Back when Rachel Ward was a model hanging out with the 1970s New York jet set, pop art legend Andy Warhol gave her a painting of a cow.

She wasn’t too chuffed about the gift then, she tells Australian Story, thinking, “A cow? I don’t want a picture of a bloody cow”.

But art and life often find a way of intertwining and that yellow and blue version of Warhol’s iconic Cow series now hangs in the homestead kitchen of Rachel’s beef cattle property, the place where the former model, actor and director has found the purpose she has long craved.

“How clever of him,” says Rachel of the famous artist, “to have known I was gonna end up as a cow hand.”