Big Cheese comes to Battery Point

It’s gouda brie a good day

This intriguing story was written by Ellie, a young Battery Point resident

It was an early Saturday morning, the day that the cheese gods blessed us. The summer mornings were getting darker, although the sky was still a bright shade of lilac. My mum, my brother James and I were on our way to swimming, bright and early at the time of around 5:30 am. As we neared the final bend to the aquatic centre, my mum spotted a black crate, with packaging paper strewn on the road. It was quite large – around the size of the cardboard crates you sometimes get at the grocery store with your fresh fruit.

After she dropped us off, my mum walked down the hill to the part of the highway where the crate was situated to remove it from the road. She was concerned that it could pose a road hazard as the traffic increased later in the morning.

On arriving home, I opened the fridge to find not one, not two, but four wheels of Brie, each the size of a small bicycle tire! Pulling open the cheese drawer, I found around 30 small artisan cheeses, each with a price tag.

It turned out that the crate on the side of the road had been full of cheese, still cold from wherever it had come from. We presumed it came from the store that shall remain nameless, perhaps off a truck on its way to deliver stock early in the morning*. Eager to investigate, my older sibling pulled out the calculator, and using the average price from Woolies, we estimated the whole crate to be worth over a thousand dollars in cheese.

Of course, we did contact the store that shall remain nameless. We knew that they probably couldn’t sell it due to losing the chain of safety for their food, but we were interested to see what they would say. My brother called them up, and emerged from the phone call, slightly bemused. Apparently, the truck transporting the cheese had a broken door and the person filling it up had failed to mention this to the driver. Every hill they went up, a box fell out – meat, chocolate, vegetable and fresh produce and, lucky for us, cheese. They couldn’t sell any of the lost produce of course, although it would have been a funny story if, at the store, customers asked about the shortage of cheese in the deli. It would have been interesting to follow our noses, and perhaps collect the other boxes of mystery food along the highway. Hopefully, other people picked them up and shared the contents.

Now came the problem of what to do with the cheese. So, over the course of the next week or so, every friend, family member and acquaintance received a heavy slice of Brie and a couple of artisan cheeses. One of my brother’s friends even received a whole wheel, much to his delight. We were trying to send all the cheese out fast, telling everyone to whom we gave a portion to share it with others as much as they could.

We realised Charles would be a great person to give some of it to, as the head of the great community of Battery Point. As we thought, he did a wonderful job of sharing the cheese with many of the generous volunteers in the suburb. We hope everyone who received the cheese enjoyed it and finds this story humorous.

*Disclaimer: Any similarity to a particular food provider is purely coincidental.