Sitting in the warm lounge room of her Maiden Gully home, we’re hanging on her every word. 

Sally’s story of battling the elements to establish and care for an organic heirloom apple orchard in Bendigo is engrossing. 

And her book, Clay Gully, to be released next month, is the perfect memento from the years Sally spent in-tune with the cycles of impossible blossoms.

“It’s a book about a complete and utter disaster. A total failure,” Sally says.

“But I had 12 wonderful years in that orchard.”

It all began when Sally and her husband Nick began searching for a property with space for their boisterous German short-haired pointer.

Finding a 1970s house on 10 acres abutting the Bendigo National Park quite literally changed their lives.

Sally, originally from the UK, had lived in Australia for two years before the Bendigo move. She’d never even seen a kangaroo before, and suddenly there she was, living among the wildlife of Bendigo. 

She says the property they moved too was very different to what it is today. And the reason for that is drought.

“At that time there was so much rain,” she says. “We have three dams that were always full, plus a 5.2 meg water allowance.

“I looked out across the paddock and I thought, we’ve got all this land, maybe we should grow something on it?”

Sally had wonderful memories of her grandfather’s orchard in Yorkshire, where she grew up.

 “You couldn’t buy apples in Australia like that. English people eat different apples,” she says.

The names of the varieties Sally sourced and planted dance off the tongue; Belle de Boskoop, Bramley’s Seedling, Improved Foxwhelp, Tydemans Early Worcester, Lord Lambourne, Sturmer Pippin, and straight from a fairy tale, Grimes Golden. 

She planted 300 trees of 24 different varieties.

“They were historic apples that I grew,” Sally says.

And they were high-maintenance.

Determined to maintain her organic status, Sally’s efforts to combat the elements naturally took her on many adventures of trial and error.

She found organic, humane ways to deal with coddling moth, hungry birds, hares ring barking the trees, animals scattering the mulch, currawongs ripping off the trunk guards, and many other things.

Once the trees began to produce fruit Sally realised she’d been given 150 of the wrong variety. Each one had to be chopped off at the trunk and the right specimen grafted on. 

“It took a few years longer than expected but eventually I got beautiful fruit,” she says.

“Then the weather started to change and we entered what was the longest drought in recorded history.”

Over the ensuring years of drought Sally’s water allowance was whittled down to nothing, the dams stayed dry and the trees became stressed and sick.

When eventually she admitted defeat it was almost the breaking point for herself as well as her trees.

“When the bulldozer came to take out the orchard, I had to be taken away,” she says.

“I couldn’t be there when it came out. I was very sad.”

To help deal with the loss, Sally began to write her story. 

“I thought, I can’t forget about this. I had to write down what happened,” she says.

“Especially the animals. I had magpies sitting on my shoulder – I had amazing experiences with animals and I didn’t want to forget them.”

Talk about amazing. How’s this one for example...

Sally tells the story of finding a brown snake caught in one of her bird-proofing nets.

“I couldn’t leave it to die, I felt really bad about it,” she says.

“So I went and got my sewing scissors and I came back and started cutting the net away slowly from the tail.”

Sally said the snake seemed lifeless, until she freed its tail and it began to whip.

 “At this point it was looking at me with its little brown eye and I’m thinking, it knows I’m trying to help it,” she says.

She continued to cut the net away, jumping back as she freed its head. But the snake didn’t slither away. It stayed looking at Sally and opened its mouth wide.

“A thread of the net was caught around its tooth,” she says.

“It was a bit late to walk away by then.

“So I went and got a stick – I wasn’t putting my hand in there – and I lifted the net off its tooth with the end of the stick.

“It had a little look at me and I looked at it and it went off down to the dam to look for frogs and that was it.”

Sally wrote 90 little stories about what happened in the orchard, then drew 180 pictures for them.

When it dawned on her she’d made a book, she sent her pages to Wakefield Press. 

The book Clay Gully arrives next month.

Sally says she’d never written a word in her life before this, and now she can’t stop.

Sally’s writing life has been an unexpected, welcome outcome of her years of toil in the orchard.

“It was a life experience,” she says.

“I’m very much conscious of the changing climate. It bothers me a great deal and I don’t think people who don’t live on the land realise it.”

Sally has ten apple trees left, the fruit of which she uses in her home kitchen and gifts to friends and family.

She says many bird species that bred around her home disappeared in the drought. The animal community hasn’t bounced back. The environment here is beautiful, but different.

She has nesting boxes for birds and sugar gliders, and in harsh times she feeds the kangaroos.

“I’m very sad about the way things are heading and I feel I have to do what I can,” she says.

Perhaps this book will help us understand how fragile our own backyard has become. Perhaps Sally’s unwavering care for it will inspire us to do the same.

■ Clay Gully will be launched at Dymocks Bendigo at 5.30pm on August 22. Sally will speak at the Bendigo Writers Festival on Sunday, August 11.