AUSTRALIA’S most notorious hoarder, Mary Bobolas, has spoken out for the first time revealing why she collects the rubbish at her Bondi home and that she is really a “clean freak” who once trained to be a fashion designer.

Mrs Bobolas, who with daughters Elena and Liana have made national headlines, says the inside of their hoarders’ house is really “neat and tidy”.

“When I am stressed I go out and collect things,” Mrs Bobolas said, speaking exclusively with news.com.au.

“But it’s all outside. Inside [the house] it is clean. I like to clean. I would like to work as a cleaner.”

During a decades-long war with her local council over her hoarding at the 19 Boonara Ave house she bought in 1973 for $15,000, Mary Bobolas’s life story has never before been told.

The house is minutes from Bondi Beach and property sales within the area show that despite its dilapidated state it is worth several million dollars.

The 75-year-old revealed that she was a very religious lady, who loved reading books including the Bible, and that indoors from her mess-strewn yard she liked to cook curries and make cakes.

“One of my daughters like cakes (sic), the other one the curries,” she said.

The Spanish-born pensioner, who trained in dressmaking and design until an accident stopped her career, is also a keen follower of politics.

She has an opinion on Malcolm Turnbull, Pauline Hanson and Sydney property prices.

But she conceded that most people could not see the human being beyond the rubbish in her yard, saying that some of her neighbours “treat me like I am Jack the Ripper, they say I threatened to slash them. It is not true, they don’t know me”.

Mrs Bobolas has staved off four attempts by Waverley Council to sell off her property from beneath her, with 11th-hour cash payments of up to $180,000 for cleaning and legal bills.

She says “friends have helped” her with cash to fight the council, which wanted to sell her house for $2 million.

“I can tell you what the council has been doing to get me to move from here, and sell my house too cheap,” she said.

“A house like the same [as mine] sold for $3 million. They want my money. Where would I go?”

Mary Bobolas’s story goes back to the Spanish island of Majorca, where she grew up until the age of five with her Spanish mother, who was a dress designer, and her father, who was a professional singer and guitar player.

At a young age, Mary, her parents and her siblings moved to Greece where they lived until she was in her late teens, and the family emigrated to Australia.

Despite not being able to speak English fluently, Mary gained a job in a large department store in Sydney’s CBD where she worked in sales.

“I was very shy, but they were very nice to me.” she said.

Mary met her future husband, a Greek Cypriot immigrant, as a shy young woman and said: “I was a virgin, back then you could not be with a man before you married or you were called a tart.”

The couple married and settled down in southwestern Sydney. Mary gave birth to her daughters Elena and Liana, who are now in their 40s.

But Mary’s marriage broke down when she felt could not stand her husband’s passion for horse racing and playing cards.

“I was naive. He told me I would be like his queen, and it was not like that,” she said.

“I had to take care of my daughters.”

Aspiring to follow her mother into fashion design, Mary studied at the (now defunct) Dover Heights TAFE, which held specialised programs for women and people from non-English-speaking backgrounds.

But she was injured when an industrial sewing machine needle lodged in her finger, and her mother feared the broken-off piece of needle would enter her bloodstream.

“I did not go back [to dressmaking] after that.”

Mary also suffered the trauma of losing her mother, who died at the age of 47 — just weeks after a gall bladder operation.

“They said my mother was going to be OK, but then they said she was going to die.”

Mary’s stress-related hoarding began after she moved to Bondi with her young daughters, but began to get out of hand during the 1990s.

In 2005, Waverley Council removed four truckloads of rubbish from the site. More rubbish was removed by the council in 2007.

Glimpses of the rubbish-filled front yard can be seen on Google Earth and real estate photos capture the piles of debris around the house, although a November 2015 Google street view image shows it relatively clean.

In April 2014, 100 square metres of rubbish was removed and it was reported Mary and her daughters were sleeping in a van because the house was so full.

Mrs Bobolas denies this, saying she and her daughters live in the house where they make dinner, sometimes eating a takeaway barbecue chicken with vegetables which she fastidiously washes “because there are poisons on the vegetables and I am allergic to them”.

She said the family has a pet cat and she feeds the birds outside her house with leftover bread.

The council reportedly has forcibly cleaned the property 13 times since 1984, at its peak removing “enough garbage to fill an Olympic swimming pool”.

In October 2014, the NSW Sheriff appointed an agent to recover the cleaning costs and early last year the property was put up for sale for the first time to recover the $180,000 in cleaning and legal fees.

Mary Bobolas has been arrested for allegedly spitting at police officers, and told news.com.au that police had injured her while dragging her off her own property.

She said that not all of her neighbours are against her, and that “some are very nice and have told me not to pay the council any more money”.

“But the other ones,” she said, pointing to a house in her street, “they write an affidavit saying that I threaten to, how you say, slash them and kill them ... like I am Jack the Ripper.”

Another neighbour, she said, spied on her and threatened her until she took out an Apprehended Violence Order against him, and he moved from the street.

She says she has friends who are helping her to fight Waverley Council, but having paid off the latest cleaning and legal fees, she just wants to stay in the house and get on with her life.

“I can’t afford to give them another $180,000,” she said, “Australia used to be a good place to live, but now Sydney is very expensive.

“I have a heart problem and I need money for my teeth. I have to look for the discount items every time I go shopping.”

Mrs Bobolas said the council had damaged her property while removing rubbish, breaking the guttering, her letterbox and the paving in her driveway, leaving it a boggy mess.

She said she was collecting boxes in her front yard to clear all the accumulated rubbish, which “friend will take away, and cheap, not like $60,000 which the Council say it costs to clear”.

Speaking about the recent elections while she fed bread to the birds in her driveway. Mrs Bobolas said she did not think most politicians deserved to be in office.

“Malcolm Turnbull is rich. Politicians do not care. They need to be more caring about people.”

She said she did not mind Pauline Hanson, except that Hanson did “not like people with dark skin or the Muslim people”.

“What right does anyone have to judge people for what they are? Only God has that right.”

Mrs Bobolas said when she was being targeted by the council or forcibly dragged from her house by police officers when cleaner arrived to clear up her yard, she thought of “How Jesus suffered”.

News.com.au contacted Waverley Council for comment.