Latest news with #McGavin
Hindustan Times
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- Hindustan Times
'Love it or hate it...': What Shooter McGavin ‘said' about Happy Gilmore 2 reviews
It has been thirty years almost since Adam Sandler's Happy Gilmore managed to beat Christopher McDonald's Shooter McGavin at golf, but Netflix's Happy Gilmore 2, sees the actor reprise his role as the pro golfer. The profile on X, going by the name Shooter McGavin, has had interactions with Fred Couples, the pro golfer who made a cameo in Happy Gilmore 2. (AP) While Happy Gilmore 2 packed a hefty dose of nostalgia and peppered the story with cameos – all designed to take fans down the memory lane – the movie apparently got mixed reviews. While some loved the memories it brought back, others felt the sequel failed to live up to the mark. Amid contending narratives online, a profile calling itself Shooter McGavin has shared its opinions on Happy Gilmore 2 reviews. What Shooter McGavin said about Happy Gilmore 2 reviews? The profile with McGavin's name shared an image with the text 'Hate me or love me, you watched.' The profile captioned it saying 'How I feel about all the Happy Gilmore 2 reviews I'm seeing.' Notably, McGavin is not a real person and is just a character portrayed by McDonald. However, the profile seems to have had very real interactions with actual golfing legends. Fred Couples who has a cameo in Adam Sandler's movie, tagged the X profile named after McGavin and wrote 'Welcome to the Gold Jacket Club,' adding, 'Your Gold Jacket will look good next to the @PresidentsCup trophy!' To this, the X profile named after McGavin replied 'Thank you Fred. The Presidents Cup would look great in my trophy room.' Notably, the Gold Jacket was something McGavin had coveted and lost in the first Happy Gilmore movie. During the filming of the sequel, star Adam Sandler took the chance to give the actor the gold jacket. 'Shooter finally gets what's coming to him,' Sandler wrote when posting the clip of him handing the jacket to McDonald. The profile named after McGavin also shared this video, remarking 'For the record… This was just Gilmore returning to Shooter what was rightfully his.'
Vancouver Sun
29-06-2025
- Business
- Vancouver Sun
Foreign national trying to fight B.C. wildfires caught up in red tape
With wildfire season in full swing, an immigration consultant says there is a simple way to end the shortage of qualified people to fight wildfires: Let existing, trained firefighters who are non-residents stay once their work permits expire by letting them choose a path to permanent residency. Jennie McCahill is representing Irish national Jake McGavin, a team leader with a wildfire-fighting contractor called Carmanah Wildfire , which is based in Sidney but has firefighting crews spread all over B.C. 'Carmanah are putting time, energy and resources into training young guys that are here on temporary permits, that have no option to stay long-term,' McCahill said. 'This means (Carmanah) go around the washing machine and are constantly in new-recruit training mode when they could have continuity of a trained and experienced team, which help with prevention and active deployment.' Start your day with a roundup of B.C.-focused news and opinion. By signing up you consent to receive the above newsletter from Postmedia Network Inc. A welcome email is on its way. If you don't see it, please check your junk folder. The next issue of Sunrise will soon be in your inbox. Please try again Interested in more newsletters? Browse here. Carmanah owner Nick Hill was unavailable for comment. McGavin, who turns 29 in September, is in his third season fighting wildfires in B.C. He's been lucky to have received a pair of two-year work permits, but the second is soon to run out. Team leader is a position that requires training and seniority, but it isn't a position that's considered skilled by the federal government, so McGavin has no avenue to permanent residency. He wants to stay in Canada not only because he's fallen in love with B.C. 'The main reason I want to stay in Canada is so that I can keep firefighting,' McGavin said. 'Like Nick, I've invested a lot of time and energy and money into getting myself to the level of skill and experience of firefighting that I'm currently at, and I want to take it as far as I can. 'Given that Canada has welcomed me in as a newcomer, I want to give back to the country and the province as significantly as I can. Unfortunately, Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada does not recognize wildland firefighting as skilled work.' While several positions in firefighting are considered skilled — including municipal, airport, industrial and shipboard firefighters — forest firefighters are lumped into a category called silviculture and forestry . Defining what qualifies as skilled is determined by something called the National Occupational Classification System (NOC), a statistical framework of more than 500 occupations. The system categorizes those occupations into skilled or non-skilled following a set of criteria, according to the federal Employment and Social Development Department , which administers the system with Statistics Canada. 'The government recognizes the critical role that all firefighters, including forest and wildland firefighters, play in keeping Canadians safe,' a spokeswoman for the department said in an emailed reply to questions. 