FLYBOY OILERS RUG UP IN DESERT TEST

No Drinks Evident In New Saudi Kite
Would VVP Fly Without A Vodka Bar?
by PHILIP WHITE

It’s been a long time since DRINKSTER paid much attention to Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin. We regard him as a bellwether of accoutrement and innovation: anything he takes to is often highly fashionable within a few decades.

However, afford him too much attention and we find ourselves influencing his behaviour, so we withdraw.

His wine empire, which he shares with Moamar Gaddafi Muammar Abu Minyar al-Gaddafi,

Guide of the First of September Great Revolution of the Socialist People's Libyan Arab Jamahiriya, Brotherly Leader and Guide of the Revolution, King of Kings, chairman of the African Union, which will soon be the United States Of Africa, is back into the dream stage since we advised him about Australian consultants.

Our Eastern Blocster since leaked us this image of Vlad2P at a secret Saudi airbase.

His test pilot and instructor is 84 years old Crown Prince H R H Prince Sultan bin Abdul Aziz Al Saud, Crown Prince of Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, and First Deputy Prime Minister. DRINKSTER advises yon Vlad2P should take note of the Crown Prince’s beard: how black they’ve got it looking; how it gives Aziz a zizz. You know: fru fru. He’s looking better, having recuperated in Morocco since the removal of a cyst from the Royal gizzard.

Prince Sultan is also the inspector general for the kingdom, and is Chairman of the Board of Saudi Arabia's national airline, Saudi Arabian Airlines.

The photograph registers Vlad2P with CP Aziz, during secret trials of a new flying carpet.

Primary witnesses report the Russian made no attempt to hide his doubts about the project, and kept his Ilyushin 96-300 ticking over nearby.


THE ENGLISH HAVE BEEN FOLLOWING FLYING CARPET SALES SINCE KING-HELL ADELAIDE SPARKY BOFFIN SIR MARK OLIPHANT SHOWED THEM HOW RADAR WORKETH IN WORLD WAR TWO

OBITUARY FOR JIM ROBINSON, RAPTOR MAN

NONAMI, THE TARONGA ZOO'S NEWEST WEDGE-TAILED EAGLE. ALL THESE PORTRAITS OF HER ARE BY MARK KOLBE. THE WEDGE-TAIL IS AQUILA AUDAX, OR, IN THE ADNYAMATHANHA, WILDU.


Bird Man Flies
by PHILIP WHITE 13 AUG 03
a version of this story appeared in The Advertiser

Jim Robinson, the Raptor Man, died of cancer last weekend. He was one of the last of our falconers: one of the very special blokes I’ve found on my rounds of the lost edges of the wine industry. He spent his gentle life fixing and rehabilitating birds of prey, or raptors, that had damaged themselves, often by smashing their wings on trellis wires whilst pursuing smaller grape-eating birds through vineyards.

If we had a proper balance of raptors in our vineyards, there’d be much less problem with frustrated grape farmers resorting to bird scarers to deter marauding birds. The imbalance brought our exports close to crisis when government relaxed the laws on shooting native rosellas and parrots in vineyards, which sufficiently disgusted nature-loving wine drinkers in California and London to suddenly drink only French. As if the French were more sympathetic to wee berrudies.

In gastronomy, as in politics, all things are connected to everything else. Mulling over Jim’s life, I had an overwhelming desire to eat pigeons. Cooked with juniper berries, in good red. Raptors eat pigeons, and now, without Jim around to fix them, there’ll be fewer raptors, more pigeons, and more gas guns.

The falcons, eagles, buzzards, kestrels, and hawks exist at the far extreme of the food chain, living on meat that grew up eating everything else, where all the poisons from the dining environment end up, concentrated. They’re the first to go when things go wrong, like during the ’seventies DDT fashion, when their egg shells wouldn’t harden.

These days, we have plastic inflatable raptors flopping around on stupid little poles like fishing rods. They never seem to scare anything, because they never straighten up and fly right, like the rulers of the sky which they dumbly, lifelessly emulate. There’s no evidence at all that their inventors ever looked a raptor in the eye, like I’ve done at Jim Robinson’s.

THIS IS NOT NONAMI'S FOOT. THIS ONE, COMPLETE WITH RADIO TRANSMITTER ON THE JESS, BELONGS ON THE ANKLE OF AN HEBRIDEAN HARRIS HAWK. LOVE THOSE NAILS!

