BETTER TOGETHER
THANKS TO SMART, INNOVATIVE THINKING, THE WILDE FAMILY HAVE A FLOURISHING CHEESEMAKING BUSINESS ON THEIR HANDS.
JANE WILDE’S EARLIEST MEMORY is of “sitting on a homemade kitchen stool, watching Mum patting the butter with a wooden butter pat.”
The self-taught cheesemaker, from award-winning WA family dairy Cambray Cheeses, grew up on an apple orchard in Karragullen, just east of Perth. “My dad always kept cows,” she recalls, “and Mum used to make butter. I guess my fascination with what milk can turn into started then.”
Jane met her future husband, a handsome 18-year-old shearer called Bruce Wilde, at a badminton game while she was still at school. Neither of them could have guessed at the time that they would one day become agricultural pioneers, with their handmade sheep’s milk cheeses served in many of the west’s finest restaurants.
Jane began her working life as a nurse, and then specialised as a lactation consultant. “I was always interested in milk,” she says with a laugh.
Bruce, meanwhile, had grown up on a small farm and had gone on to work both as a shearer and a police officer, during which time the couple married. He spent 20 years on the force in regional WA before Jane was struck down with Guillain-barré syndrome and their lives changed forever.
It was a worrying time. Guillain-barré is a disease of the nervous system that can lead to paralysis and can be fatal. There was a young family to care for and Jane was ill for some years. “I remember getting up at two o’clock in the morning,” says Bruce, “to pack lunches and iron shirts and get the kids off to school before I went to work at the police station.”
In the end, though, Bruce and the police force parted ways, when he refused to be transferred while Jane was ill, instead he tendered his resignation.
It was the best decision of his life. Not long after, on a drive through the country around Nannup, east of the Margaret River, he spotted a for sale sign on a parcel of land attached to an old timber mill. It felt like home.
Their son, Tom, who now works in the family business, was 10 at the time, and says that he and his five siblings were delighted with the move: “We moved into an old house that had been built in the 50s. It had just two bedrooms. My eldest two brothers had already left home, but the four remaining kids slept in one room, and we loved that. We spent weekends exploring the countryside. We left the house in the morning and Mum and Dad wouldn’t see us again until late in the afternoon.”
Jane, meanwhile, had begun making cheeses as a hobby in the farmhouse kitchen. “I really enjoyed it,” she says with a sparkle in her eye. “We bought this property in 1994. We had a jersey cow with a lot of milk, so I started making cheese, and it began to work out quite well.” Because the property was small, at just 65 hectares, the Wildes realised they would have to value-add to make a go of it financially. >