Hi,

This is an interesting question.
I think very few people in Australia have ever seen "normal" weaning. Weaning is so would up in cultural beliefs and expectations.
The normal age of weaning is believed to be between the ages of 2.5yrs and 7 years (See Kathy Dettwyler's research) Yet less than 2% of Australian children make it to the WHO recommended 2 years.
In my own case: I was going to breastfeed Zac (now 16!) for 6mnths "if I could". I genuinely thought that would be a pretty normal age to stop breastfeeding if I could.
We had our struggles. By 10mnths, (I was working full time from when he was 6mnths) Zac seemed to prefer the bottle. He would feed for minutes - reluctantly, once or twice a day. I was well over expressing. I went to my health nurse and told her I felt he was weaning, and I was ready to stop too. She gave me the biggest gift. She encouraged me to keep going til he was 12mnths old, but suggested I stop expressing and bottle feeding as he didn't need it. I did this. Breastfeeding barely ticked along, and I fully planned to wean him at 12mnths. Then, I don't remember how or when, he got "more into it" and I breastfed him until he was four and a half years old.
Interestingly, a close friend at the time took a different view. She was outraged at the health nurses's comments, saying she should have supported me when I said I wanted to wean. How could she make me feel guilty about wanting to stop. Maybe that health nurse saw, under the exhaustion and stress that I really didn't want to stop - and neither did he.
Our culture also has an amazing ignorance of normal baby behaviour. Babies aren't born knowing there are bottles out there in the big wide world. We give them bottles - a completely different experience for a baby than a breast. Even mothers of very young (weeks old) babies will sometimes say to me "he weaned himself - he wanted the bottle, not me) Babies are designed to breastfeed. If they can't, it's because there is something that is making it a difficult experience for them - not because they won't. With older babies, often, they can "feed on the go". for the boob they have to turn to mum, put life on hold for a bit and feed. With a bottle they can turn their head and it just goes with them. This behaviour seems normal to us. Babies seem, in our culture to come in a package with bottles. Drinking milk from a bottle can be an easier way for a toddler to get a full tummy than eating the real, healthy, solid food they need at that age - so children "fill up" with milk instead of eating meat, fruit and vegetables that they need.
We don't (by and large) know what breastfeeding toddlers would normally do. Is one feed enough for them? or 10? Or more? I am even asked (very frequently) whether if a mother doesn't wean by a certain age will their child *ever wean* (yes!)
My children have all breastfed for a biologically normal timespan. Zac is 16 - and I have breastfed all that time, pretty much!