COON: more holes than swiss cheese

By Dr Stephen Hagan and Destiny Rogers

An argument has long raged over the name of Australia's COON Cheese. Aboriginal social justice activist Dr Stephen Hagan began a campaign against the name in 1999. For years, brand owners denied the brand name was a slur, stating that the name honoured the inventor of a unique, ripening process used in the production of the cheese, E. W. Coon.
Dr Hagan questioned the veracity of that story. However, various brand owners offered no evidence other than a patent registered by E. W. Coon in the United States in 1926.
Earlier this year, Saputo Dairy of Canada, the latest brand owners, announced they would retire the name.
But the authors of COON: more holes than swiss cheese, Dr Stephen Hagan and Destiny Rogers believe an effective name change would include an honest telling of the brand history. The COON Cheese history and brand engage many Australians. For them to understand why the brand name should change, they deserve facts. Otherwise, we predict, the name will change, and the cheese remain popular, but race relations suffer. Some Australians will resent that Aboriginals allegedly erased history, cancelled Dr E. W. COON and whinged about an imaginary slur.
Earlier in 2020, Dr Hagan teamed up with Destiny Rogers from QNews to investigate the real history of COON Cheese. This book is the result.
The authors describe the previous official brand histories as ‘compiled by someone who thought they were making a cheddar. They grabbed some dates, curdled them, swirled them around in a vat, heated them up, gave them a bit of a stir and then sat them on a shelf to ripen’.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dr Stephen Hagan
• Release date: Dec 21, 2020
• ISBN: 9781005711894

Book preview

COON: more holes than swiss cheese is an instructive book.

It is non-fiction in the literal meaning, devoid of the anecdotal myth-making of corporate spin doctors.

The book’s primary goal is to correct the tainted history of an innocuous dairy product prominently displayed in the cooler aisle of grocery outlets nationwide.

More specifically, this is the factual story of the incendiary journey of COON Cheese.

Nelson Mandela said, Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.

To that end, this book’s goal is twofold.

Firstly to challenge the connivance of those with vested interests.

Secondly, to enlighten those who succumbed to the dissemination of a prejudiced history.

I suspect many of the former set out to sell not ‘the’ history of the cheese but ‘a’ history of the cheese. A narrative designed not to document truth but to protect a brand name.

That story, accepted today as fact by the broader Australian populace, is premised on the display of United States Patent No 1579196. The mere mention of the document issued on 30 March 1926 to Edward William Coon, was all that was required to win over the masses.

The brand owners repeatedly wielded the patent in ‘gotcha’ moments that avoided any genuine scrutiny of their consumer sales pitch on the origin of COON Cheese. A succession of owners promoted an inaccurate history against challenges to its authenticity by someone familiar with a popular racial slur of the same spelling and pronunciation.

Me!

Not once did brand owners provide even a scintilla of evidence to back up their claims. They thereby avoided involvement in the public discourse on one of the most hateful and historically harmful racial slurs on the planet.

I believe readers - whether for or against my campaign - will experience a significant shift in thinking around the COON story as glimpsed through the window of my challenging journey.

Dr Stephen Hagan

Statement

In researching this book, the authors accessed every resource possible - newspapers, magazines, periodicals, books, academic papers, and more - covering from well over a century ago until the current day. We began the project with an opinion, but determined to discover the truth, wherever it lay.

Was the word c__n a slur in not only the US but also Australia when Kraft branded the contentious cheese?

Was it used only against African Americans or also against Australia’s First Nations peoples?

Was E. W. Coon the inventor/creator/founder of the cheese as stated in COON Cheese histories?

Was he a doctor? Were the COON Cheese histories accurate?

Finally, was the word c__n a slur in 1999 when Dr Stephen Hagan began his campaign?

In the digital era, and during a time of pandemic, the authors never met. With Dr Stephen Hagan in the Northern Territory and Destiny Rogers in Queensland, we conferred via email and phone.

We conducted our research online. For that reason, our readers need not take our word on even a single fact. All of the information is publicly available online, even if sometimes in rarely visited corners of the world wide web. To assist fact-checkers, we sourced every fact given in this book in extensive endnotes. We avoided both anecdotal evidence and assumption. We stuck with what we could prove.

