BOTTLE RECYCLING IN S.A. CUCKOO'S NEST

WAVY GRAVY: THE CEILING OF AESOP BOTTLE SUPPLIERS IN ADELAIDE, SOUTH AUSTRALIA, IS MADE FROM RECYCLED BOTTLES.

Kesey's Ghost Keeps SA Clean Beverages Container Legislation Could Help Original Drinkers 
by PHILIP WHITE - (from the archive, June 2010)


My first thorough exploration of the bottled grog racket was in the red hot summer of 72-73. That winter, the world had run out of petrol. In the evenings, I could stroll all the way home - from the University of Adelaide to my squat in posh Walkerville - in the middle of the road, whitelining.

There were no cars.

We staged a Wole Soyinke play, Kongi’s Harvest, in the Union Hall, directed by Rob Brookman, with Ben Yenge and yrs truly on congas and bongos, and nobody came. Nobody.

But once the juice began to flow again and the summer blasted in, Adelaide began a boozebinge that would have today’s interferist wowsers aflame with disgust. The very confronting notion that civilization stops without petrol seemed to fuel a thirst previously unseen.

THE EARLIEST AMPHORAE CLAY BOTTLES WERE MORE BRITTLE THAN GLASS, BUT IF BROKEN THEIR SHARDS WERE USED ON ROADWAYS AND IN BUILDING MATERIAL








In those days I worked from dawn til dusk in Brierly’s Boy Scout bottle yard in Carrington Street. Jalopies would come in from the pubs, stacked high with tattered sacks full of empty bottles. They’d reverse against a loading deck beneath a rusty galvo roof so low I couldn’t stand erect. But I’d unload the truck, unwire the bags in a crouch, drag ’em across the bench, and tip the bottles down a chute.

At the bottom was a fifty foot conveyor belt surrounded by leering women from eastern Europe: no spikka, until my exhaustion slowed me down so much I couldn’t keep the belt full, when they’d scream for more to avoid the boss’s tongue lashing. They’d expertly flick the bottles over their shoulders into various bins, depending on the colour of the glass. Beer came in 750 ml. Pickaxe brand bottles; they went into crates for refilling. The air was full of extreme noise and flying glass.

The roof was so hot that one day I flaked out, and slid down the chute face-first, embracing a bag of bottles. I came-to halfway down the belt, waking to the laughter of the lasses, my arms about my bag of shards. The boss, a giant hob-nailed blue singlet Italian brute from the Po Valley, turned the belt off, put me under his arm, slopped me on the baking asphalt and handed me a hot frothing Coke. The women’s giggles turned to screams of demand before I’d got half of it down, and the Big Po ordered me back on deck.

That week the bastard bit my pay for the Coke.

NOT ALL CONTAINERS PRESENT PROBLEMS IN THE RECYCLED GLASS CHAIN ... SIX BOTTLES OF MOUTON-ROTHSCHILD 1996 IN ONE AT THE FICOFI TASTING, KAESLER WINES, BAROSSA S.A. 2010 - photo LEO DAVIS














The half hour lunchtime was spent in the pub across the road, rehydrating with fast pints of Southwark. I could down six with my sandwich, then back to that hellish unloading dock. At night, I’d tip glass powder from my boots and the crotch of my jocks. The homeward ride on Hellie Sangter’s pushbike was rather abrasive.

Enriched with such hands-on research, I found myself consulting to the Department of Environment a few years later, sorting out the paper mess left after the passage of the South Australian Beverages Container Legislation. This inspired piece of brilliance was designed to keep the state clean. It’s hard to explain how much litter there was: the joint was disgusting. We’d isolate a piece of road, a park, or a beach, collect all the rubbish, itemise it, then bung a deposit on whichever item made up more than a certain percent of the total. So bagmen and scavengers would clean the state.

This was an act of thievery, really – we basically pinched the revolutionary Oregon Bottle Bill, which had been devised in response to the demands of Richard Chambers, an experienced backwoodsman and logging equipment salesman with a bright green bent.

Ken Kesey was also reputed to have had input in this bill. I never met Chambers, but thanked Kesey at an Adelaide Writers’ Week a few years later, and he certainly spoke as if he’d had something along the lines of a fair bit to do with it, but probably usually did quite a lot of that, given his enthusiastic demeanour. It's a terrible pity he's not available for more help now that the South Australian Labor government has knocked the mental hospital down and built a film studio in its place. A new version of Cuckoo's Nest would be apt.

KEN KESEY, STRIPED, CENTER, WITH HIS MERRY PRANKSTERS FROM THE ACID TESTS, BESIDE THE "FURTHER" BUS. KESEY DIED IN 2001, AFTER A STROKE, DIABETES, AND COMPLICATIONS ARISING FROM A LIVER OPERATION

The efforts of Vicky Berger, Chambers’ Republican Representative daughter, eventually saw the Oregon bill extended to include water bottles in 2007.

