McLAREN VALE MAKES SOME NICE NEW ADS

PUBLICAN DOUG GOVAN'S PHOTOGRAPH OF HIS DOG, SWAHILI, DROOLING ON ANOTHER PERFECT SUNSET AT THE FAMOUS VICTORY HOTEL, McLAREN VALE ... IF YOU WERE THIRSTY, WOULD YOU PREFER TO ATTEND A PLACE LIKE THIS (PART OF DOUG'S TINY RUDDERLESS VINEYARD CAN BE SEEN BEHIND THE COOPERS SIGN) OR FOLLOW A SULLEN BLONDE WITH NO WINE BUT A CHAIR ON HER HEAD THROUGH AN INDUSTRIAL MONOCULTURAL VINEYARD WHICH NOBODY IN McLAREN VALE CAN RECOGNISE?

Getting That Image Down Pat
New Wine Region Propaganda:
Dog's Breakfast Or Clever Sell?
by PHILIP WHITE

Some years ago, I helped arrange a fiftieth birthday party for a beloved wine industry friend, Stephen Tracey, who was dying of cancer. He was beloved partly because he had been the SA sales manager of Champagne Krug and Remy Martin cognac, which was offset by the fact of him holding the same position at Mildara Blass.

But he was mainly beloved because he was such a damned good bloke, and many who knew him will find a tear welling with a fond smile at his memory. My memories are many, and splendid.

The party was at the Glen Ewin complex, in the hills near Houghton. He chose this location because it was secluded, he rented a cellar there, and there would be less chance of us being interrupted by whingeing neighbours.

We had, after all, hired the dying man’s favourite band, The Donkeys, the best rhythm and blues trio this country has yet seen.

Just before his wolfhounds savaged my lover’s beautiful buttocks, the landlord turned the power off because he felt the music was a threat to the license he was attempting to secure. This coincided with the event reaching such a level of success that Lord Twining, eminent and dignified in his tweeds and overcoat, took a moonlight stroll in the dam.

With a white plastic chair on his head.

I still feel that more hearts may have been won had said landlord restrained his giant slobbering curs, and done something to ensure innocent eccentrics couldn’t take accidental strolls in the dam in the dark, with or without chair, but there you go.

The party came to an abrupt halt.

Which is not what we can say about the lack of bite, or better, the dogged amateurishness evident in the marketing of the bits of our premium wine regions which have not yet been consumed by villa rash and ghetto.

Due largely to this blockheadedness, these remnants of a golden age seem doomed to whimpering exits, sans bang.

Lord Twining’s headgear came to mind when I saw the new McLaren Vale advertising at the Adelaide Airport.

This shows a fair Rhinemaiden a few years short of her rhinoceros stage, who reminds me of the buxom dirndled virgins the Barossadeutschers paraded in their pagan vintage festivals in the sixties.

But where those plaited valkyrie wore pale blue gazes of determined abandon, no doubt nurtured by Apex Bakery pasties and too much Sparkling Rhinegold, this lass carries a rather sullen, sedated countenance, after the style of the maidens the great illustrator, Arthur Rackham, captured in the last moments before their terrible ravagement.

The lass looks resigned, slightly fat of lip, and zombied, as she stalks determinedly downhill through a rather industrial-looking monoculture vineyard. Carrying a baroque claw-foot chair. On her head.

If it weren’t so goddam fol-da-ree fol-da-rah gothic, reminiscent of something tragic and about to get messy in the court of Mad King Ludwig, it may suggest the last minutes of, say Virginia Woolf. She has the rocks in her pockets to better avail the matter of sinking, and she’s heading to The Canal, but maybe if she tires on the brink, she might just choose to sit awhile til the Mogadon kicks in.

“McLaren Vale”, says the slogan, “one thing leads to another.”

And that’s it. No mention of wine.

Much to the derisive chagrin of the SA Tourism officials, who like to control these things, the belligerent McLaren Vale Grape Wine And Tourism Association hired its own expensive experts to devise a new campaign, brochure, and website to support this billboard, which was erected a month or two prematurely.

The rest of it had better be good. And I hope that the stringy bits of the text aren’t simply ripped off the Victorian ad campaign.

It looks like the same lass in both ads, although she seems happier in Victoria ... not to mention the line the other Victorian vignoble, Heathcote, uses: “If it’s not one thing, it’s another”.

But hang, on – surely that’s her again (above) in the contentious “Lead a double life in Daylesford” ad, with the dirndled darling singing “Let’s go down to the river to pray”.

I suppose prayer beats suicide.

This great McLaren Vale effort is surpassed only by the same region’s attempt to suddenly hit us with a suite of Shiraz wines that’ll set us back the minor consideration of around $100. A bottle.

Rather than depend upon the skill of the local winemakers to independently and honestly grow and produce quality wines that are genuinely worth the money, then rely upon the consummate skill and discernment of the judges at the local wine show to confirm their excellence with the awarding of trophies, not to mention the willingness of the marketplace – read us punters – to fork out said grey nurse/prayer mat sized currencies, the powers that be/were have launched a determined Stalinist drive to enforce such a marketing development from above.

I mean, if these winemakers felt they could make a wine and sell it for an honest hundred, why wouldn’t they have done it before?

Winemakers are like chefs and cooks, whatever their region. Some couldn’t cook dogfood.

Some are lucky to get to Maccas or Colonel Sadness level. Most slave their lives away in the sorts of joints you’d find Kevin Foley in.

And then there’s Cheong and Bilson.

Any McLaren Vale winemaker who thinks they’re the vinal equivalent of Cheong or Bilson would have their $100 beauty out already, no?

This secret operation, some years in the making, was called Rare Earths. The wines were to be collectively labled this way, and marketed as the very best the region could produce. Until, no doubt, some clever flash Harry not yet emergent chooses to launch the $200 Rarer Earths range. And so on.

THE AUTHOR (left) AND GEOLOGIST JEFF OLIVER WORKING ON THE GEOLOGY OF McLAREN VALE MAP IN KEVIN'S CUTTING AT HARDY'S SCRUB - photo KATE ELMES

While my colleagues and I were working on the hugely successful Primary Industries and Resources SA map, Geology Of The McLaren Vale Wine Region, we struggled to convince the winemakers that they should choose a more appropriate name.

You can’t appear to be serious about geology and terroir, we suggested, if you proceed with this stupid idea.