The authors believe an effective name change would include an honest telling of the brand history. The COON Cheese history and brand engage many Australians. For them to understand why the brand name should change, they deserve facts. Otherwise, we predict, the name will change, and the cheese remain popular, but race relations suffer. Some Australians will resent that Aboriginals allegedly erased history, cancelled Dr E. W. COON and whinged about an imaginary slur.

We also omitted no pertinent fact, whether it buttressed our argument or weakened it.

Amazingly, the only evidence offered by brand owners for the COON Cheese story is a link to a patent. Twelve years ago, Dr Stephen Hagan first questioned ‘Dr’ E.W. COON’s involvement in the cheese. In the years since, brand owners offered not one document or photograph to corroborate the various histories of the cheese.

The authors believe they have remedied that neglect.

This is the story of a tasty budget cheddar, but one burdened with a name that leaves an unpalatable aftertaste.

Chapter One

Five Men and a Myth

The story of Australia’s COON Cheese is today the story of five men and a myth. The men are James L. Kraft, Fred Walker, Cyril Callister, Edward William Coon and Dr Stephen Hagan.

Early in the twentieth century, James L. Kraft revolutionised the production of cheddar cheese in the US. He then did the same in Australia in partnership with Aussie businessman Fred Walker. Cyril Callister, the man who invented Vegemite, drove the development of new products at the cutting-edge Kraft-Walker Cheese Company. Philadelphia’s Edward William Coon registered a patent in 1926 for the ripening of cheddar cheese. Finally, decades after the others died, Dr Stephen Hagan fought to have the racist slur c__n removed as the brand name of the cheese.

And then there’s the myth - Dr E. W. COON - the Einstein of the dairy aisle, the Michelangelo of budget cheddar, the Elon Musk of cheese... Not that any denigration of E. W. Coon is intended. He could not control how advertisers portrayed him after his death. Anyway, E. W. Coon had prejudice of his own to answer for.

The iconic ‘Dr’ E. W. COON Australians think they know from advertisements and ever-changing COON Cheese histories bears as much resemblance to the real E. W. Coon as the Energiser Bunny does to a rabbit. He is a fiction first introduced to the Australian public late in the twentieth century. As a brand superhero, he deflected accusations of racism against a brand name with a long history as a slur against People of Colour.

Sydney Morning Herald. 22 April 1989. Page 224.

C__n existed as a racist slur in Australia long before the Kraft-Walker company branded their natural cheddar cheese. Scholars disagree over its exact origin though all agree it was born of slavery in the United States of America. Some trace it to the name of cages used to hold victims of the Atlantic slave trade. Others believe it derived from slaveowners setting ‘coonhounds’ trained to hunt raccoons on the trail of escaped slaves. (1)

Slave-owners reputedly hunted escaped slaves with coonhounds, bred to hunt raccoons.

(Slave hiding in water in background.)

But wherever it originated, the slur became better known when American blackface performer George Washington Dixon had a hit with the song ‘Zip Coon’ in 1834. (2)

"O ole Zip Coon he is a larned skoler,

"Sings posum up a gum tree an conny in a holler."

Check out the chorus of ‘Zip Coon’. It’s remarkably similar to the chorus of a Disney song recorded over a century later - ‘Zip-a-dee-doo-dah, zip-a-dee-ay’.

"O zip a duden duden duden zip a duden day."

G. W. Dixon blackened his face with burnt cork and dressed in ill-fitting attire to suggest a wannabe African American dandy. Zip Coon later became a stock character in minstrel shows.

Dr David Pilgrim summed up the essence of the caricature in a 2000 analysis.

"The minstrel shows depicted him as a gaudy dressed ‘Dandy’ who ‘put on airs’. Unlike Mammy and Sambo, Coon did not know his place. He thought he was as smart as white people; however, his frequent malapropisms and distorted logic suggested that his attempt to compete intellectually with whites was pathetic. His use of bastardized English delighted white audiences and reaffirmed the then commonly held beliefs that blacks were inherently less intelligent." (3)

Zip Coon Sheet Music

In the 1930s, the US Whig Party emerged as opposition to the Democrats. The Whigs adopted the raccoon as their symbol, the Democrats then using a rooster. (4) Slavery was the most significant issue of the time, and the Northern Whigs were anti-slavery. Abraham Lincoln was a member for many years. He later joined the new Republican Party and led the US through the American Civil War and the abolition of slavery. (5)

During the 1844 election campaign, the pro-slavery Democrats gleefully exploited the abbreviation for raccoon to attack the ‘ni__er worshipping’ Whigs. (6)

Anti-Whig newspapers like the Ohio Coon Catcher, the Coon Dissector and That Same Old Coon, piled every racial inference they could into the words and illustrations on their pages. (7) They brazenly appropriated the language of slaveowners to describe the Whigs in a non-too-subtle dog whistle.