The breweries, Coke (which virtually owned KESAB - Keep South Australia Beautiful), and Pickaxe bottles fought like pigs to stop our borrowed act. They seemed to think that South Australia would suddenly cease drinking, which was plain stupid. But we prevailed, and suddenly the state was the cleanest in the land. It still works, yet remains unique in Australia.

Lately, I’ve been talking about the ravages of alcohol with mates on Blackfella country. With all other drugs, government’s gradually learning to attack the vendors, rather than the addicts, and it beats me why this isn’t applied to those nefarious peddlers of sweetened ethanol. The deadly havoc they wreak is obvious.

Since the template is there, solid in legislation in the Beverage Container Act 1975, it should easily be applied to the tribal lands for another purpose.

If the community leaders imposed a fifty cent deposit, the kids would collect all those millions of stubbies, cans, and silver pillows and hand them in for some serious pocket money. The collected containers could then be itemized and catalogued. It would suddenly be very clear who was supplying the drug.

In places like The Alice, the vendors remove bladder packs from their boxes at the counter, flatten the cardboard and stack it behind the cash register. The besotteds lurch out, guzzling from the glittering modern equivalent of the wine skin, leaving behind the cardboard, with its polite health warnings about standard drinks.

So the bags themselves should display the health warnings, and be bar-coded to identify the manufacturer and the dealer.

Once a community could present an accurate list of such garbage items, the list could be published, and we would see who was responsible for what. These companies could then be presented with an invitation to pay for the damage they had wrought, and concerned investors could adjust their share portfolios accordingly.

Only a fool would suggest that this would cure the disease of alcoholism, but the bush and its original inhabitants would look and feel a lot better, whilst those who profit from this disgusting degradation could be identified, and leant on for some rehabilitation funding.

Just a thought.

FRI 25 JUNE 10


MANY ORIGINAL AUSTRALIANS REACT ANGRILY TO PRESS IMAGES LIKE THIS (TIME MAGAZINE, AUGUST 2006 - "THE DEMON DRINK"), AND SUGGEST THAT ONLY A MINORITY OF THEIR NUMBER DRINK TO EXCESS, AND THAT WHITE PEOPLE ARE MORE LIKELY OVERALL TO DRINK TO EXCESS.

Bad Boys

Photograph of PETER LEHMANN at his weighbridge by MILTON WORDLEY. Story by PHILIP WHITE – This first appeared in The Sydney Daily Telegraph in 1990

Twilight, somewhere near Tibooburra. I am hurtling across the desert with Peter Lehmann in his 1927 Buick ragtop. There have been enormous rains, so everything is sopping; covered in mud. It’s in our underpants and eyes, under the brims of our hats, and in our boots. It destroyed our primitive brakes days ago, a thousand miles back, but we are not stopping. Were are on our way to Alice Springs. In a hurry. We are competing in a Redex Rally.

As navigator, and occasional driver – unless he’s dead or crazy, Lehmann won’t let anyone else have the wheel – my job is to keep a pitifully small patch of the windscreen translucent by tipping water from a port bottle through a tear in the roof, so the wind and tiny manual windscreen wiper slops more mud back through the hole in the roof and into our faces. I regret wearing a shirt with pockets. They are both full of mud.

We are working on another bottle. Peter likes some help with that. And while the evening sky’s last silver reflection fades from the long skinny puddle which is the road, it becomes obvious the old headlamps have gone on strike. Again.

When total darkness settles, Lehmann throttles off marginally to let another car through. It’s a full-bore modern European rallying machine: blaring air horns, more lights than New York City, five aerials, open exhausts, ’roo bars, roll cage: all the macho stuff. Windscreen washers, for Chrissake! It roars and lurches and slews sickeningly across the dribbling mud pie which is the middle of Australia, and we are right up his quoit in the dark, two tonnes of 1927 iron, sixty-five miles an hour in the old money, no lights, no brakes, no mike on the two-way to discourage the poor bastards from slowing down too quickly. No sense. No safety. Sheer fear of death keeps me stone silent, wide awake, and passing the thirty year old Peter Lehmann port. I’m glad I can’t see through my side of the windscreen, which glows a low mud red from the tail lights of that poor unsuspecting idiot in front of us. The port is called Old Redemption, after a hymn book.