The Rare Earths are a collection of seventeen chemical elements in the periodic table. They have names which don’t leap readily from memory: Lanthanides, Yttrium and Ytterbium – that sort of thing. Apart from the fact that some of them are radioactive, they happen mainly to reside in China. They are used in such things as the nuclear business, advanced weaponry, big TV screens and electric car batteries, if not electric chairs.

The Chinese, who are very proud of their ownership of this lucrative business, recently played a dangerous game of international brinkmanship by ceasing their supply to Japan, which prides itself on the manufacture of these goods and has a rather large economy dependent upon their constant supply.

Perhaps the Rare Earth cabal belatedly believed my suggestion that as a nascent wine market for such products, China might find such an appellation rather strange. Or Japan, for that matter. But it’s more likely that the name finally went on the nose with the recent reportage of the China blockade, if not the contentious new port which mining minister Paul Holloway proposes for the fragile waters of the northern Spencer Gulf, for the shipment of the few skerricks of these obscure metals remaining in the Australian outback.

Whatever the dawning, the secret McLaren Vale Rare Earths operative recently decided to abandon the name. But they have replaced it with Scarce Earths, a term whose pronunciation is almost as difficult as “the sixth sheik’s sixth sheep’s sick”, a cruel tongue-twister I practiced determinedly, but hopelessly, back in the days when I took my class three malocclusional lisp to the Voice Training Police.

Imagine your Shanghai or Tokyo agent trying to pronounce scarce earths. They have no trouble with the Barossa equivalent, Barossa Terroirs or even that region's swish website, Barossa Dirt.

At the same time, another McLaren Vale project, Generational Farming, has wisely gone a little quiet on its logo, a circular seal, as you see on deeds and great documents, but bearing the image of two hands clasping. This appeared in magnificent gloss on the back of the international wine Bible, Decanter magazine, in an advertisement for the district which - consistent with the wan lass with the chair on her head – didn’t seem to mention fine wine.

If one were forced to rip off an emblem, logo, or official seal, one would best avoid ripping it off a firm of very stern lawyers, accountants, and debt collectors, which is more or less along the lines of what Fox Symes is.

The logos are pretty much identical.

I know this because when the devils at Telstra slow my internet download - they allege I have used too much of it on an account they assured me has no limit - and I’m trying to file copy to my desperate editors just after the whoosh of deadline has passed, I am forced to wait while said logo infuriatingly, ever-so-gradually, assembles itself in the right hand column of my e-mail screen, assuring me that Fox Symes can solve the little matter of my debts.

Anyway, all this psychoweirding is suddenly surpassed, or bypassed, by the grand new quarter of a cloverleaf which minister Pat Conlon’s transport troops have decided to impose on the entry to the McLaren Vale township.

Build a one-way freeway, I say, and eventually you’ll have to double its size. Even the Romans knew traffic goes in both directions. Build a quarter of a cloverleaf, and, well …

One can already ride upon a beautiful piece of digital bitumen curvature in a delightful little promo film viewable on a government website.

“Community Engagement”, the brief promises, “is anticipated [to] commence towards the end of 2010 once detailed planning and an environmental impact assessment have been completed ... Community engagement and detailed design work will be undertaken before commencing construction in 2011. The construction is expected to take up to 18 months to complete.”

The internationally-followed Facebook site WE OPPOSE SEAFORD HEIGHTS surprised the residents of McLaren Vale by announcing the imminence of this proposal, and suggesting the cute smooth ride which the government’s propaganda site exhibits was merely the first proposal.

PART OF THE GREAT PROCESSION OF TRACTORS IN THE RECENT RALLY AGAINST THE SEAFORD HEIGHTS DEVELOPMENT. THE PROPOSED BY-PASS COULD POSSIBLY MAKE FUTURE PROCESSIONS RUN MORE SMOOTHLY photo LEO DAVIS

“If you can get past Seaford Heights,” the feisty protest site reports, “you'll soon hit the new overpass. This was the first plan we saw. It now seems the real plan is for an overpass 12 acres wide, which will by compulsory acquisition knock out two houses, one small business, and a cellar door. The first quarter of a classic LA cloverleaf.

“The ‘community consultation’ is a meeting of four people - those ‘directly affected’. ‘Don't stress’, they've been told.

“The first overpass would have been okay! The second plan is monstrous!”

Local tour operator Robyn Smith suggests this big road thing immediately threatens Shingleback Wines’ new restaurant and landscaping, and a home recently approved and only half-built.

Justly fearful of diminishing their recompense, those ‘directly affected’ are conforming to government instruction to refrain from public complaint.

So while the wine business can be guilty of some abject dunder-headedness, it seems we can always depend upon this wreck of a Labor government to blow such amateurishness away when it comes to listening to the naïve but desperate communities which elected it.

Planning and Development Minister Paul Holloway (him again) has yet to play his cards on the dreadful Seaford Heights development, which involves planting another droll suburb on the only piece of the precious old geology left undefiled or unplanted.

Rare Earth indeed. Cement it over, brave developmentalists!

But there IS one major advantage of the proposed McLaren Vale interchange. It will smother the eighty or so winery signs which clutter the entry to the main street. These form an alley of stiff regimental flags, each promoting a different winery. If any driver even begins to attempt to look at them, Bacchus only knows who or how many they’ll kill in the ensuing prang.

Which makes one wonder who is intended to read them. Perhaps they make the winemakers feel proud.

Further up the street, of course, it’s more pennants than Agincourt: the horrid tat of promo whip flags of a myriad confusing types, the gauche yellow and blue of the real estate mobs, and the infuriating footpaths lined with dumb sandwich boards make the main street of Hahndorf look quite tasteful.

Forget the giant new Coles supermarket about to hit - I knew the joint was cactus when the fishmongery became a tattoo parlour.

Maybe those champion cyclists photographed pranging horridly on the front page of The Sunday Mail did so because just one of them glimpsed at the poxy clutter of sandwich boards and tatty fingerboards outside the delightful Salopian Inn.

Maybe we can look forward to this visual cacophony being replaced by the big picture: a troubled lass with a chair on her head, treading wearily across the scarce earths, suicidal because she didn’t call Fox Symes in time.

And now I’ve gone on too long. One thing, as they say, leads to another.