'Forest/wildland firefighters … are classified together with occupations associated with natural resources, including forestry workers, and with occupations that generally require a high school diploma or several weeks of on-the-job training or other types of relevant experience.' The categories of firefighters that qualify as skilled are classified differently, together with occupations 'that generally require more formal education, such as the completion of a two-to-three-year post secondary education program or the completion of an apprenticeship training of two to five years,' the spokeswoman said. 'While forest/wildland firefighters share similar duties with firefighters, there are differences, particularly in the fields of study and level of education required, as well as in employment and experience requirements.' One example that illustrates these differences, she said, is the increasing number of medical-related calls — 48 per cent of all calls in 2023 — placed to urban fire departments in Canada, making emergency medical training key for municipal firefighters, but not to wildfire firefighters. McCahill has filed for something called a significant-benefit work permit with Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada. Known as a C10, the permit is granted to foreign nationals who demonstrate their work brings 'significant social, cultural or economic benefit to Canada.' 'I am trying to find a workaround for the problem,' she said. 'This is my first test case.' Carmanah said they have guys that they have trained over the years that would love to come back. 'In a scenario where there are trained and experienced wildfire fighters within Canada, who not only already have the knowledge and familiarity with the work, but also with the company they work for and their fellow crewmates, it is not just beneficial, but absolutely imperative to use internal Canadian firefighting resources wherever and whenever possible, including the prioritization of experienced firefighters who are currently active and available within Canada,' she said. A spokesman for Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada said the federal government is committed to supporting communities and people affected by the wildfires and assisting provinces and territories with their emergency response efforts. 'Temporary foreign workers are required to follow the conditions of their work permit, which is usually linked to a specific employer and time period,' Matthew Krupovich said. 'If people apply to extend or change the conditions of their work permit before it expires, they are legally allowed to stay in Canada while (Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada) processes their applications.' Foreign nationals can consult Explore immigration programs to live, work or study in Canada to determine the programs for which they may be eligible or could work toward, he said. McGavin said he doesn't want special treatment. 'But considering the sacrifices I have made with my limited time here, I would just like to have the same opportunity to make an application and be considered for permanent residency, the same way thousands of people in less dangerous occupations get to.' gordmcintyre@
Ottawa Citizen
29-06-2025
- Politics
- Ottawa Citizen
Foreign national trying to fight B.C. wildfires caught up in red tape
With wildfire season in full swing, an immigration consultant says there is a simple way to end the shortage of qualified people to fight wildfires: Let existing, trained firefighters who are non-residents stay once their work permits expire by letting them choose a path to permanent residency. Article content Jennie McCahill is representing Irish national Jake McGavin, a team leader with a wildfire-fighting contractor called Carmanah Wildfire, which is based in Sidney but has firefighting crews spread all over B.C. Article content Article content Article content 'Carmanah are putting time, energy and resources into training young guys that are here on temporary permits, that have no option to stay long-term,' McCahill said. 'This means (Carmanah) go around the washing machine and are constantly in new-recruit training mode when they could have continuity of a trained and experienced team, which help with prevention and active deployment.' Article content Article content Team leader is a position that requires training and seniority, but it isn't a position that's considered skilled by the federal government, so McGavin has no avenue to permanent residency. Article content Article content 'The main reason I want to stay in Canada is so that I can keep firefighting,' McGavin said. 'Like Nick, I've invested a lot of time and energy and money into getting myself to the level of skill and experience of firefighting that I'm currently at, and I want to take it as far as I can. Article content 'Given that Canada has welcomed me in as a newcomer, I want to give back to the country and the province as significantly as I can. Unfortunately, Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada does not recognize wildland firefighting as skilled work.' Article content Article content While several positions in firefighting are considered skilled — including municipal, airport, industrial and shipboard firefighters — forest firefighters are lumped into a category called silviculture and forestry. Article content Defining what qualifies as skilled is determined by something called the National Occupational Classification System (NOC), a statistical framework of more than 500 occupations. The system categorizes those occupations into skilled or non-skilled following a set of criteria, according to the federal Employment and Social Development Department, which administers the system with Statistics Canada.
