[Tim]

THE GREAT BRITISH BANGER INVADES AUSTRALIA

Mike Ferrero from Jersey, makes the best sausages in all of Western Australia - and that's official.

His bangers have been judged the finest in the open sausages class at the Royal Show, and 31-year-old Mike was proclaimed Sausage King of WA.

'I am amazed at what has happened,' Mike says at his Great British Sausage Company, a tiny corner shop and factory in suburban Perth. 'I came here three years ago, having owned two butchers' shops in Jersey, and some friends asked me to make them some bangers.

'They had tried Australian sausages. And so had I; that's why I was making my own.'

Back in Jersey, Mike and his Glaswegian wife, Jackie, were finding the little island was getting too busy. Mike had worked in a Torquay butcher's, but didn't want to return permanently to the mainland. 'I thought about Australia and we eventually applied to migrate. If we hadn't done it, I could see myself at the age of 65 still sitting there, wondering what it would have been like.'

Mike's dad lived in Australia and Mike made the family some sausages. Ex-pat friends tasted them and wanted supplies. At weekends, as the delicious aroma of cooking sausages crept off barbecue hot-plates all over Perth, so did the whisper: 'Get Mike to make you some of his Cumberland.'

Mike began enthusiastically making the finest bangers his friends had ever tasted. When he took a sample of the champion to a local butcher he was told: 'I'll take all you can deliver.'

'I soon had 35 butchers and small supermarkets wanting my sausages. Then, after the Cumberland won the title at the Royal Show, the word spread and now I'm selling to 65 shops and stores in Western Australia. I have just come back from Sydney where I have been talking to big meat chain operators, Joe's and Peter's, and I'll be supplying to them in July. ‘I have had to upgrade my factory to do it.'

The Cumberland was up against 50 other succulent snags: some made from emu meat, a South African boerewors, and a delicious Italian concoction. The British banger won hands down.

Jealous butchers and misty-eyed ex-pats have pestered Mike for the secret of the Cumberland. It has sage and mace in it; pig intestines, and - that's as far as he will reveal. 'The secret is in the taste and texture,' he says. 'It's great for barbecues, but particularly good in winter in a casserole or baked in batter as toad in the hole. You have to have fat in it to give it flavour. A slow grill will get rid of most of it.'

Mike had made up his mind when he came to Australia that he'd having nothing to do with sausages, (they demand a man's soul, he says). But he bought a butcher's shop "because that's what I knew"; and found himself working 12 hours a day. 'They're stupid hours, six days a week. But I'm now cutting it down to 48 hours week.'

He and an assistant produce three tonnes of sausages a week to satisfy the rising demand, as well as unsmoked bacon and black pudding. Mike is looking around for larger premises and the possibility of employing another assistant.

Bob Heaperman - a fellow who knows his sausages - is executive director of the Western Australian division of the powerful Meat and Allied Trades Federation, which ran the Royal Show competition for Best Sausage. Bob likes his Cumberland cooked, split lengthways and filled with mashed potatoes mixed with cheese, onions and mushroooms - with a little more cheese sprinkled over the top.

'Two is a meal,' he says. 'Cumberlands are very thick and filling.'

Any chance of the Sausage King exporting back to the UK? 'I'm afraid there's none,' says Mike. 'They don't need them where sausages are so good; a bit like trying to sell sand to the Arabs.'