RB Sellars x Bush Journal - Nov 2024

Sallie Jones

Sallie Jones has the creative eye of a storyteller, the caring ear of a counsellor, and the sheer guts of a woman raised on the land. There’s a lot to her story. Death, grief and resilience all play their parts. But community is at the heart of everything Sallie does. She’s the co-founder of Gippsland Jersey, an innovative milk brand known as much for its rich, creamy taste as its fair treatment and advocacy for dairy farmers.

The dairy farmer’s daughter, business owner and mental health advocate grew up in Victoria’s Lakes Entrance, and is now based 200 kilometres further west in Warragul on Gunaikurnai Country in West Gippsland. Her “cool childhood” was unschooled — instead, life lessons were learned by living and working on the dairy farm with her mum, dad and three younger siblings. This upbringing primed Sallie for success, so when she finally attended high school, she excelled. “I became school captain, which was a life-defining moment for me,” Sally says. “I learned I have leadership abilities and I can make things happen.”

The young entrepreneur went on to sell the family’s milk at markets in Melbourne, started a bath milk business, and eventually co-founded Warragul's own farmer’s market in 2013. But as all this was going on, she was witnessing a steady decline in her father’s mental health. And despite the family’s efforts to help him, in March 2016 he took his own life. Sallie was devastated, and searched for a tangible way to channel her grief. “It ripped my heart out,” Sallie says. “But I just knew that something good would come out of it.”

Mere weeks later, Australia’s largest milk processing company drastically cut payments to their supplying farmers, sparking what became known as the dairy crisis. Feeling compelled to take action, Sallie says she rang her close friend and Gippsland dairy farmer Steve Ronalds and announced her bold idea to start a new milk brand together that embodied fairness, kindness and social change. “I said to him: ‘We are doing this, we are creating a milk brand,’” Sally says. “I remember feeling like we’d stepped off a cliff.”

The pair found nothing but love and support waiting to catch them. In September 2016, just six months after Sallie’s father had died, Gippsland Jersey’s first 5000-litre truck-full of milk rapidly sold out at the market. “People wanted to support local dairy farmers, and they wanted to make sure they could survive,” Sallie says.

From here another big idea came to Sallie — a way to use the milk brand’s platform to create conversations about rural mental health and suicide prevention. With help from community partners and other major milk companies, Sallie started producing a free calendar featuring a collection of personal stories from brave local farmers who open up about their mental health struggles. Distributed to dairy farms around the area, the aim is to encourage others to speak up and seek help when needed. “This is about them sharing their stories in their community, which has so much power,” Sallie says. “And then they all start talking amongst themselves, so it has a ripple effect.”

Sallie’s next ambitious project is to create a custom-built wellness and mental health facility, housed in the original milk factory her dad built, featuring professional consulting suites and other integrated resources — the sort of place she says he needed, but couldn’t find. It’s another way for Sallie to honour her dad’s enduring legacy. “I just wish so much that he was here to see it,” Sallie says. “There’d be no one prouder.”