South Australia is called “The Festival State,” for good reason. It’s got the Adelaide Cabaret Festival, the Adelaide Festival of Ideas, the Barossa Vintage Festival, the Glendi Greek Festival, the Glenelg Jazz Festival, the Adelaide Festival and, don’t miss this one, the Adelaide Fringe Festival. As visitors to the area it’s easy to see that South Australia has a lot to celebrate. We spent the few days we had in South Australia in and around the area that marks the start of The Great Australian Bight. The phrase doesn’t describe the geography alone.
Adelaide Hills and the Mighty Murray
Jump into a car and head east on the Southeast Freeway, and you’ll soon find yourself at the higher elevations of the Adelaide Hills. As the pastoral landscape slips away out the window, keep an eye out for the difference in the vegetation as you move into the rain shadow where, on average, annual precipitation is only 12 - 14 inches as compared to the 30 or so inches that is typical on the other side. Despite the dryness, the countryside abounds with farms, wineries, and orchards in almost equal 
proportion. Our travels took us to several different locations including Murray Bridge, home of T&R Pastoral, which is one of South Australia’s largest producers of beef and lamb products. Chances are if you have had Australian lamb in the U.S. it might have come from T&R (they process 6,500 lamb a day).
Murray Bridge is located, wait for it, at a bridge over Australia’s answer to the Mississippi: the mighty Murray. This is also a fitting description of our peripatetic guide, Mr. Murray Hird. Murray is with the Government of the Northern Territory and, while you may be wondering why our guide in South Australia was from the “Top End” (Australian slang for the Northern Territory), as it turns out Murray used to live in the Adelaide area. He’s been a key figure in Australia for Taste Down Under, primarily responsible for sponsoring Adriel’s trip this year and, for the 2004 competition, working with us to identify partners and sponsorship opportunities in the Northern Territory and South Australia. Beyond that, Murray is a very nice guy and despite the fact that he organized about 20 meetings a day for us we were happy to be in his capable hands.
Further down the road from Murray Bridge, at the top of hilly Sneyd Road near Mt. Jagged, Murray took us to meet Dan and Krystyna McCaul, owners of Alexandrina Cheese Company. Using old-fashioned processes, Dan hand-makes Cheddar, Gouda, and Edam style cheese. The cheddars are signature Australian cheeses and the ones we tasted were about six months in age and were a rich yellow in color, sharp but not too sharp, nice and compressed. Following the old tradition, the cheddar has a cloth-wax rind, which assists perfect aging by maintaining appropriate moisture levels within the cheese. Dan’s Edam and Gouda should not be confused with the average buffet-dinner product. Dan was proud to show off the holes in these cheeses, a mark of a superior product and related some stories to us of Mt. Jagged locals, European émigrés that drive long distances to buy these cheeses. And because Alexandrina is also a dairy, we got to taste their cream (a proper double cream won’t come out of the container, even if you turn it upside down), sour cream, and their non-homogenized milk, which reminded David of his childhood when the milkman would deliver milk to the family home and the first one to get hold of a bottle could pour it out without shaking thereby getting a large plop of fresh cream in the center of one’s cereal bowl. We also picked up some marinated Feta, a perennial Aussie favorite.
Dan is a third-generation cheese maker and Krystyna’s family has been in the dairy business for over fifty years. For those of you who love great cheese, the fact that these two have created Alexandrina Cheese Company is definitely proof (like basil and tomato) of the existence of God.
Port Lincoln on the Eyre Peninsula
There are two primary ways for tourists to get to Port Lincoln: car or plane. The drive is a good eight hours (because one must travel up one side of the Spencer Gulf and down the Eyre Peninsula on the other side), the flight a mere 40 minutes. We elected to take to the air and arrived in Port Lincoln just as the sun was coming up on a cold Thursday morning. Our regional plane service was with Rex Air. Almost your usual turbo-prop outfit except for the lamb’s wool seat covers on every seat. Very Australian, very comfortable. Murray stayed in Adelaide, so our host for the day was Des King, the Executive Director of Food Adelaide. Food Adelaide is owned by a group of Adelaide food and beverage companies that have gotten together to market their products globally. While not every product is destined for the U.S., many will be and – advance notice – they are GOOD. Among other things, on our Port Lincoln itinerary were visits to several aquaculture farms.