Not too close, mind you. Get too close, touch them for a few seconds too many, especially whilst they’re weak and wounded, and raptors lose the arrogant psychological edge it takes to stoop like lightning through the sky and drive their talons through the flesh of others for a feed. The sky is their restaurant.

But while a brown falcon, for example, can thrash through the leafiest bit of a red gum, in starving pursuit of a smaller bird to eat, it has learned in recent decades to avoid pursuing them through vineyards, because vineyards have something that red gums do not have: those deadly, invisible wires, stretched tight.

There’s a posh, multi-storey, heritage-listed dovecote in the vineyard near the main gate of Chateau Reynella. It houses, without rent, hundreds of pigeons. Jim was one of the few who really knew what that dovecote was for. Pigeons don’t eat grapes. But raptors regard pigeons as aerial chocolate truffles, and they’d sweep through that vineyard to guts themselves on the bits of the pigeon with the most sugar: the pumping heart and the brain. During the chase, they’d frighten all the grape-eating birds away. The grape crop survived, at the expense of the pigeons.

When Gough Whitlam introduced equal pay for women, the old wine families that owned the wine business refused to pay pickers and pruners men’s wages. Most of the pickers and pruners were women. This forced the rapid development of the grape harvesting machine, and the machine-pruning devices. These both worked more efficiently with hedged vinerows. Gradually, one humble fruiting wire became two or three, in pursuit of higher tonnages, and the wires killed the raptors.

Observing Jim mending the wing bones of the broken ones with plastic drinking straw splints, and replacing broken feathers with good ones plucked from his collections of raptors in the deep freeze, was to witness an incredible healing ritual that came from the dawn of time and was all over before anybody knew it, least of all the bird. First of all, if the bird was irreparable, he'd kill it immediately and put it in the fridge. If at any stage his repairs weren't working to his rigorous expectations, he'd kill the bird. If the bird had been handled too much before he got it, he'd kill it. He hated vets, who couldn't resist handling the wounded, to investigate their damages. If a bird had been in the warm hands of a vet, he'd usually kill it.

He’d keep the wounded ones roosting on his bed head with all the blinds drawn, observing them over a day or so, until they’d fall asleep from exhaustion and pain. He’d learn about their ailment by watching, then while the bird was drooping, suddenly grasp their broken bits and feel the damage, so he could then plan a subsequent rapid attack to make the repairs. Then came a long season of retraining: teaching the partly broken bird to be wild again, to fly, hover and stoop to kill. So it could be released.

Hovering was the biggest test. Hovering is very difficult. If you haven't got your wings working evenly, and you can't hover, Jim wouldn't trust you to survive.


Which leads me to the matter of pigeons. If you’re squeamish about dressing your own, you can order them through Angelakis Brothers in the Central Market. Don’t let anyone sell you homeless punks from the street: skyrats that grew up eating cigarette butts taste like ashtrays and take a lot longer to cook. Ensure they’ve come from a cage with plenty of organic corn and hempseed. I dry them with salt and pepper, and stuff them with coarsely-chopped walnuts, smoked bacon fat, black olives and brandy. I wrap them with thinly-sliced Schulz’s or Linke’s bacon, tie them, and brown them in my iron griddle with butter.

Once I’ve put the birds aside, I brown baby beetroot, fresh shiitake mushrooms and little onions in the same griddle with some chopped bacon and fresh herbs. Then I glug in half a bottle of woody shiraz with a cup of chook stock and a dozen juniper berries, and reduce the whole glorious potage by half before putting it in a covered casserole with the pigeons, in an oven already set at 230 degrees C. (Don't put the shiitake in til late.) You can see when your pigeons are done: your nose will tell you. Before serving them in bowls, I take the bacon off them, chop it up, and add it to the hot stock and veg before dousing the birds with it.

A bottle of Mitchell’s delicious screw-capped Clare shiraz 2001, and a stack of mash, and I’m back at the contemplation of dear sweet Jim – a very special, sensitive and clever man who has taken with him all the secrets.




Falco longipennis

What maddened verse gives raptors the rhythm
To thrash through shrubbage and scrub
Risking wings to get at the tucker
And peck the brains from pigeon, parrot, and bat?

I just looked an Australian hobby in the eyes.
She’d done a wing on a vineyard wire,
Humping through the trellis to get the wee birdies
The vigneron erected plastic falcons to scare.