Sydney Morning Herald
23-05-2025
- Business
- Sydney Morning Herald
What shortage? Australia's bumper olive oil season – and one company's American dream
This story is part of the May 24 edition of Good Weekend. See all 17 stories. The most eagerly anticipated moment of harvest time has arrived. Dressed in high-vis vests and grandma hairnets, we focus intensely on a machine's wide spout as the first drops of extra virgin olive oil from Australia's 2025 olive harvest appear. In his 27 years of running the country's largest olive oil producer, Cobram Estate Olives, co-founder Rob McGavin has never witnessed this moment. His general manager, Ruth Sutherland, hands us small, blue plastic cups for tasting; it's throat-grippingly peppery and pungent, with hints of green banana. Once we slosh the oil onto some swiftly produced sourdough, the camo-green juice becomes truly delicious. As we tuck into morning tea in the factory kitchen, I ask McGavin if he is relieved to start picking his 40 billion (you read that correctly) olives this year. 'I won't be happy until the $150 million crop swinging out there in the breeze is off the trees and into tanks,' he says. Supermarket shoppers will welcome this early autumn harvest almost as much as McGavin and the shareholders in his nearly $800 million listed company. Hours earlier, we had walked into Cobram's main storage and delivery depot on the fringe of Geelong – only to see the cavernous space almost empty. McGavin was shocked. 'We are really scrounging for stock,' one of the warehouse workers explains to him. The full harvest of the 2.6 million trees from Cobram's two main groves in Boundary Bend and Boort, and the smaller Wemen grove, all near the NSW border in northern Victoria, is still three weeks away. When the tides of oil start properly flowing, they will be rushed onto shelves just before an Australia-wide shortage sets in. Our demand for olive oil has surged in the past 25 years. In 2001, Australians consumed one litre per person a year, with 95 per cent of it imported from European countries, particularly Spain and Italy. Today it's two litres per head, with 50 per cent produced in Australia. Cobram supplies 70 per cent of our locally grown oil. 'There is Cobram Estate and then there is daylight as far as the next biggest producer is concerned,' says Australian Olive Association CEO Michael Southan. It will be a bumper olive-oil harvest in Australia this year, powered partly by a warm and stable growing season and the fact that olive trees have an 'on year, off year' fruiting pattern. This year, it's all on. Three hundred pickers will converge on Cobram's groves, harvesting day and night for 10 weeks. By mid-June, more than 14 million litres of oil will have been picked, crushed and bottled in Australia, at least 12 million litres of it coming from Cobram. As soon as the Geelong warehouse brims with oil again, McGavin and Cobram co-chief executive Leandro Ravetti will turn their attention to another harvest across the globe – specifically, in the Sacramento Valley in California. The company owns 1000 hectares east of the grapevine-lush Napa Valley, and is in the process of adding another 1500. After 11 years of planting olive seedlings, Ravetti claims Cobram is poised to become the biggest producer of US olive oil in the next two to three years. Probably the darkest moment in McGavin's career came in 2009, the year Cobram nearly collapsed, and when he succumbed to swine flu. Over the previous decade, he and co-founder Paul Riordan, a mate from Geelong's Marcus Oldham College, had slowly built the business through a process he jokingly refers to as 'trial and terror'. They had asked friends and family to pitch in to help them raise the $7 million needed to plant trees on the upper banks of the Murray at Boundary Bend. Near a now-dilapidated Telstra phone booth surrounded by wild asparagus, they had spotted an old olive tree. 'We thought, 'Well, if that can grow well here, we can plant more,' ' McGavin says. Starting in 1999, they planted, ripped up, replanted, tended and harvested different types of olive trees, including picual, hojiblanca, arbequina and coratina, to see which suited the climate and conditions best. But in 2009, a partner they relied on heavily for business, Timbercorp, went bankrupt. Cobram took over Timbercorp's properties, including its olive groves and processing plants. This takeover pushed Cobram to the brink of collapse and it ended up in court fighting to harvest $30 million worth of olives. It was eventually able to do so – and recover – but 'for 10 months it was grim,' McGavin says. 