AUSTRALIA DAY: ANNUAL OZ FLAG THING

What The Hell Does This Mean?
Aussie Flag Is Five Crucifuxions
Three On The Wrong Damn Cross
by PHILIP WHITE

It is becoming a DRINKSTER tradition that we discuss the flag of Australia each year on Australia Day (previously known as Anniversary Day, Foundation Day and ANA Day), the official national day of Australia. Celebrated annually on 26 January, this day commemorates the arrival of the British First Fleet at Sydney Cove in 1788, the hoisting of the British flag there, the proclamation of British sovereignty over the eastern seaboard of "New Holland", and all the numerous peoples who had lived on this continent for up to forty or fifty thousand years before England or God were even thought of.
 RATHER THAN UPON A NEAT, MASONIC, RIGHT-ANGLED UPRIGHT CROSS AS POPULARLY PROMOTED BY THE CHURCH OF ROME, JESUS CHRIST WOULD HAVE BEEN TYPICALLY CRUCIFIED ON A SALTIRE, SHAPED MORE LIKE THE RANDOM ANGULAR FIGURES ON THE SCREEN BEHIND HIS IMAGE

At Easter, the chalk board outside the little Protestant bookshop in Clare sported a sketch of a cross. “Jesus built a bridge”, it said, “with two planks and three nails”.  Christians seem to like the idea of the son of God being slaughtered on a neatly-joined, planed and chamfered triumph of carpentry.

Overlooking the fact that Jesus Christ's so-called bridge was actually built by the Italians, whose consequent, un-Christlike version of Christianity turned their straightened version of his cross into the world’s most powerful and suppressive trade mark, I began wondering again about the Australian flag.

It was very strange, hearing people like Prime Minister John Howard, decry the savage hoods of Cronulla for draping themselves in their own flag during Sydney’s race riots those short years ago. Even stranger were the subsequent demands that mosques should be flying its violently aggro "Union Jack" and stars.

The crescent moon and star on the flags of many Islamic states represent life and peace.

That should do at a mosque.

The Australian flag - really the British Blue Ensign with some southern stars on its blue fly - carries five primitive representations of the Roman form of the gallows.

It's the perfect poncho for rioting yobbos (photo above by Warren Hudson).

And that’s just the beginnings of the religio-racial horrors involved in our flag. Some of these are explained in an amazing little book that every Australian should have read: Carol A. Foley’s The Australian Flag, (Federation Press; 1996).














I annually discuss this book, and other issues here, on the occasion of Australia day.

It says something for the musical Welsh that they never insisted on having a cross, a leek, or even a harp, included in the current Union Flag of Great Britain: the Blue Ensign that we disrespectfully call the Union Jack. Maybe they realised that their harp would have to go in the middle of all those crosses, on top of the cross of St. George, which the English would never permit.

The Scots scored with the cross of St. Andrew – a white saltire on a blue ground, a saltire being a diagonal, X-shaped cross, like the tail of the early Christian fish graffito carved repeatedly into the walls of the Coliseum. This variant on the “Greek cross" represents in Roman Christianity the initial of Christ, the Greek letter χ , or chi, and the number 10.

It is the original Christian cross.

It predates the Roman Catholic church’s revisionary right-angled upright cross by several hundred years.

Roman crucifixions were principally conducted on saltires, not on the standard vertical cross later popularised by these revisionist Christians, who made it their logo, and used its shape as the floorplan of their church buildings.

There would be many fewer right angles in modern architecture had the saltire correctly been the model.

Most Roman executions were summary: fairly abrupt affairs which would not afford the expense of nails, or the types of posh carpentry evident in most tidy Christian portrayals of the crucifixion of Christ.

Crosses were made in minutes by tying two lengths of wood together at their half-way points, and placing two ends of these in shallow holes in the ground.

They were normally held upright by a third supporting beam propped against their intersection at an angle from behind, or were commonly simply leant against walls or embankments.

Nobody knows exactly why the Scots adopted Andrew as their patron in the eighth century.

Foley makes clear that he wasn’t a Scot, and his saltire didn’t begin to appear as a national emblem until about 1290. At least he was crucified, a distinction begrudged Saints George and Patrick.

We think St. Andrew died on his saltire in Greece, at Patras, in 69AD.

SALTIRE FORMS: TOP, THE POPULAR SADO-MASOCHIST BONDAGE CHI; SECOND, THE VATICAN ACKNOWLEDGES THE FORM IN ITS PAPAL CHI-KEYS EMBLEM; THIRD: THE CHI OR TEN, IN THE REGIMENTAL EMBLEM OF THE 10th MOUNTAIN DIVISION, US ARMY; AND BOTTOM, THE EARLY MEIJI-ERA CRUCIFIXION OF SOKICHI AT YOKOHAMA, WHERE A RIGHT-ANGLED LORRAINE CROSS WAS USED TO FORCE THE VICTIM INTO A SALTIRE CHI.

Three hundred years later another Greek, called Regulus, took some of Andrew's preserved bones and a tooth – for good luck - on a journey which ended with them both shipwrecked on the coast of Scotland, where the live one eventually started a Roman church called St. Andrew’s.

St. Patrick was the dissolute son of a Scots monk. He eventually took the cloth and worked his way up to Bishop before heading south to Ireland as a missionary. While there were never any snakes in Ireland, his famous purging the Emerald Isle of them had a lot more to do with him ridding its infant church of its dangerous tendencies to accommodate wisps of Druidic, Moorish, pagan Roman and Coptic theology, not to mention its obsessive confusion of the Virgin Mary with a sort of profligate faery queen, the Mother of Life, whom they celebrated with keystones in the arches of their churches.

Other bas reliefs of this woman, squatting on her bottom, her arms about her vertical shins, her hands holding open the labia of a vagina that extended sometimes to her grin, were installed decoratively about church walls, like stations of the cross.

These stones, called sheilagh na geeks, or sheelanagigs, gave Australia sheila, its colloquial term for females.

It was amusing to hear feminists decry this patois as sexist in the 'seventies - it's really a term of deep adoration and reverence.

While the pious St. Patrick had these images removed from the church walls, thousands of them miraculously survived, and still lie in the basements of the museum in Dublin, and in other places around the British Isles. These generally take the vague form of two saltires, with the vagina in the middle, where the saviour should hang.

It's obviously from whence he came.  Given its marketing, the mixed-up pagans of the day must have wondered at that vagina being ideally virginal.