Her falconer had set her up well,
Never holding her down like the dreaded vet,
Keeping her weight up, earning her trust
’Til she up and off, one crook wing tip hanging just

Enough to attract that peregrine that
Drilled a shocked silent hole in the sky,
Smashing all sound of bird into nothing:
A sudden feather-free vacuum of death.

But she came back, that broken one,
Now setting herself on her ground crew’s glove,
Staring black and yellow to my soul, as if to say
“You thought I was fucked then didn’t you”.


Philip White
1 April 2002



Wildu – Aquila audax

Slow to leave the roo somebody’d hit last night,
a wedge-tailed eagle wobbles starving into the up and
lurches to stare from sixty metres off as we draw to a halt.
“There’s another one dead over there” you say.

His gizzards unrolling in the sun, talons locked open.
I pull feathers to freshen my dead brother’s hat.
The highway kills its carrion addicts,
and these wingtips are worn half way through

from years of mothy heaving ’gainst the tarmac to escape.
He’d lost his grasp of air, finally rising so slow
he got splattered with his beak full. Too easy to miss.
Now the female’s twitching to resume her feast.

Can she know? Does she feel it go?
They found the hat in a place like this.


Philip White
24 Sep 07

ROCK DOCTORS THROW ANCIENT STONES

MARBLE BAR CHERT IN THE PILBARA, IN AUSTRALIA'S FAR NORTH-WEST: 3.46 BILLION YEARS OLD? THE RED BANDS CONTAIN THE IRON OXIDE, HAEMATITE, WHICH PROVIDES CLUES THAT ORGANISMS WHICH COULD PHOTOSYNTHESISE WERE ALIVE AND WELL 700 MILLION YEARS EARLIER THAN PREVIOUSLY THOUGHT. PHOTO: Dr. ARTHUR HICKMAN

Canada v. Australia In Oldest Life Arguments
Barossa Boasts Looking Really Silly Now
by PHILIP WHITE

Barossa winemakers claiming their soils and geology are some of the oldest on Earth might like to bone up on news from northern Canada and Australia’s Pilbara, in our far north-west.

Geologists working in the Pilbara have published an article in today’s Nature Geosciences, claiming that simple photosynthesising life forms were farting oxygen into the oceans 700 million years earlier than previous estimates. Masamichi Hoashi, David C. Bevacqua, Tsubasa Otake, Yumiko Watanabe, Arthur H. Hickman, Satoshi Utsunomiya and Hiroshi Ohmoto are the rockdoctors concerned.

“The timing of the origin of photosynthesis on the early Earth is greatly debated”, they write.

“It is generally agreed, on the basis of the presence of biological molecules found in shales from the Hamersley Basin, Australia, that oxygenic photosynthesis had evolved 2.7 billion years ago. However, whether photosynthesis occurred before this time remains controversial. We report primary haematite crystals and associated minerals within the marine sedimentary rocks preserved in a jasper formation of the Pilbara Craton, Australia, which we interpret as evidence for the formation of these rocks in an oxygenated water body 3.46 billion years ago. We suggest that these haematite crystals formed at temperatures greater than 60 °C from locally discharged hydrothermal fluids rich in ferrous iron. The crystals precipitated when the fluids rapidly mixed with overlying oxygenated sea water, at depths greater than 200 m. As our findings imply the existence of noticeable quantities of molecular oxygen, we propose that organisms capable of oxygenic photosynthesis evolved more than 700 million years earlier than previously recognized, resulting in the oxygenation of at least some intermediate and deep ocean regions”.

This key finding is critical in the unfolding natural history of Earth. Microscopic organisms such as cyanobacteria create oxygen as a by-product of photosynthesis. The date of their arrival is an essential key to our understanding of the evolution of life.

“The evidence comes from tiny crystals of the iron-oxide mineral haematite in a 160-metre-long core section that forms part of the Marble Bar Chert”, reported Heather Catchpole on ABC Science.

“Haematite can form in the presence of aerobic or oxygen-loving bacteria in the water, or by photo-electric processes in the upper 10 metres of seawater.”

“Microscopic analysis of the rocks show no sign of wave action or other structures characteristic of shallow-water sediments” Catchpole explains. “The orientation and nature of the grains of haematite also show that it precipitated directly from the seawater, rather than forming later from other processes, such as the movement of groundwater.