Three hours later, that car, totally unaware of our presence, just a length in front of us, disappears. The hole must be very deep. We follow it in at top speed, and I can tell it’s bounced out and moved on because when we hit the bottom there’s no metallic crunch. There’s a bounce, mind you, that flips our sodden swags over to join us in the front, and twists the chassis sufficiently to buck all four doors open so the port and the torch and the wet toilet rolls fall out and the roof disconnects from the windscreen and flips back to let more mud and the big black sky in. But we do not hit. Neither do we stop. And our headlights, the whole two candlepower of them, come back on. The driver ahead shrieks vicious curses over the radio, demanding to know where we have come from and who the hell we are and screaming “get back you bastards you’re far too close!”

We never get the chance to tell him we’ve been there for two hundred kilometres. No mike.

But there in the newly-dim flicker of the dashlight Lehmann grins across at me like some wild, wet terra cotta Buddha-Bacchus to say “There you are White. What you English don’t understand is Barossadeutscher stubbornness. Now where’s that port?”

And that’s Lehmann. In a valley full of conservative Silesian peasants conditioned to being downtrodden for generations by their English managers, locked up each time we go to war with Germany, and called free settlers when in fact they were South Australia’s special line of particularly well-behaved convicts, he is a very rare bird because he has that slugging, pig-headed stolidity with the ability to speak out loud and lead. Especially when the headlights come back on.

More than any other Barossadeutscher hero, and there not many, Lehmann has dedicated his wine-making years to the appreciation, maintenance and preservation of the quiet, hidden life which makes this big wine valley special.

When Saltram, the wine company for which he’d slaved for decades was bought out by an absentee landlord who ordered the immediate sacking of the hundreds of peasant-scale family vignerons from whom he bought his grapes, Lehmann walked out with his beloved growers, borrowed money from the few mates who had any, built a new winery, and promised the growers that if they’d wait ’til he’d sold the wine, he’d pay for those grapes and save their families from ruin. It was a genuine, wildy risky Moses act that took years to work properly, but it worked.

Lehmann called his spartan new joint Masterson, after Damon Runyon’s stoic, gambling private dick, and, for a while at least, the ancient peasant-scale Barossa vineyard, unique in Australia, was saved from the bulldozer blade.

A decade later, in 1989, when grape prices were soaring to heights never before seen here, and competing companies hounded the growers with higher and higher bids, Lehmann called his throng together at the annual Growers’ Picnic, and told them he’d be paying lower rates than most companies because the new prices were ridiculous. The growers stuck with him.

This relationship has to be seen to be understood. At vintage, which takes three months, Lehmann drops all else to man his weighbridge. In trucks and tractors, utes and trolleys of divers ages and sizes come the growers. They queue from first light to last, taking their turn on the bridge. As they wait to be weighed, they come in and chat with Peter, to share a smoke and a schlück or three of port. According to Barossa tradition, it’s cold tawny, taken by the flagon from the ’fridge. There’s always a mountain of fresh crusty bread - from the bakers Linke or Fechner - there on the redgum bench, and delicious gum-smoked meats and dill pickles to munch.

Lehmann remembers the names of several hundred of these folks’ businesses. He has, after all, been buying their grapes for over forty years. “Hahn, W. G. and L. G.” he says, sliding the polished weights along the scale arm. “That looks like good shiraz. Have a schlück. Heuppaff, E. H. and B. M.. Lovely. Look at that quality Whitey. Two and a half tonnes. Saegenschnitter Brothers. Scholz. Jeez, I can remember that old truck sitting in the vineyard with North Para floodwaters lapping round its windows. Have some ham. Seeliger – what is it? That’s right, W. A. and M. A.. Cabernet. Better than last year. Pech, L. W. J. and B. Y. ... how’s the family, Leo?”

The growers mill about and joke, and play tricks on the unsuspecting newcomer. “See that mettwürst there on the back of the door already”, they’ll say, “Peder keeps that on there for not to eat but for to keep our eyes off the scale while he weighs our grapes. Haw, haw haw!”

The little weighbridge room is decorated with photographs of Damon Runyon and Lehmann’s father’s graduation class from the Lutheran seminary in Minnesota.. He was a favourite local preacher for the duration of his life, and the first Lutheran in the Barossa to preach in English. It’s a room from another age; another time, when life meant more than it does today, and pace was something seen only at the Kapunda trots or Redex Rallies.

So this year, at the close of the best vintage for Barossa red since the great year of 1971, many souls were sobered when the news spread that Peter Lehmann was in hospital with bowel cancer. The first operation was complex and long, and more followed. The tumor was removed, but infection set in and one of the other things they took out was a kidney. Thousands of South Australians held their breath. Lehmann lost five stone.

The rustics in the Nuriootpa Snakepit stared glumly into their schooners of cold port and made sage announcements like “Poor old Peder. Too much mettwürst, not enough port”. The winter was cold and dull.

