Can you imagine anything more joyful than a sunflower festival? The sea of yellow stretches as far as the eye can see. Sunflowers swaying on their tall stems. Row after row across the rolling landscape. The colour of optimism, warmth and sunshine in a flower.
“They just make you happy,” says Jenny Jenner, running her hands over the petals of one. Behind her, Queensland’s Scenic Rim seems to vibrate with fertility — alive, growing, ready for the harvest.
But four years ago this was a scene of despair. The land was brown, bare dirt: Dead. It was the seventh year of drought. Times were hard, with no end in sight. “The Moogerah Dam was down to 12 per cent and our allocation was being cut off. We couldn’t irrigate — you can’t grow anything without water,” Jenny says.
It seemed – after 16 years on this farm growing lucerne — like the end of days. The district was depressed. When farming comes to a halt it affects everybody. There was no money to spend on businesses in town. People were worn down.
“You forget what years of drought does to people and the stress it puts you under,” Jenny recalls.
The birth of the Kalbar Sunflower Festival
Jenny was desperately trying to think outside the box. She and her husband, Russell, had lost their main source of income. The farm had to diversify. Jenny wondered what they could do.
It was then, in the depths of drought, that Russell made a spontaneous romantic gesture. He bought Jenny three sunflowers from the supermarket.
They looked so pretty on the kitchen bench, and Jenny noticed they lasted a long time in a vase. She had heard, on the news, of people doing dangerous things in other places to get selfies in fields of golden, yellow canola crops. They trespassed, cut barbed wire fences and brought biosecurity risks with them.
She thought, “Why don’t we plant a big bunch of sunflowers and get people to come and look? We could create a safe place where they could walk up to the sunflowers and immerse themselves in them.” She was hoping that it might “put money back into the local economy”.
Why sunflowers?
They did their research and it turns out that sunflowers are more than just a pretty face. They’re resilient, don’t need much water and flower in 60 days. The kernels can also be harvested as edibles. What’s more, sunflowers bring the joy, big time. Studies have shown that exposure to them can release serotonin in the brain and relieve stress.
When Jenny has an idea, “it happens”, Russell says in a film that’s been made about them, Growing Happiness. “And so,” Jenny adds, “we thought, let’s have a crack at this, and get the community involved.”
Jenny is sitting in a cane chair on the verandah of her pale brick house on a hilltop that overlooks fields of sunflowers. In the distance, patchwork fields lead up to the ghostly blue mountains of the Great Dividing Range. We are on the outskirts of the farming town of Kalbar, with its quaint wooden farmhouses and population of 960 people.
The story of Jenny and Russell
Jenny met Russell 38 years ago. She had been Miss Boonah Showgirl and her photo was in the paper. Russell’s mother told him, in no uncertain terms, that he should marry her. She thought that, at 25, he was too old to still be living at home. Russell found out Jenny played squash and started playing too. He proposed within a couple of months.
“I held him off for a couple of years,” Jenny says with a laugh, “and the rest is history.”
They married in 1985. Russell had a successful mowing business, but having both grown up on the land, they wanted a farm of their own.
In 2006 the Jenners bought a property and started growing lucerne. They have two children, a son and a daughter, and three adored grandsons.
The popularity of the festival bloomed
They planted their first, modest sunflower crop in 2021 and when they opened the farm for a day when the flowers were in bloom 2500 people came. The next day, “another 1000 people turned up … So we decided to make it a three-day event”.
In a gutsy move, they planted a million seeds over 25 acres in 2022. And obstacle after seemingly insurmountable obstacle reared up in front of them. They were farmers who had to have a crash course in event management.
Then there was the challenge of trying to get all those flowers to reach their peak glory on the exact three days the visitors would come. Drought gave way to rain and the worst floods ever seen on the east coast.
“Ever since we planted sunflowers it keeps raining,” Jenny notes. And when it’s raining, “you can’t get tractors on the ground, you can’t plant, it’s all muddy. You just have to sit around and wait for the rain to go.”
Fifteen thousand people had bought tickets to the three-day festival, but after 500ml of rain, the flowers were stunted. After sleepless nights, the Jenners put the festival back two weeks and crossed their fingers.
Then there were aggressively truculent townsfolk who complained about traffic and tourists and accused the council of corruption for letting the festival go ahead.
“The whole town hates you and your stupid sunflower festival,” says one man recorded in the film. Normally so resilient but stressed to the max, Jenny dissolved into tears after that particular phone call.
They had done this for the community. It was heartbreaking. But Jenny and Russell persevered — and they triumphed.
Back in April, when The Weekly visited the festival, Jenny admitted that all the excitement felt “bittersweet”. Even with all the optimism of the sunflowers around her and all the boss-lady things she had to do — from 44 portable toilets arriving and marquees to erect — there is an underlying sadness about Jenny. A deep grief. Her voice wobbles when she talks about the past two years.