“These data strongly suggest that oxygenic photoautotrophs flourished in the photic zone of the 3.46 billion-year-old oceans and supplied molecular oxygen to the deep water.”

This new research presents a problem for those with previous findings: geology Professor Malcolm Walter, from the University of New South Wales, says previous research suggests a much later date for the evolution of photosynthesis.

“Evidence from uranium deposits and iron-rich rocks in the nearby Hammersley region of Western Australia point to the earth's atmosphere and oceans first becoming oxygenated around 2.4 billion years ago” he says. “[This new claim] suggests that photosynthesis must have evolved before 3.5 billion years ago and that despite that, it took one billion years to oxygenate the surface of the earth. That's hard to reconcile with what we know about how this sort of bacteria would have spread”.

But researcher Professor Hiroshi Ohmoto from the NASA Astrobiology Institute and Department of Geosciences at the Pennsylvania State University says other data backs their claim for an early development of photosynthesising life.

“Recently accumulated massive amounts of geochemical and biochemical data can be better explained by a theory postulating the emergence of oxygenic photosynthesis and the development of a fully oxygenated atmosphere in the very early evolutionary stage,” Professor Ohmoto said. “Once cyanobacteria appeared in one area of the ocean, it probably took less than 10 million years to fully oxygenate the atmosphere and oceans.”

Another team, working on the Nuvvuagittuq greenstone on the tundra on Hudson Bay, Canada, say these are Earth’s most ancient rocks, at 4.28 billion years of age. They claim these are 250 million years older than any other rocks known.

DON FRANCIS AND JONATHON O'NEIL OF McGILL UNIVERSITY, MONTREAL, AT WORK ON THE NUVVUAGITTUQ GREENSTONE

Writing last year in Science Journal, this team claims their pet rocks may contain evidence of the earliest life. Co-author Don Francis, geology professor at McGill University in Montreal, cautioned that this had not been established.

“The rocks contain a very special chemical signature - one that can only be found in rocks which are very, very old,” he said. “Nobody has found that signal any place else on the Earth. Originally, we thought the rocks were maybe 3.8 billion years old. Now we have pushed the Earth's crust back by hundreds of millions of years. That's why everyone is so excited.”

BBC science writer, James Morgan writes that before this study, the oldest whole rocks were from a 4.03 billion-year-old body known as the Acasta Gneiss, in Canada's Northwest Territories. (The only things known to be older are mineral grains called zircons from Western Australia, which date back 4.36 billion years.)

Professor Francis and his McGill University colleague, Jonathan O'Neil, sent Nuvvuagittuq greenstone samples to the Carnegie Institution of Washington, where they were dated by measuring isotopes of the rare earth elements neodymium and samarium, which decay over time at a known rate.

The oldest rocks, termed faux amphibolite, were dated within the range from 3.8 to 4.28 billion years old. “4.28 billion is the figure I favour,” says Francis. “It could be that the rock was formed 4.3 billion years ago, but then it was re-worked into another rock form 3.8bn years ago. That's a hard distinction to draw.”

The same unit of rock contains geological structures which might only have been formed if early life forms were present on the planet, Professor Francis suggested.

The material displays a banded iron formation - fine ribbon-like bands of alternating magnetite and quartz. This feature is typical of rock precipitated in deep sea hydrothermal vents - which have been touted as potential habitats for early life on Earth.

“These ribbons could imply that 4.3 billion years ago, Earth had an ocean, with hydrothermal circulation,” said Francis. “Now, some people believe that to make precipitation work, you also need bacteria. If that were true, then this would be the oldest evidence of life. But if I were to say that, people would yell and scream and say that there is no hard evidence.”

“The exciting thing is that we've seen a chemical signature that's never been seen before. That alone makes this an exciting discovery”, he said.

For the information of winemakers who don’t understand the difference between rocks and soil, prone to make blithe back label claims about the oldest soils on Earth, the oldest rocks in the South Australian vignobles are from the neoproterozoic, which concluded about 540 million years ago and stretched back another half a billion years before that.

