‘Farmer Benjamin’ says he’s had his time in the spotlight – and that, in part, is true. But consider this the well-deserved next chapter, one told openly, honestly, and in celebration of a good man doing extraordinary things just 30km west of Guyra.

 

Neither of us slept the night before.

One lay fixated on what they were going to ask, the other on what they were going to say.

Fuelled by caffeine, intrigue and pure adrenaline, my keys hit the ignition at 6.27am and moments later I’m on the road to Brushy Creek.

The first thing you notice is the light, the way those rays cross the road with wild, early morning abandon. But they’re steadfast, too, as all good things with country roots tend to be, guiding me through Black Mountain, Guyra, and beyond.

Keep driving. We’re not there yet – but a chorus of cows is a clue we’re getting close. Other cars are stirring now too. Wheels roll, dirt flies, heads nod, sheep bleat. Good morning country air, it’s good to be here – although I could do with another coffee.

Thankfully, my 8am interview is a self-confessed coffee snob. One more right turn, then left, and he’s there – waving the car in from the top of the driveway, all arms, hair and beard in that same wild abandon as those bold morning rays.

I’m acutely aware that this, our first meeting, is a touch unbalanced. He’s spoken to me on the phone, he knows my old man (who umpires him at cricket), and he’s read my magazine – but that’s his lot. I, on the other hand, have just binged back-to-back episodes of Farmer Wants A Wife that show snippets of this man’s whole world – including moments of joy, heartache, love and loss.

I’ll say here and now, before I park in that driveway, I’m not here to talk to him about his time on that program. I’m not here for a behind-the-scenes scoop, to ask what happened when he left or if he ultimately found love.

I’m here for the real deal – the stuff beneath the surface that drives this man to get out of bed in the morning to nurture this land, honour his ancestors, nourish sheep wearing fine wool jackets, play electronica in paddocks and create heartfelt artworks with the help of carefully placed grain, obedient dogs and one hell of a creative mind.

So, if you’re keen to meet the real Ben Jackson – read on. 

But first, coffee

“My forebears, who were all Glaswegian, have been poking around these parts for decades,” says Ben, who’s already put the coffee machine on and is relieved to hear I don’t butcher a good cuppa by adding milk. 

“The Jacksons snapped up a piece of Ollera, one of the oldest settlements in the country, when plots were put up for sale. That’s how we ended up right here at Brushy Creek – and then there’s a French Shepherd called Ducat who used to run his flock around the top of the hill and bring them down for water. Now we’ve completely bastardised his name with our accents, but that’s where Ducat’s Hill comes from. To stand on that land and look out over views and vistas you know four generations before you have looked out over, it’s a cool feeling; it’s something I hold very near and dear. 

“That aside, I’m not saying it’s the reason I’m here. I can’t hear my ancestors yelling at me from the grave telling me this is something I have to do. Ask me if I want to be here, if this is something I want to do, and my answer is yes – unequivocally, yes.” 

Ben’s childhood in 1990s Brushy Creek, Guyra and the New England beyond is another thing he clearly holds near and dear. The highlight reel? Hide and seek with his sister Kate, family adventures following cow tracks in search of pots of gold, wide, open spaces where his imagination roamed wild and free and two incredibly loving, devoted parents who drove him to cricket training and matches, music lessons, theatre performances and drama rehearsals.

“Mum and dad identified early on that I wasn’t exactly scientifically minded,” says Ben. “They understood I wasn’t going to be a neuroscientist. So from a young age they nurtured my creative side and gave me every opportunity to explore theatre groups, music, all that good stuff and more.”

When the big smoke beckons

That good stuff led Ben to Brisbane where he completed a three-year drama degree at Queensland University of Technology. It was a long-held dream, to perfect the art of acting, sink his teeth into roles on stage and screen and forge a career beyond the countryside. 

“I couldn’t think about doing anything else, but…”

Pause. Breathe. This next bit seems to hurt. 

“It is what it is,” Ben continues. “The thing about acting is that it’s incredibly invigorating, beautiful and exhilarating in the moment. It’s everything that gets the adrenaline pumping – but the peripherals suck.”

He goes on to describe days spent pulling beers and pouring coffees to keep the roof over his head, tempered with hours in audition rooms where the realisation you’re competing for gigs against your mates hits hard. 

“Everyone will tell you, being in the creative industries, you’ve got to have a thick skin because ‘no’ is a pretty common word. But when I found myself regularly competing for work against people I’d studied with, people I’d grown close to, and feeling like I was trying to tread over them to get that next TV gig or stage play – that did not sit well with me.”

There’s a glimmer right there, a direct line of sight into Ben Jackson’s soul. Deep thinker, talented, loyal. I can hear his voice on the stage – strong and nuanced. The fact this man doesn’t at least have a podcast is criminal. We compare notes on how we left home as soon as we could, dove into creative pursuits then, ultimately, came back. Neither of us expected the cards to fall that way, but both are unimaginably happy they did. 

