Megg Miller OAM

Megg Miller OAM has had a connection to the Royal Melbourne Show as a competitor, judge and committee member for over 31 years. She first became interested in showing poultry after a visit to the Show as a child: ‘And I remember it from when I was a kid, it was just magical, that lit the fire’.

When Megg began to show her birds competitively, it was a man’s world. ‘We took a couple of turkeys over’, she recalls, ‘and the stewards couldn’t talk to me, they’d talk to my husband. It was very much a man’s business’. But Megg was undeterred and her love of breeding, raising, showing and learning everything she could about poultry, continued.

As a long-time exhibitor, as well as a judge and member of the Royal Agricultural Society of Victoria (RASV) Poultry Committee, Megg has a good idea of what is needed to prepare a chicken for competition:

The first work is to get the legs nice, so you might start oiling the legs at night … look at every single scale, you might need to remove the dirt … And then you'll be putting a little bit of good quality almond oil perhaps on the comb, so it's nice, and on the wattles, and I always call that putting the makeup on. Then you have your silk cloth and you run that over the plumage to bring the shine out.

The Royal Melbourne Show competition is described by Megg as ‘the cream of the show season’. Winning a serious award there, ‘you just feel wonderful’. But more than winning, the Show provides a place to share knowledge and inspire others. ‘It’s a meeting place for education on livestock’, says Megg, ‘and in a way, for future agricultural directions’.