Sadness and determination behind the sunflower festival
Around Christmas of 2021, Russell began having difficulty swallowing food. His GP immediately sent him for an endoscopy.
A five-centimetre tumour was found in his oesophagus, and he was given just six to 12 months to live.
Russell was stoic. He planned to stay positive and keep planting sunflower seeds. “They give you a reason to get up in the morning,” he says in the film. “I thought, ‘This is not happening. I am not going to let it drag me down and drag everyone around me down’.”
Nevertheless, says Jenny, “our whole life was turned upside down.
“Apparently, with that cancer, you’ve usually had it for two years before you have symptoms before you’re diagnosed,” she tells The Weekly. “It had spread to his lymph nodes and the chemo was just to hold it at bay. He couldn’t be operated on and they couldn’t cure him.”
The Jenners decided to partner the Sunflower Festival with the Cancer Council to raise money for cancer. “It was a great opportunity to have lots of people here,” says Jenny. “You could sell raffle tickets. Our local not-for-profit organisations came on board and helped us. And we were able to create the event.”
When Russell started chemo, “he never got sick,” Jenny says, “he’d lost weight but then he actually put weight back on. The first lot of chemo worked quite well for about six months. If you know much about cancer, they’ll try one drug after another, but apparently the first one works the best.”
A storm brewing for the farmers
By the end of the first year, and after radiation, Russell was feeling well enough to drive to Sydney to visit their son and their new grandchild. When they got home, “we were told that the radiation hadn’t worked and they tried another chemo”.
But it didn’t stop them from putting their hearts and souls into the next festival. In 2023 the Kalbar Sunflower Festival was so successful that they had a waiting list of 17,000 people.
By then Russell was getting thin. “We were still running the farm,” Jenny says. “We’d cut back on growing lucerne when he was diagnosed because that was too much hard work and a lot of night work. We focused on growing grain and doing the sunflower festival.”
When the end came, “it was quick,” Jenny says. “He started getting sick in May; by June he went into hospital.”
Russell had been proud of his farm. “He’d worked hard all his life. Probably too hard, like most farmers do. We should have had more holidays, all that sort of thing. But then the old ‘Big C’ comes along and wrecks your life.”
They tried to bring Russell home at the end. “But he only lasted one night here, and in the middle of the night, we had to take him to hospital.
“He fell unconscious and had his last days in palliative care. He died at the end of July.”
Jenny is close to tears talking about it. But by October last year, she was back at work on the 2024 festival.
Jenny’s mission to continue the legacy
“It gives me a purpose,” she says. “I’ll continue the festival in Russell’s honour and to raise money for cancer. That’s my focus. That’s the legacy I want Russell to be remembered for. He used to love taking the sunflowers to the hospital.”
Jenny is a woman with a mission statement. “To me, it is important to grow sunflowers to do good for other people,” she says. “The money I raise is to provide things for other people going through the same sort of journey. I feel fortunate that we have a farm and I can do this. Not everybody has this opportunity. If we can make a difference somehow because we can grow some flowers, we will try to help people.”
The 2024 festival sold out months in advance. “And we have never spent a cent advertising it,” she admits. Such is the power of sunflowers.
There were helicopter rides, lunches and dinners among the sunflowers, market stalls and food trucks. The Weekly was shown the jam for 1400 Devonshire teas waiting in a fridge.
“We make scarecrows, we’ve got tractors in the paddock, we get the schools involved and we decorate bales. Every year we add more to it.”
Sunflowers have become a symbol of strength and resilience
Sunflowers are known for tracking the sun across the sky during the day, swivelling their heads. But, says Jenny, once they bloom, “they all face east”. She says she has “learned a lot” since that first planting in 2021.
“I think I’ve got them pretty much down to a fine art now.”
To Jenny, every flower is unique. “They are just different shapes, but all equally beautiful,” she says.
And all too fleeting. In a couple of weeks, they will be drooping and gone, ploughed back into the earth for their potassium. A crop of wheat will be planted in their place.
“We will plant them again,” Jenny says. “We do another crop in between because you can’t plant the same thing straight after, it is not good farming practice.”
But it’s glorious to see the sunflowers unfurling while they’re here, magnificent en masse and covered in bees. Jenny says there is nothing “like waking up in the morning and looking at them out of the back window”.
Above all, she says, sunflowers give people hope. “They are so happy. They brighten your day, they brighten your outlook. How can you go home unhappy? Nobody could ever say that the flowers weren’t beautiful.”
This article originally appeared in the November 2024 issue of The Australian Women’s Weekly. Pick up the most recent issue at your local newsagent or subscribe so you never miss an issue!
