Metal Fabricator • Bush Poet • Women In Trades Advocate • Content Creator
Helen Dunn—known online as That Welding Sheila—is a qualified metal fabricator, women-in-trades advocate and writer of modern Australian tradie verse. She joined the Country Campfire Bush Poetry Podcast with her own recital of White Girl Wasted, bringing the humour and blunt honesty of blue-collar life straight to the microphone.
An Australian tradeswoman with years spent on the tools, Helen shares welding, metal fabrication and workshop life with a growing online audience. By 2026, she described herself as having worked in the industry for 17 years, using that experience to encourage women in trades and pass practical advice on to apprentices.
This page brings Helen’s poems, recitals and Country Campfire appearances together in one permanent home, ready to grow as more of her work is shared around the campfire.
Where Steel Meets Storytelling
That Welding Sheila is not a character dreamed up from the sidelines. Helen’s stories come from inside the trade—from the tools, personalities, frustrations and workshop banter that make up life on the job.
Her public videos move between practical trade advice, support for other women in blue-collar industries and humorous rhyming takes on workshop culture. It is a straight-talking style that gives contemporary tradie life a place within Australia’s continuing tradition of verse and yarn-spinning.
White Girl Wasted introduced Helen’s voice to the Country Campfire podcast: a lively modern poem performed in her own unmistakably Australian style. It also showed why her work belongs here—not because it copies the bush poets who came before, but because it carries the same instinct to turn everyday Australian life into a story worth sharing.
Follow Helen Dunn — That Welding Sheila
Helen Dunn On Country Campfire
The following poem by Helen Dunn has been shared on Country Campfire:
Rights And Permission
Poems and contributions are shared by Country Campfire with permission.
Poems, recitals, photographs, stories and original works remain the property of their original creator and are shared by Country Campfire with permission.
Country Campfire Legend #22