Jack Marx
IT recently occurred to Jill McNamara that her property is about the same size as Gaza.
“Gaza is 90000 acres, and we’re on 85000 acres,” she said. “So Gaza is about one paddock bigger than our property, and millions of people live there. Here, there’s three. So we’re pretty lucky.”
With her husband Jack and son, Conor, Ms McNamara runs Copago Station, a property that produces Merino sheep and, as it turns out, salt.
Since 2016, Ms McNamara has been harvesting salt from a dry lake bed on the property, packaging and selling it at Wilcannia, just 40kms to the south.
“We had a visitor, a friend of mine who came out almost 10 years ago now,” she recalled.
“He was a chef. When he saw the salt lake, he got really excited about it. So he planted the seed in my mind, and it took a while for that seed to take root.”
Today, one can see the fruits of Ms McNamara’s labours on her Instagram page, Salt off the Earth (@copago.salt). There is basil salt, chicken salt, chili salt and red wine salt – salts of every flavour and texture, all thanks to Ms McNamara and her miraculous harvesting machine, a spoon.
“When I first talked to council about harvesting the lake, they were worried about me depleting the resource,” said Ms McNamara.
“I said, ‘That’s impossible. It’s just me and my spoon.’ Because that’s all I use.”
One would think that water might be the natural enemy of a salt farm, whether flood waters that hail from the north or rain that tumbles from the sky.
But the salt lake is not fed by any river, and Ms McNamara insists a little rain – like we had this week – is a good thing.
“The best time to get it is when there’s been just a tiny bit of rain on the lake,” she said.
“The salt is very wet, but it’s also very clean, so I don’t have to worry about washing it. I’ll get maybe 100 kilos and that will last me many months.”
A website is planned for the future, but, for now, Ms McNamara is content with selling from her stall at Wilcannia Café each weekend.
“All the tourists coming through get pretty excited when they hear that it’s locally harvested,” she said.