HOT GOAT AT THE ROYAL OAK

TWIN TRENCHERMEN: WHITE (RED BRACES WITH WHITE POLKA DOTS), AND McGRATH (RED TIE WITH WHITE POLKA DOTS), HARD AT WORK Ca.1985 ... PHOTO: MILTON WORDLEY

Early Writing From Twin Trencher Terrors
Goat Finally Makes The Adelaide Infidel Plate
by PHILIP WHITE and JOHN McGRATH
from Adelaide Preview, September 1979

This was the first time the author ventured formally into writing about food. It is also the first published work of the revered Adelaide food critic, John McGrath. His crafty work is still regularly published in The Adelaide Review, which arose from the ashes of Adelaide Preview, and, with The Independent Weekly, to this day maintains Adelaide's tradition of feisty independent publishing. DRINKSTER understands there are moves afoot to rekindle the Sydney end of the Review, so we may again see a Sydney Review, which would be a good thing.

We two broad innocents had heard of a place where the mining industry had somehow linked arms with the gay pinkos to purge the Flinders and Middleback Ranges of those whalers of native flora, the goats. Those goats go in the curry every Friday lunchtime at the Royal Oak Hotel on O’Connell Street in North Adelaide, and the clientele was rumoured to regularly incorporate both miners and artistic directors. Little tongues lapping, off we did trot.

But no. No marriage of obviously separate schools here in this Royal Oak. Instead, we were instantly consumed by the riptide of a Green Frog Enterprises board meeting. These infidel truckers were taking a little business goat with a criminal lawyer, a captive nations sort of blonde woman called Chook who bore absolutely no resemblance to any variety of feathered creature, and a South Yarra Screamer sporting some wonderfully assymetric eyebrows and attendant earwear which matched. The eyebrows.

Now there’s no room for shirkers at these meetings of the Green Frog, so keen to look like a part of the bunch, your two food reporters opened fire on the carafes of red and white that deck the tables as you enter. Each pair of diners gets a carafe of their choosing as part of the $6 per head meal cost, and though there are many who’d rather a lager with their goat, the vino vapourised fairly quickly. By Jove, there’s always beer to be had, but grape? Gratis?

When one first enters the Royal Oak, the immediate realisation is this that is one of those labyrinthic jobs that are the result of a century of relatively haphazard remodeling and sub-dividing, all piled there, two stories high, on top of the mulled colonial publican’s dream. She’s a graceful chap on the outside, but once in, there are little rooms leading into darker, more comfortable little rooms, with little rooms to left and right, with diners a-wander in each, all bearing that strange smugness peculiar to doyens of the curried goat. One of these rooms boasted a particularly smug lot, and there, tucked against a wall like a little brass Buddha: a table, bearing four electric crockpots, one marker “beef vindaloo”, one “chicken”, and “mild goat” and yes, a-bubbling there amidst them, their chief: “HOT GOAT”. Scattered around the feet of this remarkable evidence that east sometimes does meet west, the appropriate accompaniments: tomato in mint, banana and lemon yoghurt, cucumber yoghurt, two lots of white rice, pappadams and cheppattis, and, lingering in their bowls like limpet mines at low tide, three sauces, anonymous in the dark. Severe helpings of the lot were collected, we assure you.

Back at our table, the lawyer had begun to mumble about his lack of faith in his current client, and the Frog truckers, sure that they’d secured a large contract distributing some rising newspaper, were locked in a study of how to cover their fleet in case of rain.

The curries are the best in town. We struggled out a list of four other eating houses that specialise in this brand of tucker, and this outshines ’em all. Each of these curries is cooked in its own sauce – a rare pleasure in these days of the one or two sauce restaurant – and the side dishes are just as good. One of the Frog men, although sufficiently toughened by years in the bush to happily manage footy shorts and thongs in the cold heart of winter, is all tender inside, and he praised god for mild goat.

Chook liked the chicken. And we food reporters loved ’em all until our colourblind member, possessed of a great momentum and pleased with the heat and beer, moved mistakenly in the yellow light from his pungent pile of HOT GOAT through the delightful lemon pickle and straight into a significant stack of the Royal Oak’s chilli sauce. That momentum ensured that he’d downed a good rapidfire seven spoonsful before his stomach lining, or lack thereof, gave him notice that his eyes had failed him again: “Driver this is no goat curry you’re pumping down on us, this is your pure bushfire blend chilli sauce!”

Too late! The room was obviously a swirling mess to our chap – the Rules Of The Bar mirror had merged into the gingham tablecloths and tapestry wallpaper, the sweat poured down, the magnificent Victorian Olympian print on the dining wall developed a nasty Cecil B. de Mille animation, and our poor boy grabbed his notebook and twisted it into a gross mistake of pain and intense heat as our company broadcast silent shock and this chap prepared to die in Chilli Hell.