'It was next-level stress. I ended up getting swine flu, then pneumonia, and I just could not get over it. My doctor told me that if I did not take time off, he would stop treating me because there was no point,' McGavin says. 'I could not lose hope, though. There were too many friends and family who had invested in us, trusted us with their money.' Grit was ingrained in McGavin very early in life. He grew up on a farm called Jubilee Park, a 13-hour drive inland from Brisbane in a tiny town called Barcaldine. His dad, Bob McGavin, farmed 8900 hectares, working at least 12 hours a day, even on Christmas Day, to make money from the sheep and cattle they ran. 'There were no holidays, no sport, no TV,' McGavin says. 'We would not really see any other people much. We were either asleep or working.' School was an optional extra. 'One term, I missed 36 days. Dad would say, 'You learn more from mustering anyway.' ' It sounds brutal, but it wasn't, says McGavin. 'I honestly think if you grow up on a farm you've won the Lotto in life. You learn to solve your own problems, and you learn how to create your own fun.' Fun for McGavin, his older sister Sue and younger brother Tim, came often in the form of a cockatoo, creatively named Cocky. 'We had him for years. He would somehow know when we were returning home from a day mustering, and he'd fly two kilometres out to meet us, then hitch a ride home on our heads.' When McGavin was seven, his mother died of breast cancer. 'I remember her empathy and kindness. She was a Christian and every Sunday would pack us into our Kingswood station wagon, and we'd go to church.' McGavin's dad, already a workaholic, coped with her death by working even harder. 'When you lose one parent, it makes you anxious about the other. I used to spend a lot of nights by the front fence waiting for dad's ute.' When Bob was 48, he was diagnosed with a type of bone cancer and given two years to live. But he lasted another 13 years. 'For the last three years, he walked around with a morphine syringe in his pocket and would inject himself if the pain got too much. He had a catheter as well. One day in the yards, a ram ripped it out. He just washed it and reinserted it back into his old fella himself.' Losing both parents to cancer contributed to the evangelical zeal McGavin has about the health benefits of olive oil. 'Mum didn't drink or smoke, but she died at 39. We ate meat; we grew on the farm, had vegetables from the vegie patch. But we had a lot of seed oil, refined oil and oils that were probably rancid.' Dietitian Susie Burrell says there is some evidence that rancid oil may lead to cellular damage over time, but 'the primary issue is that the flavour of the oil is unpleasant and nutritional benefits are depleted'. 'Health officials ... still want to penalise olive oil for containing some saturated fat.' Rob McGavin Over the past decade, there has been a revolution in our understanding of a food that's been on humanity's menu since 5000BC. Not surprisingly, McGavin and his senior executives frequently tout the benefits of olive oil, especially fresh extra virgin olive oil, and in this they have scientific backing. 'The diet that many in the scientific community agree is the best for disease prevention is the Mediterranean diet, of which extra virgin olive oil is a staple. It should be the main added fat we use in our cooking,' says Professor Catherine Itsiopoulos, associate deputy vice-chancellor of RMIT University and an olive oil expert. But she warns, 'olive oil is not a drug you can just take on its own; take a couple of tablespoons and everything will be OK. It is not enough. You need to change your diet.' Loading What makes olive oil different from seed oils such as vegetable, canola and sunflower is that it contains polyphenols. These polyphenols (often detected as the 'throat-gripping' bitterness in oil) act as antioxidants and, importantly, contain anti-inflammatory properties, Itsiopoulos says. The growing acceptance that olive oil can reduce cholesterol and inflammation, along with the risk of cancer and heart disease, has encouraged Cobram to fund research, establish the Olive Wellness Institute, and lobby the government to change the current food health-star rating system, which rates olive oil as 3.5 stars. 