The Shady Baker shares her favourite recipes that make the most of olive oil

Many years ago, when my husband Terry and I had just taken over our property, we decided to plant olive trees around our sheep yards. Local friends, Colin and Paula Clare, had an olive tree nursery and they gave us the confidence and support to get started. Later, the grove spread to the boundary of our house paddock, garden and shearers’ quarters. The original idea was to provide shade, shelter and a windbreak for our sheep. As we planted young sticks into the dry earth, a bountiful harvest seemed a very long way off.

The years passed, seasons were both good and bad, we became a family of four and those thin sticks steadily became big, strong trees. There was trial and error with tree guards, pruning and irrigation systems. After harvesting our early crops, we attempted pickling and preserving. Some attempts were more successful than others.

The Shady Baker chats to Graziher’s Life on the Land podcast about her life on a sheep station east of Broken Hill and her love of cooking for her family. Article continues below. 

In 2007 we joined the Broken Hill Gourmet Products co-op. This group of enthusiastic locals coordinates the harvesting of local heritage olive trees, manages an olive grove in Broken Hill and produces and markets olive oil. This was our starting point for pressing our own olive oil.

We now have around 300 mature olive trees on our property, comprising a number of different varieties. In autumn this year we harvested 1200 kilograms of fruit and produced 150 litres of oil. Some of this oil has been contributed to the co-op, and the rest will be used in liberal amounts in our kitchen. It has become a yearly tradition to test the freshly pressed oil on chunks of warm bread as soon as we receive it.

Each season the taste, smell and colour of the oil changes, depending on the variables of the season.

Harvesting olives involves machinery that loosens the fruit from the trees, while big green mats are laid out to catch the olives as they fall. There is a lot of heavy lifting as the crates of olives are stacked up before they are transported to the oil press in Broken Hill. Harvest day usually involves lunch or morning tea with our picking crew, as a way to show our appreciation for their efforts.

Our grove softens the landscape on what would otherwise be a bare, windswept hill. The trees provide shade for stock, people, sheep dogs and cars, which is a welcome relief in the summer heat. Over the years we have hosted a long lunch near the trees, various barbecues and, more recently, a wedding reception, where guests mingled under fairy light–laden limbs.

The trees have rewarded us with so much more than oil and olives: they have become part of our landscape and our lives, connecting us with people in our community in a way we could not have imagined when we started planting all those years ago. Our hope is that the grove will continue to be used and appreciated by future generations.