Farmers Union Iced Coffee
One of the products that survived the deregulation of Australian dairy industry is the justly famous Farmers Union Iced Coffee.
This stuff is pure liquid gold, albeit brown, and in South Australia it holds the number one place in the 600 ml drink lineup, much to the chagrin of Coca-Cola.
Supported by a witty advertsing campaing that sometimes borders on sexist (the product is, after all, targetted at blokes, and blokes on building sites or in scrap metal yards at that), National Foods continues to sell the stuff hand over fist under its original name.
Previous attempts by South Australia’s other major dairy interest to make a dent in the market share of Farmers Union Iced Coffee failed miserably, with their product going through multiple name changes (DV Iced Coffee, DV-MAX etc) before they ended up settling with the rather bland ‘Oak’ name. Why Oak? Well, that’s deregulation for you—it’s what they call it interstate, so when Dairy Vale was acquired, that’s what the milk lines were renamed. “Oak Iced Coffee” doesn’t really grab you now, does it?
Perhaps the loyalty of customers to the original Iced Coffee is best demonstrated by an anecdote told to me by a friend who used to work in a car parts plant in the south of Adelaide.
The plant canteen accepted a special deal whereby the fridges were stocked exclusively with Dairy Vale’s Iced Coffee product. The employees, however, avoided the stuff like the plague, and after a week not a single carton had been sold. So the canteen tried to sweeten the deal for the employees by giving away a free carton with each carton bought. Apparently one person did take them up on this offer, but at the end of the lunch break two cartons of iced coffee were left behind on a table. One carton was almost full, the other had not even been opened.
Farmers Union Iced Coffee made a quick return.
Then there’s the story of the SA couple who were getting married in California who arranged for a crate of the stuff to be shipped to the wedding reception. That story may be apocryphal but drink a carton of the stuff and you may understand the basis for it. [CL]
Films
Between the early 1970’s and the late 1990’s, South Australia was a seething hotbed of film production, principly the result of the Dunstan era’s investment (and faith in) the South Australian Film Corporation. The SAFC was to produce a large number of quality films that served to put South Australian cinematography—and Australian film-making, for that matter, onto the global stage.The early 1970’s saw Jack Thompson making an appearance in the film “Sunday Too Far Away”, a movie about sheep, shearers and shearing sheds. Soon afterwards, the SAFC turned to the works of the South Australian author Colin Thiele, with the release of perhaps the most famous South Australian film of all time, “Storm Boy”. This “rites of passage” movie did very well at the cinema both locally and internationally, with the lead role (played ably by a young Greg Rowe) usurped only by the part played by three pelicans—Mr Proud, Mr Ponder and Mr Percival.
Greg Rowe’s movie career was pretty well over when the SAFC adaptation of “Blue Fin”, another Colin Thiele book, was released a few years later, with Greg playing the son of a tuna fishing boat owner/operator.
Mr Proud, Mr Ponder and Mr Percival had a much longer career ahead of them, as they moved into “Marineland” after the filming of “Storm Boy” and were there until pretty well near the end of that once august institution in the late 1980’s. At least, the tour guides at Marineland said it was the pelicans from Storm Boy. They could have been pulling a swifty on the paying public, who would really not have known the difference anyway…
1980 saw another SAFC blockbuster released—Breaker Morant. The story of an officer who had been scapegoated for war crimes committed during the Boer war, or alternatively the story of the trial and sentence of a loose cannon (take your pick according to your opinions of the events), “Breaker Morant” was filmed in Burra. The choice of location simple - Burra and its surrounds were as devoid of trees as the African veldt where the film was to be set, though whereas the African veldt was clear due to lack of rain, Burra was clear due to lack of forethought and overzealous clearing of trees for firewood to feed the hungry furnaces of the Burra Burra mine.
It also means that any school camp that goes to Burra, ostensibly to explore the mining history, is subjected to a forced viewing of “Breaker Morant” by the local progress committee during their stay. If they are really unlucky, they’ll be herded into the hall that doubled as the court-room in the movie to watch the movie. “Oh wow—Jack Thompson stood here!”
Littered through the successes, there were some flops. “The Time Guardian”, featuring Tom Burlinson and Carrie Fisher (yes, from “Star Wars”) was a lame attempt at linking a science fiction movie involving time travel with aboriginal dream-time stories, while “Incident at Raven’s Gate”, a thriller/horror film, mercifully never made it to the cinema. A friend of mine who worked in the SAFC at the time had a video copy of the latter film that I saw some time later, and I have to say that it is one of only two movies I have ever fallen asleep while watching. And this was the middle of the afternoon.
And who can forget the filming of the airplane crash used in “The Survivor”, which took several weeks to setup on a vacant block of land at Panorama, only to take 30 minutes to be totally destroyed by fire for the film. Over two thousand people flocked to see the filming of the crash sequence, which was around one thousand more than the number of people who actually paid to go and see the film a year later.
But the successes still seem to outweigh the flops. The most recent major film to have been done in Adelaide was the 1996 award winning “Shine”, featuring Geoffrey Rush playing the role of chief fruitcake. This production launched Rush into the big time and also skyrocketed the career of its director, Scott Hicks. While Hicks has seen the big time and produced and directed films overseas since then, the post-production editing has always been done back in his home town, Adelaide.
By this time though, the SAFC was no longer directly involved in production of films, prefering to take more of a consultative role and sit back and help in the planning and execution of them. [CL]
Free settlers
South Australia was the only state established by free settlers, not as a convict settlement. This was a matter of pride until people began researching their family trees and it suddenly became glam to have a convict ancestor.The fact that the only state that wasn't founded by criminals is the state now famed for serial killings, child abductions and the slaughter of small furry zoo animals neatly disproves the theory that a predisposition to criminal activity is genetic. [HV]
Fritz
A bland luncheon meat, possibly derived from pork, and sold encased in wide, sausage-shaped plastic tubes. Usually eaten in sandwiches (composed of fritz, margarine, tomato sauce and white bread), or occasionally fried, like a Spamburger. Butchers would often give children free circular slices of fritz to eat while their mothers placed their orders.I have an uncle who once got through three-quarters of a tube of dog food, thinking it was fritz. He told me he couldn't taste any difference. [CG]
Frog cakes
South Australia’s culinary icons—pie floaters, fritz and frog cakes—share one distinguishing characteristic: no adult with any taste would want to eat them.
Frog cakes are described by Balfours as ‘delicious sponge cakes topped with a special butter cream and enrobed in colour fondant’. The grotesque little amphibian faces would leer at me every time I walked past Balfours in Rundle Mall, but neither I nor anyone I know was ever tempted to try one. [HV]
Fruit fly
If you drive into South Australia on a major highway, expect to be stopped and searched by guards at the border. Don’t worry, they’re not interested in your stash of cocaine, the AK47s or that hostage bound and gagged in the boot—they’re looking for your fruit.South Australia is the only state certified free of fruit fly, which is vital for overseas exports. A fruit fly outbreak spells disaster for both the South Australian fruit industry and local newsreaders, who are compelled to repeat the phrase ‘fruit fly free’ numerous times. [HV]