An Emotional Obituary For Cottee’s Cordial, Australia’s Greatest Nectar
Please tell your dad to stop picking the fruit, as it may no longer be going to Cottee's.
Cottee’s Cordial, 1927 to 2016.
Don’t it always seem to go, that you don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone*? Yesterday News Limited reported that Cottee’s Cordial, a brand that seemed as omnipresent and comfortingly pervasive as the sun and the moon, is facing imminent collapse. Let this sink in for a moment.
*Please attribute that quote to Junkee in all follow-up articles.
How has this happened? How did we get here? News.com.au reported that a significant drop in sales in the last five years, more recently with a 5.8 percent decline in cordial sales last year, has lead to Cottee’s “collapse”. They also mentioned that “cordial penetration” has dropped to only 53.7 per cent of Australian households, a depressing figure illustrated by potentially disgusting imagery.
I know that some of you won’t care about this. You, with your cordials in fancy ye olde glass bottles, with your Soda Streams and your ‘coconut’ ‘water’. But Cottee’s Cordial is woven deep into the fabric of Australian culture — like ‘Slip! Slop! Slap!’, Round the Twist and hating Kyle Sandilands — and the fact that it won’t be around anymore, is a huge blow.
Fin.
In Australia, we are not overwhelmed with historical moments that we can be collectively proud of, so we need to project our lack of a cohesive and pleasing national identity on the uniquely local products that we all have in common. Cottee’s Cordial was something we could be proud of, but we didn’t appreciate it like we should have. Now we must ingest this bitter fact, like a room temperature glass of Pine Lime that was not made to the correct ratios as specified on the bottle.
Cottee’s Cordial began in the early 1900s, when a farmer named Spencer Cottee had a dream, and a whole lot of fucking passionfruits that he had to get off his hands. After casually inventing Passiona in the 1920s, Spencer began experimenting with other flavoured waters, fascinated by the fact that people seemed to love a touch of orange and lime in their cups, probably also compounded by overall poor quality in regional Australia’s drinking water at the time.
During World War II, Spencer was asked to assist the war effort by sending Australian troops vitamin-packed fruit juices and jams. In World War II, the Allies stopped the Nazis, ergo Cottee’s Cordial helped stop the Nazis. Not only does a refreshing glass of cordial crush after-school thirst, it crushed Hitler.
Cottee’s Cordial wasn’t just a unique substance, it was a national talking point. It’s ‘My Dad Picked The Fruit’ jingle which was created in the 1980s and recycled every decade since, has a rich schoolyard legacy. You could attract instant cred by replacing the first line with: “My dad picked his nose…” the likes of which could not be diminished — unless you were later found to lacking in necessary accessories of the cool kid (i.e Tazos, Tamagotchis).
You must ask yourself, if this can go what’s next (also see: The Great Barrier Reef)? We need to use this moment to take stock of the small things that we take for granted. I bet you that right before she won gold in the Sydney 2000 Olympics, Cathy Freeman had a tall glass of Orange Crush. I bet that the first thing that the Beaconsfield Miners wanted was a couple of icy glasses of Coola Lime. I heard that when Julia Gillard made her famous misogyny speech in Parliament, she necked some Apple and Raspberry first. ACDC probably fucking love cordial. Phar Lap probably drank it by the trough-full.
We as a nation will move on from this, but now, seared in our consciousness, is an important lesson: soon enough, everything becomes obsolete. Nothing gold stays.
Vale, Cottee’s Cordial.
(Note: Cottee’s actually refutes claims that the company is collapsing. We can only pray that this is not optimistic spin.)
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