We have found it impossible to accurately gauge the importance of that notebook, but we are certain that it was the trigger that flung words to the lips of our asymmetrical South Yarra Sister. “Are you Sol Simeon?” she asked. The dyee had barely gasped an astonished but final “No!” when she followed up with a good old 1,2,3 “I can write!” and sure, she could write anything. That seemed to please the Frog director in footy shorts who rattled back: “Aaah, good! I gotta friend in Sydney who hasn’t heard from me in six years!”

Unperturbed, our writing lass offered us scandal, upper crust gossip, and the true story of the horse breeders who burned down the Morphetville grandstand before somebody notified her that the “funny meat” she was gobbling actually came off a goat. At that, she foundered in a thick bank of silence.

By that stage the chilli demons had slowed to a simmer in old colourblind’s blood, and the two of us fled to the social security of the front bar. It was still daytime. A sturdy barmaid pulled the taps there, the horizontal barroom lightbeams catching the beer and her topaz rings in one cool sweep. She blushed excellently, and managed perfectly the soft barrages of conversation that drifted over her bar. “Looks like the winter’s blown in ... ” “... Yeah ... ” “... Cold ... ” “... Cold ... ” “... Yeah ... ” “... Very cold ... ” “... Got a coat on ... ” “... Yeah ... ” “... Rolled me sleeves down ... ”

This hotel was on the verge of demolition until a bunch of bothered locals raised hell several years ago. We know little of its history prior to that, but it’s been a steady supplier of astoundingly inexpensive bottleshop bargains since then, and now, these curries ... look, this wonderfully strange old pubful of these people is enough. But add, just one lunchtime per week, this HOT GOAT and you’ve got one of the town’s warmest corners, with excellent folk, food and value. Just be very careful if you’re colourblind, and remember to book a table before you arrive.

FOOTNOTE:
The South Yarra Screamer turned out to be Ang Tolley, only recently (Nov 2008) married to her long-time partner, David Paxton, of Paxton’s Wines, McLaren Vale. Sol Simeon was the nom de plume of two Adelaide journalists, Jeff Turner and Tony Baker (both now deceased), who somehow managed to find 52 Adelaide restaurants a year to praise fulsomely in The Sunday Mail. The Royal Oak has gone from strength to strength. Its cuisine is now rather more varied than it was in those ginger days.

BIG BOB McLEAN: BACK UP THE HIGHLANDS

BIG BOB, THE BIONIC YETI-STEINER of McLEAN'S FARM ON MENGLER HILL ALREADY: BACCHUS SENDS THE HOLY LIGHT DOWN FROM ABOVE, THE HALO FLICKERS ON, THE WALL GOES THIN, TRANSPARENT, AND PEELS BACK, AND THEN, AGAINST THE ADVICE OF HIS HELLHOUND, THE GRINNING LOVELY BOY WALKS STRAIGHT TOWARD YOU ON HEALED KNEES ... JEEPERS, CREEPERS, WHERE'D HE GET THEM PEEPERS?

Squeaky McLean Resurrects As Big Bob
Barossadeutscher McLeinig Sheds Skin
Somebody Please Shout Him A Kilt!
by PHILIP WHITE - a version of this story was in The Adelaide Independent on 13 MAR 09

Let’s face it. If I were Big Bob McLean’s knees, I would have given up too. Not just from carrying his mighty frame around the hills and gullies of city and field the wide world round ... it’s the sheer number of drinks that needed support.

Anyway, they did wear out, and McLean shrunk.

Not in girth, mind you. McLean’s equator is constant. What altered was the altitude. As those poor legs approached serious kiltspreader bandy, McLean got shorter than me: a difficult thing for an old bouncer to digest. McLean did big time door at the Redlegs Club and The Old Lion when he was a lift electrician and I had spiky hair and ripple soles. Suddenly he was PR at Orlando, and somehow he got Bacchus to tell MD Guenther Prass to send him to live in Sydney to promote Pol Roger champagne, which he did so thoroughly that for a time there in Australia’s brash biz gizzard, PR in fact became Pol Roger, and that front bit of McLean’s vast equatorial zone was known as Pol Pot.