 Patrick, by the way, was never crucified. He died of long life in Armagh in 463AD.

The Irish used the golden harp or the shamrock as their emblem, and we don’t know precisely how the red saltire on the white ground ended up representing them on the Union Flag, although it seems to have been convenient to the graphic artists of the time - its red saltire fitted neatly within the white of saltire of St. Andrew.

But it also has to do with the fact that this saltire (right), finally named after St. Patrick, was in fact the flag of the Fitzgeralds, who’d been sent by the leonine Henry II, father of Richard I, to bash the Irish into submission in 1169.

The English cross of St. George, a ‘cross throughout’ in heraldic terms - in this case a vertical red cross on a white ground - came from France. French warriors fought beneath it in their invasion of the Islamic east in the Third Crusade (1189-1192). Their English mates carried the opposite: a white cross on a red ground. But by the Seventh Crusade (1248-1254) the English had adopted the French version and sometime thereabouts also adopted St. George as the patron of England.

There’s a serious move afoot to have St. George’s Day (April 23rd.) made a public holiday in England. It's years back but still perfect pondering that in its St. George’s Day Special Issue of 19th. April 2008, The Spectator Diary was written by that venerable British scholar, Beryl Bainridge, who called St. George a scroundrel. “Why on Earth [he] was made our patron saint is a mystery”, she wrote.

Born in 303AD, George was a soldier in the time of the Emperor Diocletian. He made a great deal of money selling pig meat to his fellow troops before he was ordained Archbishop of Alexandria, a position from which he gorged his coffers by taxing the bejeesus out of the Christians while he gave everyone else, like the Jews, the horrors, by pillaging their places of worship.

Eventually he was imprisoned, but a mob broke into the jail, dragged him about the streets and chopped him into bits which were chucked into the ocean. Call that a matyrdom if you must; it seems highly unlikely that he died on a cross, although in its early determined efforts in brand reinforcement, much Roman catholic history insists he was first tortured on one form of cross or another; perhaps a wheel.

George's spirit was believed to have miraculously assisted the English by visitation to battles fought centuries later by the terrible warriors Richard I, Lionheart, (who was tough on Jews, Moslems and the Pope), and Edward I, Longshanks, (who was tough on the Scots, the Welsh and the Moslems).

The bit about the dragon seems to have been invented by an Italian biographer of saints, Jacobus de Voragine. George killed many pigs, but a dragon? Uh-huh.

Bainbridge recounts asking her grandson whether they’d taught him anything about St. George at school. “No”, he said, they hadn’t, “apart from the fact that George had a friend who was a dragon.”

That accounts for three crosses. The Union flag clearly has four. But the fourth is a phantom: it’s not really there. Then, you could say it was always there.

When the first Union Flag, named after Queen Anne, was designed in 1606 to symbolise the union of Scotland and England, the creative types down at heraldry found they had to retain some of the white background of England’s flag (St. George's cross), to avoid breaking the heraldic law ruling that blue and red should not touch. At the same time, had they not retained its blue background, the white saltire of St. Andrew would have disappeared into the white ground of George’s cross. And the English cross, of course, had to lie atop the Sottish one, lest the Scots dream of dominance. So the fourth cross, the narrow white outline around the cross of St. George, represents nothing more than the English presumption of superiority.

The Fitzgerald's saltire, meanwhile, masquerading as the cross of Ireland, fitted quite neatly within the white saltire of St Andrew.

On the Australian flag, we have a fifth, even more ethereal cross.

To somehow imagine a group of stars was put there by God to remind us of his son’s forthcoming crucifixion is well, stretching it. Why didn’t he stand it up the right way? What does it look like from below? Did he deliberately tilt it, like a saltire? It stands up as straight as a Roman Catholic cross on our flag, but never does in the heavens. And why is there the annoying fifth interlopering star near the centre? Is that the original Crux, the middle star, slipping down to the right?

THE GERMAN CLUB, 223 FLINDERS STREET, ADELAIDE, DECORATED FOR HITLER'S 50TH BIRTHDAY ... THE NAZI SWASTIKA IS A BROKEN SALTIRE. MORE FASCINATING IS THE AUSTRALIAN FLAG: NOTICE HOW EPSILON HAS ACTUALLY ESCAPED THE CONFINES OF THE CRUX ... I KNOW OF NO OTHER EXAMPLE OF THIS FLAG

It’s too late now to ask Augustin Royer, the French astronomer who first named it Crux Australis in 1679 ... in the days when austral meant something grave, sober, harsh, stern, austere, dry, windy, threatening, astringent and tannic in the great southern unknown.

On the 1901 version of the Australian flag, the five stars in the group each had a different number of points, indicating its magnitude of brightness in the heavens. Poor old Epsilon, the stray one fleeing the centre, rarely visible these days from our cities, scored only five. Which it still has. For ease of manufacture, the rest had officially settled at seven points by 1908.

The seven was convenient for flagmakers in that the large Federation Star, aka the Commonwealth Star, below the Union Jack, has seven points, indicating the six states and Papua New Guinea.

Yep. Papua New Guinea.

No wonder troubled souls from the bordering waters between here and there say they have a right to come here to live, as they were never consulted about being cut off our country. We opened their batting for them, by taking their country and putting them on our flag. Now we leave them on our flag but burn their boats and ship them home.

If the Gaelic states, Ireland and Wales, had united and colonised Australia, we could have a flag bearing a sheila, playing a harp and cavorting amongst the shamrocks.

Which reminds me of South Australia’s first official state badge, or cartouche (left), of which many variations survive.

These display a helmeted Britannia standing coolly on a beach, surrounded by cliffs like those at Rapid Bay. Her blowing, flowing robe looks as loose and casual as hippy cheesecloth in some versions. She has casually put her shield on the sand, resting it against her right hip, and extends her left hand to a naked original bloke who’s sitting on a rock, holding a spear.

Maybe it’s her spear. They’re obviously having a chat. Might just as well chat about spears. Within a few years the English had destroyed all the native yakka spear wood and axe glue on the Fleurieu Peninsula, adjacent to that beach, to export glue and stain for British cabinetmakers.

Just what the Australian flag represents to our original people gives me the horrors. There are many indigenous words for bits of the Crux Australis; of course many tribes had their version of how those stars got into the sky, or who, or what they are, but they never, of course, saw a cross in it, preceding, as they did, the invention of God and crucifixions by tens of thousands of years.