'I feel so let down by the health officials in this country who still want to penalise olive oil for containing some saturated fat while ignoring the health benefits of it,' McGavin says. Helicopters and light planes are to McGavin what Ubers are to city dwellers. He spends considerable time flying between the Boort and Boundary Bend groves, and the farm he lives on with his wife, Kate, and three adult sons in western Victoria. We fly in to Boundary Bend just as giant trucks are bringing the first lot of olives in from the groves. McGavin explains the oil-making process as the olives are sent jostling along a belt where they are stripped of leaves, stems and dud specimens. In a three-step 'crush, mix, spin' process, olives are pulverised into a paste, the flesh ripped and torn to release the oil, stored in sacs. This crude tapenade is then churned for 30 minutes to bond the tiny oil droplets together. The mix is then funnelled into a centrifuge that separates the oil from the water and flesh of the olive. The first drops of oil we capture come from coratina and picual olives, two of the 30 varieties Cobram grows. They will go into specifically labelled First Harvest bottles. The aim is to pick most of the 40 billion olives at what McGavin calls 'peak oil accumulation'. This is still three weeks off. The First Harvest olives have a lower oil-accumulation ratio but are very high in polyphenols, and picking them is a way to test the machinery before the army of contractor pickers converge on the groves. Many of the incoming pickers are 'grey nomads' – older, retired couples who arrive in their camper vans to set up home near the Boort and Boundary Bend groves. Their job is to operate the 28 apartment-sized picking machines, reverently referred to as either Colossus or Optimus, for 12-hour shifts. McGavin, Ruth Sutherland and I walk behind a lumbering Colossus as it pushes along a row of arbequina trees at a top speed of 400 metres per hour. A column of plastic claws shakes each tree to strip it of olives and feeds them onto a conveyor belt and into a waiting truck which, once full, will head straight to the nearby mill. Loading Company policy dictates it must take no longer than six hours from tree to tank – from the olives being plucked then crushed and pumped into storage vats ready to be bottled. 'The faster the process is, the more health benefits are kept in the oil,' McGavin says. 'If you leave the olives sitting around off the trees, they start to ferment.' McGavin's aim is to make the healthiest oil – with the highest content of polyphenols – for the cheapest price. A 750ml bottle of Cobram Estate oil cost $20 two years ago. Today it is $25, a hike blamed on higher production costs. At the same time, the price of imported olive oil has risen by 70 per cent; this is attributed to severe droughts in Europe causing a global undersupply of oil, according to the Australian Olive Association's Southan. 'But we are not seeing demand drop,' he says. 'It seems we are still willing to pay for olive oil even while prices rise.' Demand is expected to rise 5 per cent a year over the next five years, with the total value of the Australian market forecast to reach more than $500 million by 2030. This may seem massive, but is a thimble compared to the size of the American market, currently worth $US3.1 billion ($4.8 billion) and predicted to grow by 7 per cent a year to 2030. This explains why Cobram is looking to the US with a confidence not shared by many other Australian companies now, especially in light of the US-imposed tariffs. Ravetti, who was born in Argentina, says Americans still largely think, as Australians did 20 years ago, that the best olive oil comes from Europe. The US produces only five per cent of the olive oil it consumes, mostly in California, which has textbook-ideal growing conditions for olives. The rest is brought in from places like Spain and Italy. It has not been an easy ride for Cobram since it started planting groves in California in 2014. 'American retailers didn't want to know about a little Australian company, even if it was making the oil locally,' says Ravetti. But by 2022, the business began ramping up its operations, and has planted 200 to 400 hectares of olive trees every year since then. Ravetti predicts that in five years' time, Cobram's revenue will be higher in the US than in Australia. McGavin aims to supply 'locally grown, high-quality extra virgin olive oil to retail outlets across the USA'. It's a bold ambition. But the boy from Barcaldine is on a mission.
