Kangaroo Island Olives

As the sun sets over Investigator Strait, Dan and Sue Pattingale use the dying light to harvest their crop. There's an old saying in this business, vines are planted for your kids, olives for your grandchildren. But Dan and Sue have done this for themselves, thought the kids are already chipping in with some unwanted help. Just over the rise is Stokes Bay on the North coast of Kangaroo Island and it's here that the only olive oil producers on the island have set about establishing their long term dream. "About six years ago were looking for something to grow and that's when we decided on growing olives. So we've been involved in it for that long, And we've been producing olive oil for five years using feral olives growing around the island." For many years this family covered every highway and byway of KI in search of wild olives a fruit which made it's way here along with another Mediterranean import. "They probably came with the Liquarian bee which has been here for about one hundred and fifteen years." "So with Italians who came onto the island?" "Well I'd say Liquria is in Italy...Italy is the second largest producer of olives in the world, so it's logical to put the two and two together. But I have been told that there are some trees at American that were put in about a hundred and thirty years ago. So they have been here a long time."

Dan's now planted two and a half thousand trees of his own and this year's harvest is his first commercial crop. For this former shearer, the trip to Peter Maroudas' press in Thebarton is the culmination of both a career change and years of hope and hard work. The olives are first washed and then crushed, stones and all. The pulp is then kneaded under intense heat before the juice is extracted in a cetrifugal separator. It's a process which is being repeated more and more throughout the country. "In the last three of four years there have been close to three million olive trees planted in Australia. So in a few years time there's going to be a lot of good Australian olive oil on the market." But you don't need to wait that long for Dan Pattingale's. His North Coast Olive Oil is available now and it's certainly fresh. "Virgin Oil is oil that has been just squeezed from the fruit, it's a fruit juice and nothing else happens to it. There are no solvents used in extraction it really is just squeezed out of the fruit." North Coast Olive Oil and other lines from the Kangaroo Island Olive Oil Company can be found in the Central Market.

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