Our first stop was at Australian Southern Seafood, an oyster and abalone farm just outside of Port Lincoln. Aquaculture is not the world’s most glamorous activity, but we came to find out that working with oysters and abalone has its amorous moments. Our tour began in the oyster “sex room,” but it wasn’t about mood lighting or Barry White on the loud speakers. The work in the “sex room” results in the cultivation of 20 million spat each cycle. These Pacific Oysters end up in Coffin Bay where the waters are pristine, and where the nutrients come from upwelling Antarctic waters and not from run off (there are no rivers on the Eyre Peninsula). They, quite simply, are some of the sweetest, fattest, yummiest oysters we have ever had.
From the “sex room,” we went to the settling pond then saw where Australian Southern grows its own algae to feed both oysters and abalone in their early stages of growth. But abalone, unlike oysters, do not continue to be filter feeders as they mature. Abalone graze for their food (think cattle). In an aquaculture setting, this is approximated by feeding the abalone pellets of food, which we had a chance to see when Adam (our guide) took us over to the large, barn-like structures that housed the abalone raceways.
For anyone who is familiar with aquaculture, the term “raceway“ will make sense. It is typically a long, rectangular structure used to house fish, abalone, or whatever is being farmed. A continuous flow of water is maintained in the raceway, keeping the water at optimal levels necessary to ensure healthy aquatic life, and also to flush out the solids that accumulate in the enclosure due to feeding and pooping. For the abalone, the raceways were essentially long, shallow troughs suspended on a series of poles, probably ten to a pole. What it really reminded us of was the scene from the movie, “The Matrix,” in which Keanu Reeves’ character, “Mr. Anderson/Neo” finally sees the true nature of his existence as a human source of energy for the megalithic computer world: row upon row upon row upon row upon row… You get the idea. The abalone are housed in a semi-dark to dark environment, illuminated only by the light that filters in through the roof beams and the headlights worn by the farm workers who tend to the animals. These little creatures are nocturnal feeders, so to grow them faster the entire facility is kept in a constant state of semi-gloom. The juveniles are small, about the size of a pinky-fingernail while those that are ready to be harvested are the size of a small child’s fist. Adam was kind enough to grab one for us and give Des and David a sample. Mmmm, raw abalone at 8:30am. (I think we’ve eaten way more raw seafood for breakfast on this trip than, well, than ever.)
Despite the semi-darkness, the place has a kind of a charm and cheeriness to it; perhaps because the crew keep the radios on. They were, however, non-committal about the abalone’s preference in music (perhaps a secret ingredient of the grow-out process), which got us thinking about what would if one day an abalone realized it didn’t like the music and, just as in “The Matrix,” a little abalone Mr. Anderson awoke from his state of J.Lo-induced twilight dreaming to find out he was just one of thousands of abalone being raised simply to….
Sorry. If you have a chance to have a spot of lunch while in Port Lincoln, make sure you try some of the local delicacies. For us that included Coffin Bay Oysters, Hiramasa (Yellowtail Kingfish), Southern Bluefin Tuna, Mussels, Scallops, Eastern King Prawns, and Cuttlefish.
Our day in Port Lincoln ended with a quick visit to one of the two wineries in the area. Boston Bay Winery is located on a windswept hillside about halfway between the airport and the city proper. Standing in the tasting room, you can see out over the Riesling vines into the harbor beyond. It’s a spectacular view and the Boston Bay offerings are amply impressive. Our top pick: the Riesling Mistelle, a style you don’t seen often these days. Boston Bay’s version of this fortified grape spirit is aged in oak and has clean citrus undertones and a gorgeous peachy-golden color.
Then it was back to the airport and a quick hop across the bay to Adelaide just as the sun was setting. Thanks, Des, for a great trip to Port Lincoln and thanks Murray, for being a mighty good guide.