The Age
23-05-2025
- Business
- The Age
What shortage? Australia's bumper olive oil season – and one company's American dream
This story is part of the May 24 edition of Good Weekend. See all 17 stories. The most eagerly anticipated moment of harvest time has arrived. Dressed in high-vis vests and grandma hairnets, we focus intensely on a machine's wide spout as the first drops of extra virgin olive oil from Australia's 2025 olive harvest appear. In his 27 years of running the country's largest olive oil producer, Cobram Estate Olives, co-founder Rob McGavin has never witnessed this moment. His general manager, Ruth Sutherland, hands us small, blue plastic cups for tasting; it's throat-grippingly peppery and pungent, with hints of green banana. Once we slosh the oil onto some swiftly produced sourdough, the camo-green juice becomes truly delicious. As we tuck into morning tea in the factory kitchen, I ask McGavin if he is relieved to start picking his 40 billion (you read that correctly) olives this year. 'I won't be happy until the $150 million crop swinging out there in the breeze is off the trees and into tanks,' he says. Supermarket shoppers will welcome this early autumn harvest almost as much as McGavin and the shareholders in his nearly $800 million listed company. Hours earlier, we had walked into Cobram's main storage and delivery depot on the fringe of Geelong – only to see the cavernous space almost empty. McGavin was shocked. 'We are really scrounging for stock,' one of the warehouse workers explains to him. The full harvest of the 2.6 million trees from Cobram's two main groves in Boundary Bend and Boort, and the smaller Wemen grove, all near the NSW border in northern Victoria, is still three weeks away. When the tides of oil start properly flowing, they will be rushed onto shelves just before an Australia-wide shortage sets in. Our demand for olive oil has surged in the past 25 years. In 2001, Australians consumed one litre per person a year, with 95 per cent of it imported from European countries, particularly Spain and Italy. Today it's two litres per head, with 50 per cent produced in Australia. Cobram supplies 70 per cent of our locally grown oil. 'There is Cobram Estate and then there is daylight as far as the next biggest producer is concerned,' says Australian Olive Association CEO Michael Southan. It will be a bumper olive-oil harvest in Australia this year, powered partly by a warm and stable growing season and the fact that olive trees have an 'on year, off year' fruiting pattern. This year, it's all on. Three hundred pickers will converge on Cobram's groves, harvesting day and night for 10 weeks. By mid-June, more than 14 million litres of oil will have been picked, crushed and bottled in Australia, at least 12 million litres of it coming from Cobram. As soon as the Geelong warehouse brims with oil again, McGavin and Cobram co-chief executive Leandro Ravetti will turn their attention to another harvest across the globe – specifically, in the Sacramento Valley in California. The company owns 1000 hectares east of the grapevine-lush Napa Valley, and is in the process of adding another 1500. After 11 years of planting olive seedlings, Ravetti claims Cobram is poised to become the biggest producer of US olive oil in the next two to three years. Probably the darkest moment in McGavin's career came in 2009, the year Cobram nearly collapsed, and when he succumbed to swine flu. Over the previous decade, he and co-founder Paul Riordan, a mate from Geelong's Marcus Oldham College, had slowly built the business through a process he jokingly refers to as 'trial and terror'. They had asked friends and family to pitch in to help them raise the $7 million needed to plant trees on the upper banks of the Murray at Boundary Bend. Near a now-dilapidated Telstra phone booth surrounded by wild asparagus, they had spotted an old olive tree. 'We thought, 'Well, if that can grow well here, we can plant more,' ' McGavin says. Starting in 1999, they planted, ripped up, replanted, tended and harvested different types of olive trees, including picual, hojiblanca, arbequina and coratina, to see which suited the climate and conditions best. But in 2009, a partner they relied on heavily for business, Timbercorp, went bankrupt. Cobram took over Timbercorp's properties, including its olive groves and processing plants. This takeover pushed Cobram to the brink of collapse and it ended up in court fighting to harvest $30 million worth of olives. It was eventually able to do so – and recover – but 'for 10 months it was grim,' McGavin says. 