“I never thought I’d be back,” he says. “Up until the age of 27, I thought I was destined for the stage, for travel, for doing this and making that. I’m almost ashamed to say it, but I couldn’t wait to see the big wide world, to see what I could make happen. But our story about coming home doesn’t make us Robinson Crusoe – it is, however, a story that perpetuates itself wholeheartedly and always comes back to community.”

What was intended to be a two-week stint back home, helping his dad with lamb marking, turned into the rest of his life. From acting classes and pulling beers to jumping in a pen, picking up lambs and knocking their tails off – Ben will be the first to say you couldn’t think of anything more different. But by the end of day one back on the farm, he felt as though the blinkers had been completely removed and Ben knew. This is where he was meant to be.

“I’m going to quote my neighbour here, and it’s a beautiful quote – ‘the best thing about agriculture is quantifiable rewards’. And by quantifiable rewards I don’t necessarily mean the moolah. I mean you spend a hard day out on the farm doing a fantastic job with some lambs and you see them grow; you see them run through a gate, happy and healthy. 

“It’s those tiny moments in the big wide open world of agriculture, without external pressures, that are absolutely magic. While you do get them in acting when you’re discovering a new character, you can also work yourself into the ground and never get the feeling you do when you watch those lambs jump.”

If I was writing a stage show, I’d probably ‘end scene’ here. Our protagonist is happy, he’s found his feet and the curtains draw closed on him looking out over the countryside and lambs that leap.

But there’s more to this story… and it’s not what you’d expect to find 30km west of Guyra. 

Enter the Electric Postman

It’s intermission. A fresh cup of coffee is poured and I can tell something’s bubbling beneath the surface. 

Curtains draw open. The second half begins with a question. 

“Did you feel a sense of calm coming home?”

“No, not to begin with,” says Ben.

“Initially, the creative brain in me was starved. I had all these ideas and needed to direct that energy somewhere, but I didn’t know where or how.”

It’s at this point I should tell you Ben has another string to his already beautiful bow. While in Brisbane, he and four mates established their own record label – look up ‘Um, Yep’ for an electronica treat to the senses. So between pulling beers, pouring coffees and battling for acting gigs, he was also recording a plethora of music. 

His DJ name? Electric Postman.

He mixes sounds, makes memories and boy, does he move. 

“I’m a bit of a festival fiend actually. I like going out and listening to other DJs and producers from around the world, seeing what they’re doing and discovering the sounds they’re creating. And while you can draw a certain amount of inspiration from your favourite artists, like Daft Punk and Justice, it’s not my thing to try and copy.”

Instead, Ben’s creative process starts with an idea, a rhythm, a beat – and from that moment onwards a nucleus is formed from which everything else flows. 

“I literally try to paint a song around it, rather than write an intro, a bridge, a verse, a chorus – I follow that core feeling and ask myself, ‘what if I did that, or how about I do this?’ That freedom goes back and forth and before you know it, there’s six minutes of banging electronic music in the pipelines.” 

Neither the music nor the man fit into any mould. If you’ve been lucky enough to see Ben DJ live, or caught a snippet online, you’ll come face to face with a musician who feels every – single – beat. He lets his body go with the music, so much so if gravity bowed out for a moment I’m fairly certain he’d float away. There’s something about him that’s not of this earth, and yet he’s also one of the most grounded humans I’ve ever met. 

Then there’s the lyrics. 

“I know if I’ve spent a great deal of time by myself, running around yelling at disobedient dogs and trying to talk to inanimate objects, eventually the brain starts going a bit loopy,” says Ben.

“But next minute, you’re coming up with lyrics that are so far off the wall they work. Having the freedom to be able to let the mind go into those places is a beautiful thing.

“Nothing’s off the table, and that’s a really exciting place to be. As a crew with Um, Yep, we know that we can experiment, go completely ham and not be driven by fiscal rewards but by creative output. It’s magic when you see people not be hemmed in by ideas, to just go for it and make it happen. To be sat here, 30km west of Guyra, putting our work on Spotify and iTunes and collaborating with various artists, it’s incredible. But finding that balance, uncovering a way to weave that into my world here, took time.”

Truth be told, it took Ben a good 12 months to find himself after returning home. He’d been gone nine years and came home a different person – with that came the need to discover who he was as a farmer, an artist and a musician in this new, but old, land.

Sheep art is born

While returning home to a country community, throwing himself into the bushfire brigade, the local cricket team and “a heap of lamb and spud stuff” settled his soul – there was a part of Ben left wanting. Magnified by drought and COVID-19, that part ultimately found its place in a paddock – when Ben combined carefully placed grain with sheep, drone skills and some of his favourite tunes. 

He calls it sheep art. 

“Credit where credit’s due: I couldn’t have done it without my dogs Fluffy, Strudel, Weird Horse and Sputnik. But at the end of the day, it’s off my own bat and I’m somewhat proud of that.

“That juxtaposition between agriculture and electronica is fantastic,” he says. “I think it opens up worlds and shifts long-held perceptions about the kind of people who work the land. 

“The idea that farmers are fuddy-duddy folks who love their tractors and spend all their time chasing sheep or cattle from the crack of dawn, then come in swearing about a flat tyre – those days are done. Farmers are agricultural enthusiasts, but we’re also nuanced, weird and wonderful people and it’s time others see us in all our shades of grey.”

