the women’s shed who has loved the friendships she has made.
We all have passion and it comes from different perspectives. We have people with different sets of expertise: we have horticulturalists, foodies, tradies, artists, teachers, professionals, business owners and all sorts of creative women. We come from many different backgrounds to form a committee that will mean a lot of different things to women in the community.
There is a perception that women should be doing other things other than getting dirty using power tools. What’s your response to that?
Gayle Reville: It’s empowering to be able to do things that traditionally we have not been able to do. To give yourself independence, financial independence. With the skills we learn here we’ve been able to do a lot of work around our homes by ourselves, saving on tradies and other professions for some of the jobs.
Some women also come from a place of trauma, they don’t want to invite men back into their lives because they are frightened. So it’s hugely empowering to be able to do most of these things ourselves and to have the backing of other women.
Serious welding skills are on offer in the women’s shed.
Jennifer Belsar: Women live in houses and houses need maintenance. If you can do that yourself you are not dependent on someone else. Also being able to create bespoke items for your home is so exciting! You can’t put a value on that and the satisfaction it brings to the individual.
Kathryn: It’s healing because you have power. It brings confidence.
Elyse Fisher from the Middle Hotel knocks up a gourmet kitchen!
Marion: People don’t realise how invisible many women feel once they reach the age of 50 or 60. And they don’t know what it feels like, or looks like, but women do know and they support each other and they are stepping out of the shadow of their former invisibleness and they don’t need to feel visible to anyone except themselves. That’s huge because we do vanish into the floorboards as we get older.
Sue: The shed is empowering for women in the sense that they can try new things. You’ve got trained women teaching you, and they are now role models, telling you “You can do this, we can do this”.
A creation from one of the founding members of the group, Gayle Reville … an absolute talent when it comes to art.
A lot of community groups would have given up by now. Do you think you were underestimated?
Jen: A lot of people probably just thought we were a craft group. And there was a thought that we’d be only using hand tools. It was always my plan to teach everyone how to use power tools. One of things I always say at the start of every new group workshop is that: once you learn how to use power tools you are going to feel a little bit discriminated against culturally for not having been taught how to use them years ago. When you can use them, it becomes “well, that was easy. Why didn’t I learn this sooner?”
President of the Korumburra Women’s Shed Jen Belsar with her steampunk letterbox. Jen has been involved in women’s sheds for years and really wanted one for Korumburra!
Jen: It’s a cultural shift teaching women how to use power tools. These are intelligent women, professional women, teachers and others who run their own companies, who say: “We want these skills with power tools.”
The postie who delivers to Kathryn Chapman’s home in Wattle Bank always gets an eye full.
Lisa Churchward: The absolute joy and exhilaration of using something like a table saw or a thicknesser, angle grinder, welder - just creating with those things that were previously not in our realm. There used to be a feeling of fear about using them. You realise that you can learn to use something safely and not be afraid. Now we can fix things, make things using welders, take things apart, grind things down. It’s awesome.
Participants in the women’s shed can build one of these on the first day!
Marion: It makes you think of the war periods from the past. Women had to step in while the men were away, and that was okay. But when the men came back, we were relegated back to domestic duties where we had been. Whereas now society is changing. There has never been a time in history with so many people living as singles, so people need to learn what has traditionally been done by others. It’s good for men to able to cook and sew, just as it is important for women to know these new skills as well.
Interviewer: You’re not anti-men though are you?
Chorus: Not at all. We love men. We think they’re awesome, and we love taking advantage of their muscles to cart things around for us when we need it!
Secretary Sue Phillips serving up snags during one of the Shed’s fundraising days at Bunnings.
How do you engage the community in your projects at the women’s shed?
Jen: This is a community project showing how far women have come and also the region. We’ve had women from Foster to Loch and all the far edges of the South Gippsland Shire. We also have women from outside the shire who come in with the idea of learning how to use power tools. Often those women have had those tools in their sheds, but didn’t know how to use them.
We come here to connect and to have community. One of the things that happened when we lost the shed two years ago was we felt that we had lost our tribe, our friends. When you are a younger woman your connections are built through the children: through school and kids activities, and then through your own work and sport.
