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12 hours ago
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Outside a marquee, across from the clock tower, a crowd is gathering for the Stanthorpe apple and grape harvest festival’s apple peeling contest. Well, contest might be an exaggeration.
Kerrie Stratford, 65, is the undisputed champion of apple peeling. There is no competition. She has won 21 titles at the Queensland town’s biannual festival, claiming a shelf full of trophies including one tasteful prize that is a rock with a peeler on top of it.
It doesn’t stop a table of 10 competitors from trying though. Yet no one will admit to secretly practising at home. Nonchalance is apparently the only acceptable attitude towards competitive apple peeling.
Especially Stratford. “No, no, no,” she says. “I’m just relaxed,” she adds, without really looking it.
This morning she will attempt to break her own record. The pressure is on. The peelers are on the table. The apples are ready. Fingers are being flexed.
The first contest is the fastest to peel an apple. Stratford has held this record, too. “I held the fastest and longest, both titles, for quite a while,” she says. “But as I’ve gotten older my speed isn’t there any more. Arthritis is coming in.”
Russell Wantling, the festival’s president, decides he has to stand up to employ the full force of the peeler. A cookery writer, Kim McCosker, wins; she is there to judge the “prestigious” apple pie competition later in the morning.
There is a tremor and a shake as Stratford clutches the peeler for the second contest, the longest peel. And they’re off. A flurry of action. They have 10 minutes; the countdown begins. This is clearly an art. Stratford is not just peeling thin lines of skin, she is taking part of the flesh so the peel won’t break.
Around the table there are cries of disappointment as other peels break. Stratford seems to be going agonisingly slowly. With seven minutes to go she is still near the top of her apple. This comes down to the millimetre, to the second. Oh, the suspense. Time seems to expand and slow down.
“My fingers are cramping bad,” she says through gritted teeth. Down to the count and she has miraculously reached the bottom of the apple.
Out comes the tape measure. Stratford has not broken her 2018 record of 6.1m. Today the peel is a mere 3.9m (nearly 13ft).
John Bruschi from Toowomba has given her “a run for my money”. He has, he admits, been coming to the festival for years and has been watching her technique closely.
The tremors were not nerves, it turns out. Stratford has battled through serious illness and pain to be here defending her title. She has, she tells Guardian Australia, the rare Dercum’s disease, “one of the 10 most horrible diseases you could ever get”, as well as polyclonal B-cell lymphocytosis. “I’m a ticking timebomb.” There is no respite from the pain. “I’ve got a genetic mutation that stops pain meds working.”
Stratford lives on acreage outside town with eight chooks, a red heeler and a short-billed corella so foul-mouthed that, when he was surrendered to wildlife authorities, no one else would take him. “If I drop something on the floor he calls me a ‘cockhead’.” She doesn’t cook or peel anything much at home any more, since her husband died 10 years ago. “I haven’t touched anything in the house from when died, everything is exactly the way he left it, with a big layer of dust.”
In the scheme of things the champion apple peeler has more pressing concerns than yet another trophy. “You don’t take it too seriously, there are more serious things to think about.”
The Stanthorpe apple and grape harvest festival is now in its 60th year. On a fertile plateau, high on the Great Dividing Range in Queensland’s granite belt, it’s one of the country’s biggest harvest festivals. It brings in $20m and an estimated 70,000 people over 10 energetic days.
This year’s festivities kicked off with an Italian long lunch for 600 people.
It was an Italian Catholic priest, Father Jerome Davadi, who started wine-making in Stanthorpe in the 1870s. As tin mining waned he grew grapes for altar wine.
During the second world war, Stanthorpe housed Italian prisoners who were billeted on local orchards and farms. Today their heritage runs deep in the vineyards.
Asked if all this generational intermingling has produced family feuds, Samantha Wantling, the festival’s vice-president, says diplomatically: “We all have apple and grape stories. We live and breathe it.”
