Program of Event
Keynote Speakers

Kristy McGregor co-founded the Channel Country Ladies Day in 2012, when she was working as a governess at Durham Downs Station on the Cooper Creek, west of Eromanga. After working on the station, she moved to Longreach and worked in public health, before meeting a dairy farmer from Aotearoa New Zealand, and moving across the Tasman. Since then she has worked in policy and community engagement, and co-founded a food producers festival. In 2020, Kristy published the first edition of Shepherdess – a quarterly magazine documenting life for women in rural Aotearoa; the fifteenth edition has just been published. Along with her role as the Publisher and Editor-in-Chief of Shepherdess, Kristy is Executive Producing a TV Series which goes to air in October, sharing the stories of women on the land. She is also producing a three day festival, The Shepherdess Muster, based on the Channel Country Ladies Day.

Kristy is passionate about community engagement and working with communities to bring
out positive narratives, and believes in the power of events and story in creating vibrant rural communities. Kristy holds
a Bachelor of Social Science in Asia Pacific Governance and Development from James Cook University, Queensland, and a Master of Agriculture from Massey University, Manawatū. Kristy has been a recipient of an AGMARDT Leadership Scholarship, studying Social Entrepreneurship at the Stanford University Graduate School of Business. She lives on a sixth-generation family dairy and beef farm in the Horowhenua, with her partner, Mike, and their five-year-old son, Hartley, and almost three-year-old daughter, Tully.