I work in the remotest parts of cen­tral and north­ern Aus­tralia and have met many remark­able peo­ple in the last 15 years. While work­ing on Milingim­bi in the ​‘Croc­o­dile Isles’ recent­ly, I met Jason, a remote area nurse who comes close to being top of my list. 

He has been an inspi­ra­tion to me – high- light­ing that med­i­cine and nurs­ing can go hand-in-hand with oth­er pas­sions. Every con­ver­sa­tion he and I had in the remote com­mu­ni­ty hos­pi­tal began with Jason’s thoughts about how best to care for the Indige­nous patients he knew and cared about.

And every con­ver­sa­tion end­ed with his oth­er pas­sions – black gar­lic, his wife’s flow­ers and their grow­ing herd of angus cat­tle in Welsh­pool, Victoria.

After decades of remote area nurs­ing in Aus­tralia and over­seas, Melanie and Jason decid­ed to give farm­ing a go. Now they man­age to do both. But it’s not just any farm. They hope to be one of the only pro­duc­ers of black gar­lic in Aus­tralia and have aspi­ra­tions of sell­ing over­seas. After some heart­break­ing delays with the COVID pan­dem­ic, they’re final­ly on the road to a dream come true.

The two nurs­es first met in Alice Springs and worked in cen­tral Aus­tralia for 16 years. Chas­ing more adven­ture, but also want­i­ng to learn from a dif­fer­ent cul­ture, and help bridge gaps in health care, they moved to the most north­ern part of Alas­ka called Tuk­toy­ak­tuk where their two chil­dren were born.

The kids went to the local Inu­it school and soon spoke flu­ent Inu­vialuk­tun (a rare Inu­it lan­guage) as well as French and English.

In 2015 Jason and Melanie moved back to Aus­tralia with the dream of estab­lish­ing a farm while the kids were in board­ing school. Melanie did a 12 month course in hor­ti­cul­ture and she decid­ed they’d focus on flow­ers and gar­lic. Their non-nego­tiable vision was to be chem­i­cal free, self-sus­tain­able and organic.

When staff at the remote clin­ic in the NT talk about their fam­i­lies back home, Jason talks about how many bulbs of gar­lic Melanie can plant. Between nine and 12 thou­sand a day – ​“and all in a squat­ting posi­tion between the raised beds we built”.

When he’s not dri­ving the 4×4 dent­ed con­vert­ed troop-car­ri­er/am­bu­lance around com­mu­ni­ties, he’s dri­ving around their farm on the oppo­site end of Aus­tralia. Just around the coast from Wilsons Prom in Vic­to­ria, their prop­er­ty gets a good rainfall.

To begin with Jason built (by hand) 86 raised beds and togeth­er they filled them with organ­ic mate­r­i­al and soil.

Melanie man­ages four big worm farms and uses a worm juice/​water mix to spray on the pro­duce instead of chem­i­cals. The first year they start­ed with just 800 gar­lic plants. The crop grew from 800 to about 28,000 in the sec­ond year and despite the huge num­bers they are plant­i­ng and har­vest­ing, they do it all themselves.

The plants are grown in spe­cial raised beds that Jason built by hand. Each row is 110m long and it takes 40-tip­per loads of organ­ic soil to fill one row. When it’s time to make a new row, Jason shov­els the tons of soil into the Polaris and Melanie races up the hill to tip it out as best she can each time the tip­per buck­et is re-filled.

Now Melanie’s hun­dreds of flow­ers have tak­en over the orig­i­nal gar­lic beds which have been trans­plant­ed to anoth­er pad­dock. She’s turned what was a bland space around a fall­en down farm­house into an oasis. The local florists can’t get enough of her daisies, freesias and tulips.

And since she still loves deliv­er­ing babies at the local hos­pi­tal, a fair num­ber of her plants go to staff and patients.

Some time ago Melanie began exper­i­ment­ing with gar­lic salt and hand­ing it around to the neigh­bours. Even­tu­al­ly they were fight­ing over it, Jason says, so they began mak­ing batch­es of that too. By default, Melanie and Jason have fall­en into stock and have a grow­ing herd of robust Angus cat­tle. Soon they’ll be incor­po­rat­ing 400 chick­ens which will be in chick­en trac­tors and fol­low the cat­tle from pad­dock to paddock.

Jason has shared pho­tos with me of the two of them at work and explained how Melanie care­ful­ly plaits ten gar­lic bulbs and plants after har­vest­ing and hangs them in the shed ​“as big as a small hos­pi­tal” that Jason designed.

Up until now they have been sell­ing their gar­lic to a cou­ple of small local shops and neigh­bours and the prod­ucts Melanie makes have been snapped up as word spreads.

Just recent­ly they enlist­ed some help to put a web­site togeth­er and final­ly, after a long wait due to COVID, they will be tran­si­tion­ing to black gar­lic – a process. He’s put in an indus­tri­al kitchen, bought all the equip­ment to fer­ment the bulbs at the right tem­per­a­ture and humid­i­ty – and pur­chased hun­dreds of jars from an Aus­tralian sup­pli­er – more expen­sive than buy­ing from over­seas, but ​“so much more sat­is­fy­ing to know you’re sup­port­ing a local business”.

This year will be the first black gar­lic sea­son and they’re wait­ing to see if all the train­ing they’ve done and the equip­ment they’ve built will see it through. Next year, all being well, they’ll apply for a grant to get their small busi­ness off the ground and maybe export­ing overseas.

But they still plan to keep nurs­ing, Melanie will keep deliv­er­ing babies and Jason will keep shar­ing his sto­ries and how many bulbs of gar­lic she can plant in a day.