When you get to an older age it’s like well, how do I make friends now when moving to a new area? The beautiful thing is that you can make friends instantly in this group which is really important for a lot of our members. The resilience, the sense of community, the friendships … you can’t put a value on it. The government funds organisations in communities to make these things happen, but we do it organically.
Gayle Reville (right) and Wendy “the flower box lady” Twining working in the shed.
Gayle: We want our culture to be based on respect. Everyone needs to be respectful. We want to be inclusive within our group. It’s really important to us that respect is the cornerstone of the way we operate.
Kathryn: It’s that feeling of being in a tribe is what motivated us to keep going and get our shed. We all worked so hard because we missed that friendship and connectedness, working together and inspiring each other. That to me was really important.
Jen: We do things for each like helping shift house, gardening, moving stuff, sharing home grown food, sharing skills, repairing and building things around each other’s homes.. It became so much bigger than what was happening in the shed. We support each other in everyday life.
Marion: I would like to add that I’m interested in the community kitchen. There will be people who don’t feel like working on their projects or even thinking about a project but they want to be there as part of the tribe. There’s a lot of ways women can express their creativity. It doesn’t always have to be about power tools. And it’s not always about crochet.
Founding member Beck Pierce was instrumental in setting up the legalities of the organisation, and is a pretty handy artist as well.
Marion: We have to be careful not to denigrate the gentle arts. Many of us take part in gentle arts as well. We love the gentle arts. These will be a part of what we do in the shed as well.
Jen: We intend to offer workshops and classes in painting, pottery, fabric dyeing, mosaics, jewellery making and many other creative endeavours. We are keen to hear from any women in the community who have a skill that they would like to share.
Sue: One of the more important things to come out of this women’s shed is the community. It’s about power tools of course, but it is much greater than that . It’s people and a community being built. It’s magical. I’m desperate to build the boxes that I like to build, but I’m also desperate in making sure we build this great opportunity for the community.
Interviewer: That reminds me, Jen you said there would be other activities going on at the women’s shed other than learning and building, is that right?
Jen: We’ll have fundraisers, garage sales, music/open mic nights and other events. None of this happening yet but there will be plenty of things happening for everyone once we open the doors.
Ladies. What are you waiting for?
Interviewer: Having taken a tour, it seems you’ll need support from the community to bring the venue up to standard. What do you need?
Jen: We need everything (all laugh). We need a kitchen in there that’s commercial grade, plumbing, electrical work. We need to set up with shelving and furniture. We have had a lot of power tools and hand tools donated to use over the (past two years) but the focus now is on getting the venue ready for purpose and we’d love to get that support in our community from whoever wants to help us. These works will give us the ability to run social opportunities for the community, especially a kitchen.
Lisa: We need financial donations or tradies who want to help us out, testing and tagging all the donated tools which we are now working on.
Jen: We are going to have lots of parties up there and invite everyone!
Do you feel vindicated now for hanging in like you did, incorporating your organisation?
Kathryn: To be honest we did feel like this was hopeless. We’ve had times when we’ve cried and felt like giving up, but we have other members who are strong and just kept pushing us along.
Marion: There’s an expression: storming, forming and norming. We’ve been through the forming and storming and now we get the chance to build our group the way we want it to be. There’s a lot of strong people all working towards the common goal.
When can we expect the first activities to start happening?
Jen: It will be months away at this stage. The first step was getting the keys to this magnificent building and then the hard work follows. We’ll have some fundraisers to bring support to the women’s shed.
Anyone you would like to thank?
Jen: We have to thank the South Gippsland Shire Council, Danny O’Brien MP, Melina Bath MP, Russel Broadbent MP - they have been great supporters of ours the whole way. Everyone who stood with us over the past couple of years, the committee who helped get our organisation underway, and the people of Korumburra who reached out and provided support in whatever way they could. It means so much to us!
We also need to thank the Rowville and Dromana men’s sheds who donated lots of equipment and power tools to us, and also huge shoutout to Fish and Elyse from the Middle Pub for all the support they’ve given us in many different ways.
GET INVOLVED
Follow the movement on Facebook ‘Gippsland Women in Sheds’
Email: korumburrawomensshed@gmail.com
Mobile: Jen Belsar 0422 470 122
Donations and support welcome!