Pretty hard, too, to imagine what a God-fearing Islamist sees in our flag. Unless, of course, it’s wrapped around the shoulders of the white crusaders of Cronulla, where it makes absolutely perfect sense.

The Australian flag was best summarised by Seinfeld during his visit to Adelaide. Having spotted the huge bugger flapping in Victoria Square outside the Hilton, he said “I love your flag. It’s like England at night.”

He had no idea what the adjacent flag, same size, same height, on a matching pole, was about. Here it is:

The Australian Aboriginal Flag (above) was first raised on 12 July 1971 at Victoria Square in Adelaide. It was also used at the Aboriginal Tent Embassy in Canberra in 1972. The top half of the flag is black to symbolise Indigenous people. The red in the lower half stands for the earth and the colour of ochre, which has ceremonial significance. The circle of yellow in the centre of the flag represents the sun. The Australian Aboriginal Flag is displayed at Aboriginal centres and is well recognised as the flag of Aboriginal peoples of Australia. It is flown during NAIDOC Week to celebrate and promote greater understanding of Indigenous peoples and culture and during National Reconciliation Week in recognition of 27 May as the anniversary of the 1967 Referendum which removed from the Constitution clauses that discriminated against indigenous Australians and 3 June as the anniversary of the High Court decision in the Eddie Mabo land rights case of 1992. Mr Harold Thomas from Northern Australia designed the flag. The Australian Aboriginal Flag was proclaimed on 14 July 1995. Permission is not required to fly the Australian Aboriginal Flag. The Australian Aboriginal Flag is protected by copyright and may only be reproduced in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright Act 1968 or with the permission of Mr Harold Thomas. Contact details are: Mr Harold Thomas, PO Box 41807, CASUARINA NT 0810 [!].

Flag: The Spirit of Ballarat, used with kind permission of the artist, Peter Clarke, of Ballarat. "Of course you can use it," he said. "That's the people's flag.  That's what it is!"  Mr Clarke's flag combines Harold Thomas's Aboriginal flag with the Eureka flag first raised by  downtrodden gold miners at the Eureka Stockade Rebellion at Ballarat in 1854. "The cross is important," Mr Clarke said. "The cross is us - our spirit."  He told The Courier that the Aboriginal flag's yellow circle was also reminiscent of the hub cap he used for gold panning as he grew up in St Joseph's Home orphanage.  "It pretty much represents what we're all about - black and white. The early days of Ballarat, the goldmining, and the Irish and Chinese which came here seeking their fortune, this made the place such a multi-cultural city. The Spirit of Ballarat is a symbol of hope and one of spirit. I painted it as me."  The Spirit of Ballarat hangs in the Trades Hall in Camp Street.

STOP PRESS: [10 MAR 2014]

As Scotland's independence looms, St Andrew's flag will lose its right to stay on the Union Flag. Presumably, Australia will have to adjust its own strange flag accordingly. This is one suggested design for the new "Jack":

For other possibilities, all of which will be deliciously contentious, check this piece from The Atlantic.



FOOTNOTE:

AUSTRALIA comes from the Greek αυστηρός, through the Latin austerus, which means severe, and gave itself to the Middle English auster, or austere, meaning the south wind and its source. By 1541, austere was also used to mean sour, or bitter and astringent, and harsh to the taste. This gradually came to cover anything that was harsh to the feelings generally; stern; rigorous; judicially severe; grim in warfare; severe in self-discipline; strict and abstinent. In 1597 it meant severely simple; without any luxury. By 1667 austere also meant grave and sober. The Latin austeritas became the Old French austerite, which, by 1590, as the English austerity, meant severe self-discipline, abstinence and asceticism. In 1634 austerity also meant harsh to the taste, or astringent sourness. This soon also covered general harshness to the feelings; judicial severity, or stern or severe treatment or demeanour. By 1713 it meant rugged sternness, and by 1875 austerity also meant severe simplicity or lack of luxury. The Latin australis became austral by the time of Middle English, and was used to indicate something that was belonging to the south. Or was southern. It also came not only to mean influenced by the south wind, but also warm and moist. This Latin australis gave its name to the great continent rumoured to lie in the south, Terra Australis. The French were the first to use Australien, meaning of Terra Australis. By 1693, the English language included the word Australian, also meaning of Terra Australis. The Terra was leaving Australis by 1814, in which time the English-speaking world had begun to use Captain Matthew Flinders’ suggested name for this huge southern beach-fringed slab of sand, dust, and stone, Australia. Now. About those original inhabitants …

AND ANOTHER

Salman Rushdie writing about his visit to Writers' Week in Adelaide in the Tatler, London, October 1984:

‘Don’t you find,’ Angela Carter said one evening, ‘that there’s something a little exhausted about the place names around here? I mean, Mount Lofty. Windy Point.’ On another occasion, Bruce Chatwin said something similar: ‘It’s a tired country, not young at all. It tires its inhabitants. It’s too ancient, too old.’

COMMENTS

OCKER BOB WROTE

You should get back to making wood, peckerhead. Australia rocks. And dusts. And blazes. And waves. And we love it, austerity and everything. Stay away! But if you change your mind, we'd handle that, too. Easy come, easy go. And vice versa.

PAUL CLANCY WROTE

As a soldier who has "served under" that flag I do not share the sentiments of so many of those, who in resisting change to a more appropriate bunting, always use the defence that the flag is somehow sacred because so many have "died under it".

From my experience that is a load of codswallop. Certainly, in Vietnam there was no such flag sentiment that I ever noticed. Unit logos, badges and other less formal signs, usually of black humour, dotted the unit lines at Nui Dat. I don't recall seeing too many Australian flags flying although there may have been at Task Force HQ. Vehicles carried stenciled red kangaroo logos to identify us as Australians and there were no Australian flags on our uniforms (I do note that our modern day diggers in Iraq and Afghanistan have Australian flag badges on their uniforms and fly Australian flags on their vehicles but I presume this is because they operate in multi-national forces and they do it to be recognised as Australians). It is always a good idea to ensure that you cannot be mistaken for an American.

I reckon soldiers, particularly those in war zones, are not very flag conscious at all. Not in my day anyway. Everyone was too busy getting the job done and getting home in one piece to be that patriotic - although scratch a digger not very deeply and patriotism will gush forth.

