Zoo little beauty... Mogo Zoo, NSW

MIDNIGHT is Sally Padey's favourite time. She sits on the back veranda at her house in the centre of Mogo Zoo and hears the lions start to roar.

Sally Padey

ABOUT midnight is Sally Padey's favourite time. She slips into her wicker chair on the back veranda at her house in the centre of Mogo Zoo and sits back as the lions start to roar.

..It starts deep inside them, growls that grow and roll across the night air until they can be heard in the villages of Tomakin and Mossy Point on the coast six kilometres away. Roars make the house vibrate. Even now it still sends tingles down her spine and makes the hairs on her arms stand on end.

Then the siamang gibbons join in. Their's is more like classical music, at least 20 minutes of Pavarotti.

This incredible night chorus never ceases to fill Sally with awe, no matter how many times she hears it.

Here on the south coast of NSW, Sally Padey is living her dream.

"Through my life I have met some amazing people but I have met some truly inspiring animals," she says.

A sanctuary to some animals that no longer exist in the wild and others that are on the endangered list, Mogo Zoo is known worldwide but little is known about the woman who built it, literally, with her bare hands.

Sally hasn't seen the Hollywood movie We Bought a Zoo but she knows how little glitz and glamour goes into building one. From $4000 and a share in the block of land where the zoo now is, Sally built Mogo Zoo from the ground up. The land was typical sheep land, dry and tramped down hard with a total of just seven gum trees growing on it.

A friend told her how she had read in a magazine about something called the Zoological Parks Board of NSW. Sally rang them and said she wanted to start a zoo and they laughed. Her perseverance wore them down until they took her seriously.

With her then-husband Bill Padey, Sally built the first animal enclosures by hand, laying cement landscaping herself. It took a year before the first animals arrived - a small collection of buffalo, pheasants, peacocks, deer and a pet kangaroo for which they didn't need a licence.

What she really wanted was to save endangered animals and conserve threatened species but you couldn't just walk into a pet store to buy a snow leopard or get a packet of food for African servals. When the zoo licence was awarded to Mogo in 1991, the first exotic animals were two pumas from Taronga Zoo who were getting on a bit and had been taken off display. New zoo owners at the time were tested by getting older animals, surplus stock. When they got to Mogo, they were all treated like kings and queens.

Sally had rescued a clydesdale horse from the RSPCA but she had to sell him to pay for the materials to build the puma enclosure. It broke her heart.

The early days were tough with every cent going back into the zoo. She recalls how one midnight, she was sitting on the bear mound scrubbing out their pool by hand and suddenly there were ants everywhere and she realised she was sitting in the bears' honey. She wasn't angry at the ants but cried at the thought of wasting the honey.

When Sally and Bill split up, she felt her life was only just beginning. She bought him out of the business and is now one of only a few female zoo owners around the world.

"I just love it," she says. "I take what we do here very seriously and the responsibility weighs heavily on me but I never stop appreciating it. I have such fun. It has taken 22 years but I now have 37 of the most dedicated and passionate staff."

Mogo Zoo was famous for its snow leopards - it now has six - and some of its animals are almost famous in their own right. Mac the lion starred in George of the Jungle 2 and the Holden Monaro ad when, thanks to special effects, he played every one of the lions in Martin Place.

Then there are always new animals arriving - recently two cheetahs from Western Plains zoo and fennec foxes from South Australia, all part of breeding programs.

The zoo is worth many millions of dollars but it is more than a job. Its animals are more important to Sally than any money. She once, briefly, considered an offer to buy it but she said she would have to take the animals with her - in other words she might as well stay put.