On a winter Monday 20 years ago photographer Will Swan and I had been working the morning from hell.
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We’d been to three `jobs’ (interviews) in three hours when we arrived at an Exton dairy farm.
Will lugged 15kg of camera bag over his shoulder and we walked through some winter slush to a ‘50s fibro and iron house that had been turned into a farm shop for Heidi Dairy.
Two years earlier, in 1990, I had tasted my first farm butter at Heidi but in 1992, Will and I were visiting to learn about cheese making from Swiss farmer and cheesemaker, Frank Marchand.
The startling cold sunshine did nothing to warm our feet as we traipsed through paddocks of winter-wet grass down to Marchand’s little piece of Switzerland in NW Tasmania – a grey and white, concrete block, cheese factory.
The Marchand family ran their dairy herd on rich Exton pasture, and were turning their herd’s high-fat milk into fresh farm butter and Swiss style cheeses.
The cheese room was a photographer’s dream. Heavy timber shelves with row-upon-smelly-row of 40kg wheels of gruyere, raclette and tilsit cheese – as it evolved, wheels of fortune – to be hand turned and wiped every day until just ripe.
I’d interviewed cheese makers before – first Jon and Lyndall Healy at Pyengana about their cheddar dreams and just down the road from the Marchand’s at Elizabeth Town, Michael Bennett of Ashgrove, who told me how each and every evening he had a `fingernail’ of his favourite blue cheese with an apple before he went to bed.
``A fingernail?’’
``That’s all you ever need, that’s enough to give you the taste.’’
At Exton in 1992, we made our way from the cheesery back to the fibro farmhouse/shop front and were about to say our goodbyes.
``You have to have lunch, don’t you?’’ Frank Marchand said.
Please note, contrary to a popular myth, newspaper journalists and photographers were never offered hospitality. It’s true. Regularly used and abused, but never fed. Just saying.
Spread out on the long kitchen table were cold cuts of salami, raclette, gruyere and tilsit cheeses, salads, breadsticks and wine. We stayed and got tutorial on how smart Europeans do business.
The quality of the Marchand family’s cheeses became the stuff of legend and eventually the Heidi brand was sold to the multi-national Lion, based in Burnie.
I heard Frank Marchand retired somewhere down the Tamar River. His dream was to buy a boat `go fishing’.
Last week I bought some Heidi Tilsit for old time’s sake.
Once home, when the cheese came to room temperature, I broke the knob end from a stale breadstick and unwrapped the cheese.
The alchemy of fine cheese making, like fine wine, means you really can smell and taste its history. When I put my nose to the cheese I could smell it’s big history.
The Tilsit smell was all musky oak with a shard of ammonia. I was transported to an oaky, Swiss winter barn where the last of summer’s nutty hay was set, hard, into a rich jersey cream.
A few years after the Heidi story I interviewed a young, French cheesemaker who was holidaying in Launceston. From north-east France, he was heartbroken that inspectors from the European Union had ordered his family’s centuries-old cheese caves be sprayed with PVC for hygiene reasons.
Fortunately, Tasmania did not have to become part of the European Union to enjoy the fruits of European hospitality and hard work as our world-famous salmon, wine and cheese industries attest.
Even more fortunately, Tasmania’s Europeans chose to stay.