As The Farmer Wants A Wife comes to an end (what will we do on Wednesday nights?) Fiona Higgins shares the story of her real-life rural romance

Before I met Stuart I never imagined that I – a latte-loving city girl who dated bankers and lawyers – would ever fall for a brawny cotton farmer. Let alone give up my beloved noisy apartment to live on a remote farm, where I would take up baking and strut around in dusty jeans and a gingham shirt.

As a child, my only trip to a relative’s farm left me traumatised by my uncle’s remark that a lamb I had been petting earlier was the one on the table for Sunday lunch. And I’d mistakenly thought of farmers as slow-talking, grass-chewing and sometimes sexist. But from the moment I saw Stu at a leadership conference in Melbourne I was instantly attracted to him. Tall, broad-shouldered and tanned, he had a typical farmer’s physique.

For 18 months we had a long-distance relationship. In that time I visited the farm once and saw little besides the decor of Stu’s bedroom. But then our relationship faltered – mainly because of my lack of commitment to him. It was during the six months apart I realised I had lost the best thing that had ever happened to me and decided to take drastic action and move to the farm near the township of Jandowae – population 700 – in western Queensland.

When I arrived, it felt like a different universe. I was immediately struck by the intense silence – our nearest neighbours were more than 10km away. In the 15 years since Stu had bought the property he had focused all his attentions on farming and done nothing to the decrepit old bungalow.

On my second night I came across a huge snake about a metre from my foot. I also had to get used to the green tree frogs that lived in our toilet and get over the shock of discovering rats living in the roof.

That first Saturday night we went to bed at 7.45pm. “My god,” I thought. “I’ve moved to rural Australia and turned into my grandmother.” For the first few months I did ask myself: can I cope? But there’s nothing like being romanced in a rural way. Stu knew I loved baths but we only had a shower at the farm. One night he borrowed an old iron bath from a neighbour, filled it with water and placed it in a tractor tray. Underneath he lit fires in two 44-gallon drums and put candles around the tub and filled it with rose petals. I lay there for a blissful 45 minutes, having a bath 3m in the air beneath the stars.

Then one April morning (only eight weeks after I arrived) Stu proposed to me with a treasure hunt of notes around the farm – I was officially to be a farmer’s wife for real. Three months later we married at Cambooya, population 1400, about an hour’s drive from Jandowae.

As time went on I found myself behaving more and more like a stereotypical farmer’s wife. When I lived in the city I would never have been caught dead making Anzac biscuits, but I took up baking scones and enjoyed hanging out with the neighbouring wives. Not to mention the hospitality: one friend would drive past the farm and leave me boxes of fresh vegies and jars of homemade jam. But as any good farmer’s wife will attest, any socialising has to be planned. I couldn’t call up a friend and say “fancy catching a film?” since the nearest cinema was 90km away.

I loved living in rural Queensland but sadly, like many farmers, we were eventually forced to sell the farm last July. In many ways I think I was more upset to leave than Stu, and though we now live near Sydney, with our 18 month-old son Oliver, I hope we will return to farming one day.

To the hopeful candidates on The Farmer Wants A Wife, I’d say farming life can be idyllic but it’s got to be the right farmer. And Stuart was mine.

Love in the Age of Drought by Fiona Higgins is published by Macmillan Australia in April, $34.99, www.loveintheageofdrought.com