'It was next-level stress. I ended up getting swine flu, then pneumonia, and I just could not get over it. My doctor told me that if I did not take time off, he would stop treating me because there was no point,' McGavin says. 'I could not lose hope, though. There were too many friends and family who had invested in us, trusted us with their money.' Grit was ingrained in McGavin very early in life. He grew up on a farm called Jubilee Park, a 13-hour drive inland from Brisbane in a tiny town called Barcaldine. His dad, Bob McGavin, farmed 8900 hectares, working at least 12 hours a day, even on Christmas Day, to make money from the sheep and cattle they ran. 'There were no holidays, no sport, no TV,' McGavin says. 'We would not really see any other people much. We were either asleep or working.' School was an optional extra. 'One term, I missed 36 days. Dad would say, 'You learn more from mustering anyway.' ' It sounds brutal, but it wasn't, says McGavin. 'I honestly think if you grow up on a farm you've won the Lotto in life. You learn to solve your own problems, and you learn how to create your own fun.' Fun for McGavin, his older sister Sue and younger brother Tim, came often in the form of a cockatoo, creatively named Cocky. 'We had him for years. He would somehow know when we were returning home from a day mustering, and he'd fly two kilometres out to meet us, then hitch a ride home on our heads.' When McGavin was seven, his mother died of breast cancer. 'I remember her empathy and kindness. She was a Christian and every Sunday would pack us into our Kingswood station wagon, and we'd go to church.' McGavin's dad, already a workaholic, coped with her death by working even harder. 'When you lose one parent, it makes you anxious about the other. I used to spend a lot of nights by the front fence waiting for dad's ute.' When Bob was 48, he was diagnosed with a type of bone cancer and given two years to live. But he lasted another 13 years. 'For the last three years, he walked around with a morphine syringe in his pocket and would inject himself if the pain got too much. He had a catheter as well. One day in the yards, a ram ripped it out. He just washed it and reinserted it back into his old fella himself.' Losing both parents to cancer contributed to the evangelical zeal McGavin has about the health benefits of olive oil. 'Mum didn't drink or smoke, but she died at 39. We ate meat; we grew on the farm, had vegetables from the vegie patch. But we had a lot of seed oil, refined oil and oils that were probably rancid.' Dietitian Susie Burrell says there is some evidence that rancid oil may lead to cellular damage over time, but 'the primary issue is that the flavour of the oil is unpleasant and nutritional benefits are depleted'. 'Health officials ... still want to penalise olive oil for containing some saturated fat.' Rob McGavin Over the past decade, there has been a revolution in our understanding of a food that's been on humanity's menu since 5000BC. Not surprisingly, McGavin and his senior executives frequently tout the benefits of olive oil, especially fresh extra virgin olive oil, and in this they have scientific backing. 'The diet that many in the scientific community agree is the best for disease prevention is the Mediterranean diet, of which extra virgin olive oil is a staple. It should be the main added fat we use in our cooking,' says Professor Catherine Itsiopoulos, associate deputy vice-chancellor of RMIT University and an olive oil expert. But she warns, 'olive oil is not a drug you can just take on its own; take a couple of tablespoons and everything will be OK. It is not enough. You need to change your diet.' Loading What makes olive oil different from seed oils such as vegetable, canola and sunflower is that it contains polyphenols. These polyphenols (often detected as the 'throat-gripping' bitterness in oil) act as antioxidants and, importantly, contain anti-inflammatory properties, Itsiopoulos says. The growing acceptance that olive oil can reduce cholesterol and inflammation, along with the risk of cancer and heart disease, has encouraged Cobram to fund research, establish the Olive Wellness Institute, and lobby the government to change the current food health-star rating system, which rates olive oil as 3.5 stars. 