In 1967 if you had asked an Australian digger in Vietnam what the Australian flag should be he probably would have said it should depict a can of VB with two Melbourne Cup winners rampant.

HECTOR'S BLOG WROTE

A few years back, on a rare visit to the old country, I was driving a carload of Scottish rellies to a wake (my mum's, it was a good one). We passed a church flying the Union Flag - not sure why they do that since it was the Church of England - and I said: "Oh look, there's a large corner of our flag." Much mirth.

More seriously, I have long thought the Australian flag would look much better without the mishmash of Christian mythology in its top left quarter and a proportionately enlarged Commonwealth Star centred in the left field. We'd lose a bit of red - but I reckon it would look bloody lovely. Comments?

ANONYMOUS OF THE BARMY ARMY WROTE

Get your shit stars, get your shit stars, get your shit stars off our flag.

ANONYMOUS OKKAROKKA WROTE

Whoever that Barmy bugger is, he/she should be given an Order of Australia. That's true republicanism!

PAGAN JANE WROTE

Imagine if we lived in a cross-free world! I like your way of thinking.

ANONYMOUS ANONYMOUS WROTE

they never taught any opf that in school.

PLEASE MAKE A COMMENT BY CLICKING "COMMENT" BELOW, COPYING THE CIPHER, AND THINKING UP A NOM DE PLUME IF YOU'RE TOO SCARED TO BE YOU

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MILDEW NIBBLES AT STOIC OZ VIGNERONS

MILDEW SUNSET: LOOKING WEST TOWARDS THE HIGH BAROSSA, HOME OF KARRA YERTA WINES AND STUNNING RIESLING photo MARIE LINKE

Famine Then Floods Now Mildew
God Smites Aussie Grape Cockies
Vignobles Limp To Later Vintage
by PHILIP WHITE

I slid into the Sevenhill pub the other day, it being the favoured watering hole for the thirstier breed of Clare winemaker, and Ned, its publican, being a reliable one-stop shop of information for the itinerant wine hack.

“Much mildew around, Ned?” I asked of the fluffy vine mould which thrives in the wetter weather we’ve been having.

“Nah Whitey, not too much”, he said.

“Anybody going broke?” I asked, broke being the status, declared or not, of many folks in the wine game at this peculiar point in time.

“Nah Whitey,” he said, “most of ‘em are telling me how much money they’re gonna make this year.”

And there we had it. No expensive public relations twister required. A vintage round-up in the time it took Ned to pour two schooners.

After my plate of fish’n’chips there on the veranda – close to bloody perfect – and a quick bottle of Crabtree Watervale Riesling 2010 – better than bloody perfect - I got to thinking about the conversation later in the day, when the winemakers would ease in and settle their bellies against the rubbing strakes of Ned’s cool bar.

“Anything happening Ned?” somebody would be asking.

“Aw, not much,” he’d say. “Pretty quiet. Whitey called in for lunch.”

“Oh really? What’d he want?” they’d ask.

“Oh, he asked about the mildew.”

“Shit! Did he? What’d you say?”

“I told him nah, not much mildew.”

“Ar good. What else did he ask?”

“He wanted to know if anybody was going broke.”

“ Bastard. What’d you tell him?”

“I told him how you blokes keep bragging about how much money you think you’re gonna make this year.”

“Aw, good. Caniva nuther Pale, please Ned?”

DOWNY MILDEW - CLICK ON IMAGE FOR LINK TO DJ's GROWERS BLOG, WHERE YOU'LL GET A MORE TECHNICAL EXPLANATION OF THE FUNGUS AND THE WAY IT WORKS - photo JAMES HOOK

And that’s pretty much it. That’s how it happens. I mean if James Halliday had rung up the Clare Valley Grape Wine and Tourism Association from Sydney or wherever he lives, asking for a vintage report, he couldna got a more precise summary of the 2011 vintage, and there would have been a great deal of fuss about what to tell him.

I mean, if he’d asked a McLaren Vale winemaker a similar question, the winemaker would have to explain that he or she had been forbidden to speak to the press about the weather, and that he’d have to ask Elizabeth Tasker in the McLaren Vale Grape Wine and Tourism office for the real truth. Again, there would be a great deal of fuss.

If there’s one thing I can tell you about Whitey, it’s that he’s your man on the ground. Intrepid, they used to call reporters of his ilk. Not like these sweaty poofters that can’t taste wine when their lappy batts go flat.

Anyway, I’m here to tell you that in the course of a week, I cruised around the hills from Kangarilla, where I live, up the eastern side of the range to Eden Valley, where I slept, and then on to Stanley Flat, up north of the Clare racecourse, where I surrendered to what the experts would probably call a coma.

THE HAHNDORF HILL WINERY LADS ARE QUIETLY CONFIDENT ABOUT THE WAY THEIR BONNIE BIODYNAMIC VINEYARD IS HANDLING THE MILDEW THREAT IN THE ADELAIDE HILLS

It is highly unusual for a bloke to be able to drive, as we did, from Kangarilla to Eden Valley, in the middle of January, through fog. All the way. No sooner had we climbed over the Willunga Escarpment than we were in it, and my phone was beeping out its warning from James Hook at DJs viti supplies, telling me the conditions were ideal for mildew in the hills. It's stayed more or less that way for days.

Vintage will be late and low this year, even if we do get a summer.

Mildew is something that’s not too difficult to spot. It’s very topical this year, as there’s an acute shortage of the fungicide sprays required to handle it, and, as I’ve reported here before, it’s rife along the River from Blanchetown to Bourke, even before the vineyards fill up with houses washing down from Queensland.

But, you know, in the premium regions, you know the moleskin country, well, with, cough, proper vignerons, well, it just wouldn’t be an issue, would it. No. So a bloke gets in a car and takes a bit of a look around for himself.

Anybody who says that they have no mildew this year is a bullshitter. But, like at Yangarra (below), where I live in my cosy rented depot, responsible, calm, long-sighted vineyard management sees it kept to an absolute minimum, even within the spray restrictions of the organic certification organization viticulturer Michael Lane wisely chooses to observe. The big vineyard looks sweet, smells sweet, feels sweet, is sweet. The vintage will be strangely late, but here, it looks very very good. Sweet.


