Granny Smith
Her legacy continues to grow - along with the millions Australia makes in exporting the apple she accidentally discovered
Granny Smith is without doubt one of Sydney's most famous homegrown heroes, but many people don't realise that she was a real person.
A self-made one-woman cottage industry who produced cakes and children and community spirit in prodigious quantities, Maria Ann Smith came over to Sydney from the UK in 1839 for a new start with her family under the NSW government ‘Bounty Scheme' - essentially to help feed a fast-growing colony. She more than lived up to her side of the bargain while she was alive - and continued to do so after she died.
Having been born into a farming community on the Sussex-Kent border in the UK - the ‘garden of England' - Maria was used to living off the fruit of the land. She and husband Thomas, a farm labourer, and their five surviving children (three more had been stillborn) arrived as orchardists and settled in what is now the Sydney suburb of Eastwood, barely inhabited at the time and known as the Dark Country. The church where she is buried - St Anne's in Ryde - now sits close to the corner of busy Victoria and Ryde Roads, but when Granny Smith was alive its prominent position afforded it a splendid view over rolling farmland, orchards and fields flowing down to the Parramatta River below, and west to the Blue Mountains. The Smiths' farm was located a few kilometres from St Anne's.
By 1856 the Smiths had bought 24 acres of good farming land in Eastwood for the princely sum of £605 (though it's unclear how they could afford it since Thomas was only paid £25 a year when he first arrived in 1838). The southern part of that farm is now Granny Smith Memorial Park.
Ryde's good fruit-growing climate allowed them to provide fresh produce for the Sydney market: apples, pears and other fruit, vegetables, milk and eggs. Maria made fruit pies, for which she developed an enviable reputation. All this produce had to be transported to Sydney by either horse and cart along rutted and often muddy tracks, or by boat down the Parramatta River, whose wharves had first to be reached along similarly rough roads.
At first, Thomas would take their goods to market, but, according to their grandson Benjamin Spurway, his grandfather would often arrive home from Sydney with little money left to show for their hard work. So Maria began to go herself. This must have taken all day, a tremendous burden on an already busy mother and farmer.
It was anecdotally reported that one day a wholesaler at the markets gave her a box of crab apples from Tasmania with which to weave her pie-making magic. She took these home and, like most housewives of the time, threw the peels and seeds out of the kitchen window onto a compost heap in the garden below. Some months later, she found a small apple seedling, known as a ‘pippin', growing in the compost. She tended it carefully and it bore fruit. "Isn't that just like God?" she is reported to have said. "The very stuff we chuck away, He uses to bring in a new thing."
The earliest account of the origin of the Granny Smith appeared in the Farmer and Settler of 25 June 1924, in an article by Herbert Rumsey, a Dundas orchardist and local historian. He interviewed local fruit-grower Edwin Small who recalled that in 1868 he and his father had been invited by Maria to examine a seedling apple growing by a creek on her farm.
Apples never grow true to type from seed and most pippins bear fruit good only for cider or animal feed. The Granny Smith, however, cooked well and tasted tip-top. With refrigerated transport still only in its infancy, the Granny Smith apple's beautiful colour, delicious flavour and texture and ability to hold well and maintain its crunch on long voyages quickly brought it export success. They have become the most popular apple in the world because of their versatility: in salads, in pies, in juice, in sauce. They freeze easily, store well and don't bruise or brown as quickly as other varieties.
Knowing through harsh experience the difficulties of motherhood, Maria had earned a reputation for her willingness to help her community and in her sixties she had become affectionately known to all as "Granny". She died in 1870 at the age of 70, before the commercial success of the apple which bears her name. It first officially appeared as "Smith seedling" in 1890 at the Castle Hill Agricultural and Horticultural Show. In 1891 "Granny Smith's Seedlings" won the prize for best cooking apples and by the following year many farmers began to grow their own. In 1895 Albert H. Benson, Fruit Expert for the NSW Department of Agriculture, named "Granny Smith's Seedling" as a suitable variety for export. He also initiated the first large scale cultivation of the apple at the Government Experimental Station in Bathurst.
It was one of the original staple supermarket varieties, and one of the first international varieties. Soon after World War I, Granny Smith apples were being exported from Australia all over the world, making this country a fortune. So get out there and grab a Granny. It's Aussie to its very core.
Lifeline
1799 Born in Peasmarsh, Sussex, UK
1819 Marries Thomas Smith, a farm labourer from nearby Beckley
1838 Emigrates to Sydney aboard ‘Lady Nugent'
1842 Moves to Kissing Point, Ryde. The family buys 24 acres of land
1868 Discovers and cultivates an apple seedingly growing in compost
1870 Dies 9 March, buried at St Anne's, Ryde
1876 Following Thomas's death, local orchadist Edward Gallard buys part of the Smith farm and develops the ‘Granny Smith' seedlings
1985 First annual Granny Smith Festival in Ryde - now attracting 100,000 people each October