But as the months wound by, Lehmann, P. L. and M., Peter The Rock, Peder the Preacher’s Kid, Mr. Stubborn Barossa himself, gradually shook off his ailments and slowly, surely grew healthy again. He has been cleared of the cancer, and on Thursday, the day his 1989 was to win the Jimmy Watson Trophy, he took his first glass of Old Redemption for many months. Then he took another. And another.

And at ten thirty at night, he telephoned me from the Barossa with a wicked gurgle in his raspy gambler’s voice. “Lehmann”, I said, instantly worried, totally forgetting the function then underway in the Melbourne show hall. “Is everything okay? Are you alright?”

“White” he said triumphantly, “not only are you talking to a man who can drive in the dark, but to a Barossa winemaker who in this same year has won the top red trophy in the Brisbane show with his cabernet blend AND the Jimmy Watson Trophy with a traditional 1989 Barossa shiraz".

Tomorrow, or yesterday your time, is Lehmann's birthday. I can promise you there will be an unholy degree of schlücking and schnabelling at the weighbridge, and late, when the jazz has finally played right out, Norty Schluter, Baker Linke, Peder and Dingo will play ten dollar poker until there's no need to keep the lights on.

.

Fellow drug dealers

by PHILIP WHITE - This was published in The Independent Weekly in 2007

Never thought I’d hear words like it. Tucked away, it was, in a late night news bulletin on Radio National. Smack in the middle of the week in which our Prime Minister seems to have declared war on any aboriginal person who fails to swab clean, the Premier of Queensland suggested it was time that the huge businesses that make a lot of money flogging booze to troubled bush communities might consider sharing the cost of the havoc wrought by their powerful intoxicating depressants.

The intensity of my stunned silence was matched only by the silence radiating from those manufacturers of rotgut fortifieds and bladder packs.

Suddenly, belatedly, the environmental cost of the irrigation regime which makes possible this part of our beloved wine industry has become glaringly apparent thanks to the drought. Squandering our only river to make plonk that’s three times the strength of average beer and sells for the cost of Perrier water has always confounded me. Before the PM engaged his God to stop the drought, the water crisis cast a very bright light on this rote stupidity. While the rain he sent was far too heavy and in all the wrong places, perhaps his aim will be better if he shines his big torch on the human health costs incurred by the cheapest end of the wine business.

It’s twenty five years since Richard Farmer, then a famous Canberra liquor store owner - whilst also Prime Minister Hawke’s press secretary - stood up in Sydney’s Bulletin Place Cellars and addressed the throng of wine industry magnates as “fellow drug dealers”. While the faces have changed, the suits remain the same, and none since has uttered anything quite so disarmingly honest.

It would be easy to monitor precisely which alcohol products are behind the horrors the PM has declared war upon. The model’s been working perfectly for nearly thirty years in South Australia. It’s called the Beverages Container Legislation, and I am proud to have worked in the visionary crew that devised it.

This clever mechanism was designed to clear up the rubbish which once lined all major roadways, parks and beaches. Slices of public property were cleared of all litter, which was sorted and categorised. Any item that made up more than a predetermined percentage of the total would incur a deposit, which would encourage its recycling.

Suddenly, bottles and drink cans disappeared from the roadsides. While that left squillions of ring-pulls in the environment, the threat of another deposit on those saw the drinks business quickly invent the flip-top can.

While this system was imposed in the name of a healthy environment, it could very easily be adapted to improve the health of the humans that coincidentally inhabit that environment. Record the brands of alcohol most abused in each troubled community; tweak the bar code technology to reveal the identity of the vendor, and invite both manufacturer and dealer to share the cost of fixing the broken drinkers, their families and communities.

The cunning plonkmongers of the Alice long ago learned that the best way to hide the identity of the bladder pack manufacturer was to remove the bladders from their packs at the cash register, leaving the drinker to squirt the stuff straight in, a la your goatskin, and the emptied bags to blow like big chrome leaves around the bed of the Todd while the flattened boxes grew like topsy beside the grog shop counter.

You’d never be permitted to erect a big billboard there to promote your port or gordo moselle, but there’s no need for billboards in a bush landscape which constantly vibrates with glittering reminders of the faux relief promised by the silver pillow. But even this clever veil of anonymity could easily be lifted if the bar code was printed on the bladder as well as the cardboard.

This unpacking trick also removed any chance of the indigenous drinker sighting the cute little image of the International Standard ISO 3591-1977 tasting snifter, politely half full at 50 millilitres, which illustrates the number of standard drinks the bags contain. No tasting glasses in the bed of the Todd.

We’ll probably never know whether this removal of the bags from their branded boxes was an initiative of the manufacturers, but there’s an enormous amount of money at stake. Fortified wine production might be declining, but nearly half of Australia’s wine is sold in bladder packs.