Put your faith in cheeses

Wednesday, 18th February 2009

Sir Les Patterson celebrates Australia’s under-recognised talent for the other kind of culture

Cheese is my thing. Whenever I’m on a long-distance flight at the Australian taxpayer’s expense, jetting from arts conference to film festival, I only have to run the finely tuned Patterson nostrils over my fingernails to know, pretty well to the exact year, what fine old cheese I’ve been fondling. You see, readers, I put Australian cheese on the map.

But, I hear you asking, what’s a bloke like Sir Lesley Colin Patterson — former Australian cultural attaché to the court of St James, father of the Australian film industry, and internationally recognised authority on good-looking ceiling inspectors, fine wines and king-size mentholated filters — got to do with Tasmanian camembert and its ilk? It’s logical, cheese-lovers: look up in the dictionary under ‘culture’ and you’ll find ‘cultivation of living material in prepared nutrient media’. Now, if that’s not what you spread on a biscuit and drop down your throat with a nice port after dinner, the Pope’s a Jew. Cheese is a culture and, let’s face it, when the first pint of milk went off in the olden days and some crinolined housewife discovered a bottle of gorgonzola in her fridge, a new taste sensation was born. I’ve been sitting on the Australian Cheese Board for many years, and I’ve got all the facts at my fingertips.

Cheese came to Australia with the convicts and in those days it was the poor man’s diet. Little did those scallywags who laid the foundation stones for our magnificent island continent know that the mousetrap they were munching between floggings, stone-breaking and unnatural relations with each other would later become the refined, taste-tantalising morsel that connoisseurs sweep into their supermarket trolleys on a daily basis.

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