Ben’s unique fusion of music, agriculture and showmanship delivers sheep artworks that are equal parts beautiful and bizarre, witty and wild. From spelling out favourite band names, cheering on his footy team and sending birthday wishes, it’s a mesmerising way to break the farming mould. 

And it all began in the moonscaped paddocks born of drought.

Ben describes tens of thousands of dollars being poured onto the ground, trying to keep stock alive and becoming so focused on his animals, he lost himself. 

“You’re not all there – I’d come home broken, buggered, I’d stopped creating music. That’s when a part of the brain gets tied up, it’s going stir crazy, this artistic side is screaming to do something but there’s no physical motivation to make it happen.”

The birth of a dear friend’s firstborn son was the impetus to see if he could write something… in sheep… then film it. 

“That’s a bit of a dopamine hit, when you’re first trying to fly a drone from the top of a hill to capture a word in the dirt, formed by sheep. But it worked, and it was pretty darn cool.”

That day, ‘Angus’ appeared from the ground in swirling white wool, two weeks later, ‘Go Blues’ emerged for the State of Origin and next minute, the public’s appetite for sheep art grew. 

“Out of a shit situation, I’m starting to do something that’s artistic, something meaningful. Isn’t that what artists always want to do? Create something that means something to one person or a plethora of people? I won’t say it’s the one thing that got me through the drought, but it certainly helped. It made a massive difference in terms of my drive and willingness to keep going. Instead of going out every day and getting a gut full of dust, you’re doing something that might mean something to someone.”

Then came the heart. 

A simple symbol. Stitched together by sheep. To the tune of Simon & Garfunkel’s Bridge over Troubled Water. 

While it meant one thing to Ben – he could never have imagined how much it would mean to others. 

“Doing the heart as a tribute to my Aunty Deb was born out of circumstance – not being able to attend her funeral due to lockdown,” he says. 

“At the time, it was the only logical thing I could think of to show how much I love and miss her. And while it was a little while ago now, it has given me space to think about what it meant.

“At the time, everyone around the globe was shut in. And yet in that moment we experienced art transcending living rooms – that heart meant a lot of different things to a lot of people. It felt like, for the time it took to play that one song, everyone had their own Aunty Deb.”

People the world over reached out to Ben and his family, consoling them for their loss and sharing their own tales of woe. Unimaginable connections were forged across oceans and, ultimately, that sheep art heart went viral. 

He describes the acknowledgement as visceral and humbling – the kind of feeling you get when you pass someone on the street and exchange a nod, a pat on the back or a laugh about how bloody cold the weather is. 

It’s that community spirit, that deep connection to place, that Ben’s found once more in Guyra – and he’s in it for keeps. 

“I’m deeply committed to this town – it’s been here for me and I want to be here for it right back.

“I’ve done a fair amount of travelling in my time. I’ve lived in the big smoke, pursued passions and chased other kinds of lives. But every time I come back out here, a sense of belonging so strong washes over me it’s impossible to ignore. People go their whole lives trying to find that feeling, that knowledge that you’re in the right spot, you’re where you’re meant to be. I’m acutely aware of how privileged and fortunate I am to have that feeling when I look out over Ducat’s Hill every morning – that’s special, I cherish it, and there’s no amount of money on the planet that can tear me away from this place.”

I get it, that feeling – it’s subtle but electric, grounded and real. 

And when I leave Ben’s home for my own, I feel it for myself the second Mount Duval emerges on the horizon. I’m grateful for that, for the conversation I just had and for the opportunity to share Ben’s story in his own words, entirely unstaged and true. 

If you’re still hoping for a slice of something connected to that show, you’re hard out of luck. But what I will say is this: when you spend more than five minutes in Ben Jackson’s company, you realise he’s anything but ordinary – he’s wild and free, but steadfast, too, as all good things with country roots tend to be. He’s an artist, a musician, an agriculturalist and a really good human. 

He’s happy. 

He’s healthy. 

And for the record, he didn’t say groovy once. 

What’s in a name?

So how exactly did Ben’s record label score the name ‘Um, Yep’?

Well, back in his Brisbane days, Ben was honing his stage craft while writing music on the side, all the while trying to get it out to record labels and distributors. Tired of the ongoing slog, Ben and his mates took matters into their own hands. 

“It came about one night, after a merry amount of beers, as the four of us chatted about how the effort and energy it took to market, promote and pitch our music was becoming entirely demoralising. It was taking up a large slice of our creative time and sucking the batteries. 

“That’s when my dear friend Cameron turned to the group and said: ‘Why don’t we start our own label?’

“And I’ll never forget it, Justin looked up, eyes glazed and simply responded with: ‘Um, Yep’.”

That was it – locked in stone. Fast forward to today and the record label is a 10-strong crew creating high-quality EPs without boundaries. Having shaken off the shackles that come with trying to create for others, Um, Yep seized the opportunity to go free rein. Check them out for yourself here. 

Um, Yep | Electric Postman | Photography Jim A. Barker