Up through the fog past Hahndorf and into Charleston, there aren’t too many Charlestons being danced, but there’s a fair bit of mildew, and a fair bit of belated panic spraying going down by those who’ve managed to secure the fungicide.

It was misty more than foggy by the time we lobbed at Vanessa Hall’s cottage in the Henschke Cabernet vineyard at Eden Valley, and my trusty warning from DJs Growers made chilling sense. Sousing ourselves in Mars Linke’s stunning Karra Yerta Riesling on the veranda, it was apparent that this was perfect mildew weather: shivery as much as misty. The sky cleared long enough for us to souse ourselves in a blazing Garden of Eden sunset, before retreating to the warmth inside.

ANNIKA BERLINGIERI AND VANESSA HALL: HANGING OUT FOR MORE OF MARIE LINKIE'S PRIZEWINNING KARRA YERTA RIESLING WHILE SHE TAKES THE PHOTO AND WHITEY POINTS INTO A STUNNING EDEN VALLEY SUNSET

But I woke to the gentle mumble of women chatting in the vines. They were addressing the vines, really, one at a time, plucking off the odd unwanted leaf, giving them a pat, and a word of encouragement. That vineyard looked schmick: thick of leaf, and clean. Sweet, see. Fussed over. Another of Prue Henschke’s biodynamic triumphs.

There are two obvious reasons for the better organically or biodynamically-managed vineyards looking better than the monocultural industrial grapeyards. The first is that people who care enough to do away with the petrochem regime will be spending more time in their vineyards anyway. There's a lot more hands-on TLC, making for a better-balanced garden.

The second is that vines which have grown, continually coddled by the mindless protection of chemical prophylactics seem to have no reason to grow tougher leaves, bunches and cell structures, and are vulnerable when something goes badly wrong, like when the spray runs out. The vineyards which have grown without these chemical carapaces tend to have tougher leaves, and thicker cell structures, and are more resilient from the start.

The tiny patch of determined bush vines which gave me my coma are on the northern edge of viable viticulture as far as the Clare Valley goes. Not much chance of a flood there: they slurped up their inch of rain so damned greedily I reckon they sucked their veins full of dust. A few wisps of mildew on the odd leaf there, but those grumpy old coots aren’t gonna notice. Even the crows give them a wide berth.

Sweet wouldn’t be a word I’d use in their case, but their fruit will be just runny enough to wet the specks of dust in their veins, and will ooze out a tincture flavoured mainly of determination. Dust is damn fine fungicide.

MINTARO, IN THE CLARE VALLEY: ONE OF SOUTH AUSTRALIA'S BEST-PRESERVED PIONEER VILLAGES, AND A GREAT SOURCE OF DRY-GROWN BUSH VINE FRUIT

Heading south, through the major Clare vignoble, well, there’s a bit of mildew here and there, and some of it would be a great embarrassment to the perfectionist. I sat on the grand veranda at the new café and tasting area at O’Leary-Walker, savouring their magnificent Drs. Cut Polish Hill River Riesling, gazing out across the Main North Road to that beautiful swathe of vineyards on Watervale’s priceless calcrete slope.

Somebody there’s sprayed so much copper sulphate on their vineyard it was turning blue: heading toward the colour of eucalyptus: Blue Hills. You wouldn’t want to be a mildew spore on that block.

And so on.

The Barossa’s full of locusts, but they’re concentrating their admirable feasting skills on the weeds and grasses pushed up by this very damp spring and summer, and so far, have left the vine tendrils alone. Yes, there’s a touch of mildew here and there, but most of it’s been sent skipping. Sensible farmers have it pretty much under control; the lazy and the forlorn and the ones who couldn’t afford the spray are still sufficiently confident to look at your shoes when they talk to you. You know it’s a bad year when they look only at their own shoes.

So there’s your vintage assessment from Whitey. Oh, I should say that the Barossa and McLaren Vale Shiraz crop will be rather short: the vines look happy, but pull those leaves aside and you’ll see the bunches are very scrawny and meager. I suspect this damage occurred away back in the terrible heatwaves of the previous summers, when the tiny buds were still forming in the wood, and the air temperature blasted into the fifties. Something’s gotta give, and, well, you know, if it’s not flood it’s bloody famine.

THE St ALOYSIUS CHURCH AT THE JESUIT WINERY AT SEVENHILL - THE OLDEST WINERY IN THE CLARE VALLEY

Anything else you need to know? Duck up to Sevenhill and ask Ned. Take a few days. Compare the essential qualities of the excellent regional platters at, say, Reilly’s in Mintaro, and the one at O’Leary-Walker. Compare the views from Reilly’s veranda (you’re looking straight at the Magpie Stump Hotel) and the Sevenhill pub (you’re looking at the track to the Sevenhill Winery).

Or just find yourself a cottage in a vineyard, lie back with a tumbler of Good Catholic Girl Riesling and a big ice block, and worry about the mildew until your coma arrives.

WINEBIZ NEEDS SMART MINISTER FOR WINE

GONDOLA ON THE MURRAY CREATOR, STEFANO DE PIERI: CELEBRATED CHEF, GASTRONOMIC ENTREPENEUR, AND PRINCIPAL PROMOTOR OF HIS BELOVED MURRAY VALLEY: THE WINE BUSINESS LACKS SOMEBODY WITH HIS SKILLS AT ITS HELM

Small Flood, No Casualties
Wet Brisbane Night's Role
In 1980s Vic Wine Boom
by PHILIP WHITE

In the interests of injecting a little humour into the horrific muddy mess covering eastern Australia, here’s a late exclusive.

Few readers will know of the great Brisbane flood of, about, er, 1983? and its role in the resurrection of the Victorian wine industry.

Victoria’s wine business had been the biggest in Australia until it was ravaged by the dreaded root louse, phylloxera, in the late 19th century, giving the great wine families of South Australia, the Gramps, Seppelts, Hardys, Penfolds and Hill Smiths, their chance to expand and fill the gap.

Which, with chill confidence, they did.

PREMIER DUNSTAN HITS PARLIAMENT IN HIS PINK SHORTS, ADELAIDE, WEDNESDAY 22nd NOVEMBER 1972

But by the early '80s, it was a different scene. The rosy flush of South Australia’s Don Dunstan premiership was gone: Adelaide was not about to get any more feature stories in The New Yorker; pink shorts were out in parliament, and the gay dude who had been Australia’s most nationally-coveted leader was sulking in self-imposed exile. Suddenly the City of Light, the Athens of the South, seemed to be governed by straw-sucking cockies with beards. It was shockingly, depressingly dullsville.