A vote for the Whig coons was a vote for the c__ns.

We make no apology for this little work, boasted the Ohio Coon Catcher.

"We expect to catch many a c___s by the frosts of November. The whole country will be scoured, and every valley, glen and mountain top will echo with the chase." (8)

The Ohio Coon Catcher. 17 August 1844. Page 1.

Following the Civil War, African Americans broke into show business. With white audiences unwilling to tolerate anything but dim-witted racial stereotypes, black entertainers found their opportunities limited to minstrel shows. However, the black minstrel performers made far less money than whites performing similar entertainment in blackface.

Abolitionist Frederick Douglass described the blackface shows as, the filthy scum of white society, who have stolen from us a complexion denied to them by nature, in which to make money, and pander to the corrupt taste of their white fellow citizens. (9)

AUSTRALIA

Both African American minstrels and their blackface counterparts toured Australia. Mrs Rowes American Circus visited in 1852 with a devotee of the burnt cork as a feature act. (10)

Mr Barlow, celebrated Banjoist and Prince of Negro Minstrels, who is always at home with his song, illustrative of the emphatic yet ludicrous ideas of the D_rkies...

One African American minstrel who toured Australia decided to make his home here. Irving Sayles, according to numerous reports, possessed both talent and charisma. However, he knew making a buck depended on indulging racism. He pandered to his audiences with songs like ‘I’m the Father of the Little Black C__n’, and ‘De C__n Dat Had De Razor’. (11)

Sheet Music for Irving Sayles' most popular number.

Although willing to play the c__n onstage, offstage Irving Sayles refused to pander. He once received a 20 shilling fine when found on licensed premises during prohibited hours. (12)

A police constable, probably alerted to Sayles’ presence by an informant, searched Melbourne’s Barkly Hotel on a Sunday night. When he headed towards a particular room, the licensee’s daughter told him not to disturb the lady who occupied it. He ignored her.

Inside, the constable found Irving Sayles and a woman.

What the ____ do you want? asked Irving.

The cop, in turn, asked what Irving was doing there.

What the ____ has that to do with you?

(The newspaper blanked out the particular expression Irving used. After a vigorous debate, the authors finally agreed he probably said, What the goodness gracious do you want?)

The Sydney Truth failed to appreciate Irving’s humour, mainly it would appear, because of his skin colour. (13) The paper described him as ‘the c__n comedian’ and a ‘black brute’ and questioned his nationality: How a c__n can be an American is not clear.

When he left Sydney, the paper celebrated that his absence would give decent, clean-living white men an opportunity to earn a steady wage.

Meanwhile, Australians adopted the word c__n as a slur against all People of Colour, but most especially against Australian Aboriginals. An article from the Charters Towers Evening Telegraph is typical. (14)

Evening Telegraph. 3 March 1908. Page 8.

Chapter Two

Cheese It!

The COON Cheese story begins with three extraordinary human beings - Fred Walker, Cyril Callister and James L. Kraft.

Born in 1884, Fred Walker first attended a state school before gaining a scholarship to Melbourne’s Caulfield Grammar School. His father died in an industrial accident when Fred was just six. (1)

According to the now offline Kraft Virtual History Museum, Fred Walker’s mother performed charity work among local Chinese. (2) That perhaps assisted her son’s scholarship to a school with a strong missionary ethos.

Reverend Davies, the founding headmaster of Caulfield, previously travelled to India as a missionary in the 1870s on behalf of the local St Mary’s Anglican Church. (3) He later left to become the first Australian missionary in Korea. Reverend Barnett, who replaced him, only stayed a few years before himself leaving on a mission to Hong Kong. (4)

Caulfield Grammar School took a remarkably enlightened attitude to Asia and Asians - much removed from the familiar cliché of paternalistic do-gooders instilling Christianity and Britishness into ignorant heathens. Charles Ying, who in 1913 arrived as perhaps the first overseas boarder at Caulfield, later became a prefect. Considering Australia’s enthusiastic embrace of the White Australia Policy, that appears a singularly defiant and decent action. (5)

Fred Walker would soon