McLean nearly squashed Sydney, which only intensified its thirst for PR.

Sir (Arthur) Roden Cutler VC AK KCMG KCVO CBE, Governor of New South Wales, was awarded the Victoria Cross for his matter-of-fact valour in Syria, which cost him a leg. He was a 'go in do it' sort of fellow; a dignified humble man who enjoyed intelligent, honest and hearty company, especially if there was good red about. Sir Roden was accorded a State Funeral on Thursday 28th February, 2002. He left a big hole at the top of Australian living history. This photograph is from Wine And Spirit Buying Guide, DEC 84, which was edited by me. I reckon I may have taken this photograph. If it's yours, please correct me. Sir Roden was at least 6'6". Bob was big.

That was a long time ago. McLean went on to wear his knees out kneeling on them during his Petaluma years, then using them as a sort of PR forklift in the St Hallett epoch. By the time him and Wilma put McLean's Farm on the top of Mengler’s Hill in the high Barossa Ranges he was shorter than me. Which is handy getting through a fence with a shotgun.

To make up for this lowering, McLean, with Wilma, Sarah and Adam, added 500 metres by planting 6,144 vines in the tough sandstone and schist of that speccy ridgetop, way up in the weather and the yaccas. Dry grown bush vines. Riesling, grenache, mataro and shiraz. Nuts. Wilma runs it more or less along the lines of bio-D, and uses her fat-tailed sheep for weed control and fertiliser. The vines are in their seventh year now, and have spent half of that time in drought. Poor little buggers.

Last summer, which was bad enough, when we sat there on the winery apron, gazing reverentially through the heat at that vinous garland on the ridge, we agreed that something was keeping those vines alive. We took a sledgehammer, and knocked a predominant piece of the vineyard off. In a bucket of water for a while, the weight of that grey stone increased by almost half.

This was something I’d learnt at Mountadam, whilst drying the dishes with David Wynn in the cliff top eyrie he built there with Patricia. The actual bedrock loomed in a huge outcrop outside the kitchen window, and through most of the year, he pointed out, you could watch the water oozing from it. That whole long ridge is ancient seabeds, and the sandstone’s like a sponge.

McLean’s rocks held so much water through the last summer that it wasn’t weeds that needed munching: the vineyard suddenly sprouted thousands of red gums.

BOB McLEAN IN THE SHADE OF HIS NEW WINERY APRON IN A VERY HOT VINTAGE: THE CRACK WAS GOOD

I was scared to visit or call this year. But,you know, things being what t hey are, McLean reckons his crop might be down twenty or thirty per cent or so. The vines look quite healthy; even happy. Some leaves yellowed in the heat; they fell. Others took over.

Make an appointment to visit and buy and sit there looking up at that vineyard and drink it: the first vintages are beginning to ooze out of bottle, and both red blend and riesling are exciting indicators of many joys to come, hell or high water.

Some of McLean’s wines are from grapes around about the Eden Valley and Kalimna, on the Barossa floor. Some are blends of that with some Mengler’s fruit. And some, the barr-Eden wines, are off that amazing vineyard, 100%.

The barr-Eden grenache, shiraz and mataro blend is a sultry old oak and wild yeast raven: about as farm gate as you can get. McLean’s cruisy nonchalance on the old basket press had impressed me during its manufacture: the mighty left arm disinterestedly winding the ratchet down – a job due two men - the right switching twixt cigar and glass. It is the fruit of all that you see: McLean’s lovely shed full of barrels, which has the dry gizzards of a library growing within it, as wood panels, books, and the consequent knowledge are the best insulator. Open the wall, and you’ve got that wild, crazy vinegarden on the hill.

And the riesling? With Col Forbes’ help, it’s a rarity of true blue beauty. Like the original Orlando Steingartens. Go, sit, buy.

What I meant to say was McLean’s got new hinges in his knees. A year with the quacks and he’s Big Bob again. Whew! He’s no good short.

BOB AND WILMA McLEAN'S VINEYARD ON MENGLER'S HILL. IT'S TWILIGHT, AND WE'RE LOOKING DUE NORTH FROM THE WINERY DOOR. SEE HOW THE LIGHT'S BRIGHTER IN THE WEST, WHICH IS LEFT. THE VINES ROLL ON OVER ANOTHER RIDGE OR TWO. THIS WILL BE A LEGENDARY VINEYARD.