To add insult, Victoria went and elected its shiny new glamourpuss Labor government of John Cain. Like Our Don, Cain, too, sported the odd safari suit, and the determination of his mob to bring on big time economic change equalled the drive South Australia’s winemakers had shown when they kicked the Vics all those years before. To really add insult, he appointed Don Dunstan to the driver’s seat of Victorian tourism, with a special brief to revive its wine business.

This seemed eerily to coincide with the South Australian government's disastrous Vine Pull Scheme, when taxpayers' money was spent paying fourth and fifth generation grapegrowers to uproot priceless old vineyards and get out of the wine business.

So Victoria wasn't merely beeing cheeky. It was throwing down the glove. Battle was declared, but there were no rules of engagement.

The third member of its new muscateers was deputy premier Robert Fordham (right), who was fondly regarded as “The Member for Wine”. As a punk wine editor and great fan of the revolutionary genius of Dunstan, I just had to nail a good long interview with the mercurial Fordham. For reasons that had a lot more to do with smoke than mirrors, this opportunity eventually arose in Brisbane.

Fordham, who was little known there, and not recognised, had a PR flak I called Hacca - he looked very much like celebrated corporate raider Robert Holmes a’Court, with that tall, elegant bearing. The three of us plunged through a restaurant and sufficient bars to break Queensland’s vicious laws of congregation with a midnight rendition of The Red Flag, warbled in the sweet harmony of the drunk outside Brisbane Town Hall. In Bjelke-Petersen’s day, this was an act of illegal demonstration if not plain revolutionary uprising.

We laughed about being arrested. Which we weren’t. But we must have looked suffiently besuited for most people to think Fordham and I were security men for Hacca. Rather than attempt to convince the citizens of Queensland that the shorter member of our team was really the deputy premier of Victoria, we found it easier to let people think they were suddenly in the company of Holmes a’Court, Australia’s most stylish billionaire.

THE REAL HOLMES a’ COURT, FAR RIGHT

They would have locked us up if we’d insisted that Bob fordham was the deputy premier of Victoria.

This unplanned masquerade gave us perfect cover to drink and discuss wine. Intensely.

Eventually, I crawled to bed up the top end of what was then the poshest hotel in Brisbane. But hardly had the thick head hit the pillow than the bedside phone buzzed and an anxious voice said

“Mr White, are you awake?”

“Yes,” I said, “I’m answering the phone.”

“Are you alone?” she asked. “This is reception. We have an emergency.”

She warned me the floor would be wet when I dropped my feet over the side, that we were on emergency lighting, and that I should pop on my dressing gown, leave the room immediately, and wait with the other tenth floor guests in the lift foyer. Under no conditions were any of us to open the door to the fire escape or call the lift.

By the time we had gathered there in the gloom, we were up to our ankles in water. I’d lost my two compadres: they were further up the building. We could hear a mighty torrent rushing down the fire escape stairs, and when we snuck the forbidden door open a crack to see, it was almost impossible to force the door shut again.

Things looked very grim.

“If we’re this high above the river,” someone said, “and we’re under water, this is a bloody big flood. It must be a hundred foot deep!”

We stood there, fuddled, boozy strangers looking awkward and helpless in the dim, waiting for our submerged building to fill up with floodwater, when an official arrived with a torch and explained a swimming-pool sized water reservoir on the roof had led go, and that we simply had to wait til it decanted itself into the downstairs bar and car park, which it did over the next hour or so.

In fair dinkum Queenslander style, they soon had us in safe, dry rooms, and had dried the top floors out by next evening. The downstairs bar had stuff floating around in waist-deep water, and the whole joint smelled like a bad cork for weeks, I was told, long after Robert Holmes a’Court and his minders left town.

But I left that meeting with no doubt that Fordham and his gang would revolutionise Victorian winemaking. They were fizzin! Within years our tiny rival state had more cellar outlets than we did: an entire new crop of boutique, top shelf vineyards and cellars were spread across cool Victoria, an array whose depth, quality and colour trounced complacent South Australia.

The punchdrunk reeling of today’s wine industry demands the sort of determined revolution of those Cain-Fordham-Dunstan days. With the mighty flood easing the drought and beginning to rinse our river and the Mallee on a scale that will shock, atop the collapse of huge wineries like Constellation Australia, and the scary viticulture implications of global warming, it’s time we had a Minister for Wine.

Is there anybody smart enough?

While Fordham got the wine job done, he eventually quit the deputy premiership in 1988 as the Cain government wallowed in a series of crises mainly caused by dumb business decisions: the same old same old bugger-ups we see cyclically in leftish governments whose frontliners suffer a pugnacious pathological obsession with proving that they are as good at business as the businessmen they are expected to merely govern.

“Politics is the art of the possible,” such a polly sagely advised me over his Riedel of Bordeaux last year. I have since become convinced that successful politics is really the good management of change, and the intensifying struggle for the retention of power eventually leads all politicians to avoid changing themselves. They should resign earlier.

Eventually even premier Cain resigned after taunting his party with a "back me or sack me" ultimatum. “We appointed a few dills but we weren't crook,” he said as he quit, leaving the finances of his state in tatters.

PREMIER DUNSTAN IN 1973, WITH DIANNE MEDWELL OF THE AUSTRALIAN DESIGN CENTRE

Dunstan, indeed, had quit the Victorian Tourism Commission two years earlier, after a hissy spat over a photograph was published of him with Monsignor Porcamadonna, a leader of the Order of Perpetual Indulgence, a gay activism group.

Stefano di Pieri, Cain’s advisor, fled to Mildura, where he married a publican’s beautiful daughter and set about floating his gondola on the Murray, and poor old Hacca? I reckon we lost him in the Great Brisbane Flood of 1983.

The reinvigorated Victorian wine business still stands, however, proud, brave and generally delicious. As a committed Murray mudplugger, maybe Stefano is the man to sort the Australian wine business. He wouldn’t let history repeat itself, would he?





















STEFANO DE PIERI: A GREAT AMBASSADOR FOR THE GASTRONOMIC ESSENTIALS THAT THE MURRAY-DARLING BASIN DOES BEST