'I feel so let down by the health officials in this country who still want to penalise olive oil for containing some saturated fat while ignoring the health benefits of it,' McGavin says. Helicopters and light planes are to McGavin what Ubers are to city dwellers. He spends considerable time flying between the Boort and Boundary Bend groves, and the farm he lives on with his wife, Kate, and three adult sons in western Victoria. We fly in to Boundary Bend just as giant trucks are bringing the first lot of olives in from the groves. McGavin explains the oil-making process as the olives are sent jostling along a belt where they are stripped of leaves, stems and dud specimens. In a three-step 'crush, mix, spin' process, olives are pulverised into a paste, the flesh ripped and torn to release the oil, stored in sacs. This crude tapenade is then churned for 30 minutes to bond the tiny oil droplets together. The mix is then funnelled into a centrifuge that separates the oil from the water and flesh of the olive. The first drops of oil we capture come from coratina and picual olives, two of the 30 varieties Cobram grows. They will go into specifically labelled First Harvest bottles. The aim is to pick most of the 40 billion olives at what McGavin calls 'peak oil accumulation'. This is still three weeks off. The First Harvest olives have a lower oil-accumulation ratio but are very high in polyphenols, and picking them is a way to test the machinery before the army of contractor pickers converge on the groves. Many of the incoming pickers are 'grey nomads' – older, retired couples who arrive in their camper vans to set up home near the Boort and Boundary Bend groves. Their job is to operate the 28 apartment-sized picking machines, reverently referred to as either Colossus or Optimus, for 12-hour shifts. McGavin, Ruth Sutherland and I walk behind a lumbering Colossus as it pushes along a row of arbequina trees at a top speed of 400 metres per hour. A column of plastic claws shakes each tree to strip it of olives and feeds them onto a conveyor belt and into a waiting truck which, once full, will head straight to the nearby mill. Loading Company policy dictates it must take no longer than six hours from tree to tank – from the olives being plucked then crushed and pumped into storage vats ready to be bottled. 'The faster the process is, the more health benefits are kept in the oil,' McGavin says. 'If you leave the olives sitting around off the trees, they start to ferment.' McGavin's aim is to make the healthiest oil – with the highest content of polyphenols – for the cheapest price. A 750ml bottle of Cobram Estate oil cost $20 two years ago. Today it is $25, a hike blamed on higher production costs. At the same time, the price of imported olive oil has risen by 70 per cent; this is attributed to severe droughts in Europe causing a global undersupply of oil, according to the Australian Olive Association's Southan. 'But we are not seeing demand drop,' he says. 'It seems we are still willing to pay for olive oil even while prices rise.' Demand is expected to rise 5 per cent a year over the next five years, with the total value of the Australian market forecast to reach more than $500 million by 2030. This may seem massive, but is a thimble compared to the size of the American market, currently worth $US3.1 billion ($4.8 billion) and predicted to grow by 7 per cent a year to 2030. This explains why Cobram is looking to the US with a confidence not shared by many other Australian companies now, especially in light of the US-imposed tariffs. Ravetti, who was born in Argentina, says Americans still largely think, as Australians did 20 years ago, that the best olive oil comes from Europe. The US produces only five per cent of the olive oil it consumes, mostly in California, which has textbook-ideal growing conditions for olives. The rest is brought in from places like Spain and Italy. It has not been an easy ride for Cobram since it started planting groves in California in 2014. 'American retailers didn't want to know about a little Australian company, even if it was making the oil locally,' says Ravetti. But by 2022, the business began ramping up its operations, and has planted 200 to 400 hectares of olive trees every year since then. Ravetti predicts that in five years' time, Cobram's revenue will be higher in the US than in Australia. McGavin aims to supply 'locally grown, high-quality extra virgin olive oil to retail outlets across the USA'. It's a bold ambition. But the boy from Barcaldine is on a mission.
