This is Jeannie. Jeannie doesn’t eat as much as she used to, and is hoping for the gumleaf milkshake Nancy makes to tempt her.

As Nancy reaches out a hand, Jeannie slowly leans out, all soft grey fur, fluffy ears and dignity. She bestows a gentle kiss on Nancy’s forehead.

The two regard each other quietly.

Nancy says that after a separation some years ago, Jeannie came home to Waterways Wildlife Park and greeted her by resting a quiet paw on her head.

“I’m home,” Nancy believes the koala was saying.

Jeannie is one of five koalas on display at the Gunnedah park, and there are quite a few others in “rehab”. Along with the koalas, the Waterways menagerie includes dingoes, parrots, wedge-tailed eagles, ostrich and deer, lizards, wombats and echidnas.

Nancy has built a strange family, but it is not one she would change for the world. And along the way, she says, she has found great support in the people of Gunnedah, whose support “has never wavered”.

The wildlife park owner has suffered snake bites and emu attacks, broken bones and bureaucracy, but Nancy has also learnt to use a computer and gone on to recently complete the course that now makes her a qualified zookeeper.

And she has just been given recognition by Rotary as a Paul Harris Fellowship for “her life of exceptional dedication to saving wildlife, especially koalas”.

Gunnedah Rotarian Ron Whiteman told the club he remembered when an orphaned baby koala returned a year after her release to the wild with a baby on her back, and held up her arms for Nancy to pick her up.

Fellow Rotarian Don Ewing said he first met Nancy and her husband Colin Small at their home in Gunnedah where every wall of their home supported sacks with orphaned joeys.

It was an unlikely calling for Nancy, who grew up as a “town girl” in Werris Creek, raised by her dad, Noel Bedford.

She lived briefly in Sydney, but it was an experience she didn’t care to repeat.

“I couldn’t handle the city and it couldn’t handle me,” Nancy recalls.

She had never seen a kangaroo in the bush until she was married and living at Mary’s Mount. Nancy had honed her skills in cooking at the Werris Creek railway station cafe and was an accomplished seamstress, but her talent for animals had been restricted to stray cats and birds.

At Mary’s Mount, her husband brought home two joeys to look after. Nancy was horrified.

“We drove to town and went in to the vet,” Nancy said. “He dug out a recipe with about 22 ingredients to rear joey kangaroos.

“And that’s how I started. They were hard work.”

The joeys turned out to be a grey kangaroo they named Skippy, and a wallaroo by the name of Chubsy. Skippy eventually went bush, but Chubsy was part of the family for years.

After three years at Mary’s Mount, the country was hit by severe drought, and Nancy, Col, their first child Terry, Chubsy, a number of birds, and a new recruit - Millie the emu - made the move to a suburban home in Gunnedah.

“Gunnedah didn’t know what hit it,” Nancy says, with a smile.

By this time, Nancy says, word had got around that she would take in injured animals and she was forever being left with animals of just about every type to nurse back to health. Strange sacks containing wriggling creatures were left on the front porch. In about 1975, she took her first koala on board.

In Gunnedah, Nancy’s family grew, with the birth of her second child Jodie and an increasingly bizarre assortment of wildlife. The house became known as a backyard zoo with local children visiting to take a peek at Nancy’s animals. The schools would even bring students up for visits.

After 10 years, Gunnedah Shire Council officers decided it official.

Nancy says the late Bill Clegg, a former Gunnedah mayor, and historian John Buchanan led the push to find a suitable new home for the Smalls and the wounded wildlife. In 1980, they came up with the 15 acre site 7km from Gunnedah on the Mullaley Road that houses Waterways Wildlife Park.

Little by little, Nancy, Colin and a group of volunteers built the animal enclosures, starting with the wedge-tailed eagle house.

It was then Nancy began to learn the hard way about the many rules and regulations governing the keeping of wildlife.

The park has opened and closed following  problems with authorities, but Nancy says she has always fought to keep the park’s license and battles to stay on top of the changing regulations.

“There wasn’t much paperwork to start with,” she says.

Support came from the council and from a new group called the Friends of Waterways formed in 1993.

Nancy’s worst moment came when RSPCA officers seized eight koalas in 2010, sparking community outrage, a petition signed by 4000 people and a parliamentary inquiry. 

All but one of the koalas - who died following the removal - were eventually returned to the park.

The inquiry resulted in a number of recommendations. One recommended the council formalise its support of the park, which it did. The Department of Primary Industries also recommended that the park should have a qualified zookeeper.

It was this that sparked Nancy, who had only very basic knowledge of computers, to start four years of study. She had already completed a veterinary nurse’s course in 1984.

“I loved it,” she says. “I used to sneak off to Tamworth, stay at my auntie’s place and study really hard.

“I failed in the first term, but the head teacher said I had to get back into the swing of things.”

She said it was at first difficult to concentrate on the theory side, but she soon became fascinated with the information.

Her latest adventure in tertiary education was completion of the Captive Animal Management Course Certificates III and IV.

Park volunteer Karen Fox says proudly that Nancy had more than her share of distinctions and credits, fitting study in between late night feeds of the animals and her other tasks.

She even caused a bit of a stir with her assignment detailing how she raised an echidna named Babe from a puggle (an echidna baby).

Nancy has recently completed the course along with her daughter Jodie and another Gunnedah woman, making the three of them qualified zookeepers. She says she uses some of the techniques that have come from her study - others are “tried and true” through years of caring for wildlife.

Her hardest times, she says, have come when she is away from home.

“I get really homesick,” she says. “That’s when I am out of my comfort zone.”

Some of those times have come from health issues, including a hip replacement, pleurisy and stomach ulcers, and some through injury. She was bitten numerous times by her son Terry’s 12 foot carpet snake Reggie (later found to be Regina), an animal that seems to be the one exception to Nancy’s love for wildlife.

She still does not have snakes in the park.

She has been scratched by koalas, bailed up by an angry ostrich and lunged at by Jimmy the “psycho” wallaby, but says her worst injury came from a seagull.

“I nearly got my nose taken off by a seagull,” Nancy says.

“That was the worst week. I walked into a pipe and got two black eyes, had a bleeding nose from the seagull and a big roo ripped my dress.”

But despite the more feisty among the animals, Nancy has an obvious love for the residents of her park, a love that is now shared by her grandchildren.

Her husband Colin, a “steering wheel attendant” or truckie, is also quietly passionate about the animals, recently building a lizard enclosure and bringing home all sorts of creatures from the roadside.

Nancy says she is happy with the night-time feeds, the strange calls for help and the satisfaction of seeing an animal recover. And there is always the happiness of a koala’s kiss.