TWO years ago, FarmOnline's MATTHEW CAWOOD wrote about cotton industry founding father Paul Kahl, who has died at the age of 96.
Widely remembered as one of NSW's most respected and innovative farm sector players, Mr Kahl with his wife Jean and their farming partners Frank and Norma Hadley helped kick-start the modern Australian cotton industry in 1962 after migrating from California's San Joaquin Valley.
But, as Matt discovered, that was far from the whole story about cotton in Australia, or the life of Paul Kahl.
This story was published in a 2013 feature on 50 Years of Cotton in the Namoi Valley, and captured in a fascinating video.
IN the early 1960s the papers were breathlessly calling cotton "white gold", but there really was an element of goldrush in the building of the cotton industry.
At few points in history have farmers been able to borrow to buy land and then pay off most of their equity - if not all of it - with a year or two of good crops. But it was possible in the early days of Australian cotton.
The cotton pioneers had grit and sharp business sense, and they held a good hand.
The NSW government finished Keepit Dam, west of Tamworth, in 1958, before it knew what would be grown with the water. Cotton promised a return on the investment, and the government threw ample resources and a lint bounty at the fledgling industry.
The agricultural banks were similarly expansive.
The black soil around Wee Waa was as naturally fertile as Australian soil can be. It had grown great expanses of Mitchell grass for the past several thousand years: the only tillage it had known was from earthworms a metre long and as thick as a man's thumb.
But these advantages hadn't been exploited for cropping when, in the late 1950s, Nick Derera, former director of the Hungarian Cotton Research Institute and a refugee from the Soviets, began trialling cotton varieties near Narrabri for the NSW Department of Agriculture.
Mr Derera wasn't the first to grow cotton in the district - it had been experimented with going back to the 1920s - but he was arguably the first who knew what he was doing.
Excited reports about promising yields were published in the local paper, the North Western Courier. It was a time of heightened interest in all things agricultural, and a few lines from Narrabri found their way into a paper in Merced County, California.
The information piqued the interest of Paul Kahl and Frank Hadley, cotton growers who felt their expansion in California's Central Valley was being stifled by a thick web of government regulation.
"I detested more and more having to go to the government office in town to find out how many acres of each controlled crop I could plant in the spring," Mr Kahl wrote in his autobiography, Cotton Pickin' Pioneer.
The pair visited the Australian trade commissioner in San Francisco, learning that "Australians spoke a form of English that would take some getting used to but was better than learning Spanish or Portugese".
They also learned that the Australian government was busting for some know-how in the cotton business. Most of Australia's 10,000 bale cotton crop was grown in Queensland, and most of that was poor quality.
Kahl and Hadley grew their first crop, with help from Nick Derera, on a 65-acre field east of Wee Waa in 1961-62. It yielded a creditable 1.5 bales an acre (3.7 bales/ha).
Wee Waa was their own choice of location. Mr Kahl, now nearly 95, recalls that it was the last place the Australian government wanted them to set up.
The Snowy Mountains hydro scheme had just been built at vast expense, but it was mostly being used to water pastures on unviable soldier settlement blocks.
Government officials kept nudged the Californians toward the Riverina; when nudging didn’t work, they were offered free land and water.
Alternatively, they were pointed north, to where cotton was being grown in Queensland.
But the south was too cold for available cotton varieties, the Californians correctly decided, and Queensland didn't have the right infrastructure.
Wee Waa's climate was right, the block size was right, Keepit Dam was right, and the district was home to Nick Derera, "the only man in Australia who understood cotton".
When the first crop was picked on "Glencoe", Wee Waa, in April 1962, a NSW Department of Agriculture field day drew 1200 people - who, Mr Kahl noted, were insistently pointed towards the Riverina by Government officials.
The "Glencoe" harvest had to be taken north of Brisbane to be ginned, a 1200-kilometre round trip over a route that was only tarred for a third of its length.
After driving the 1950 International truck on two of the 10 trips it took to transport the crop, Mr Kahl decided a local gin was a priority.
More Californians and some Australians began flooding into the district in 1962, enough to allow the formation of the Namoi Cotton Co-operative in that year.
The following year, when the first Namoi gin was built, there were about 50 Americans in the district.
A reporter for Womans Day dropped by Wee Waa and found that "…American cornmeal appears on Wee Waa grocery shelves, American accents demand a 'middy of new', and American misses in tight Bermuda shorts give a new interest in life for Wee Waa males".
In 1963, an Australian farmer told a paper that he would earn 165,000 pounds from a 1250 acre cotton crop. Undeveloped land was valued at less than 100 pounds an acre.
A big Californian agribusiness, Boswell Farming, scented prosperity. In 1964 Boswell began building what became Auscott.
Cotton's growth curve arced up strongly for the best part of decade.
The 1971 floods wiped out 80 per cent of the Namoi Co-op's crop and big swathes of infrastructure, and the cotton pest heliothis (now Helicoverpa) began its reign over the nightmares of growers in 1973.
But the industry had momentum that drought and low cotton prices have occasionally stalled, but not halted.
Zest for life
Odds were against Californian Paul Kahl surviving past 1943, when the United States Air Force B17 bomber he was flying was shot down over Germany.
Mr Kahl landed the shot-up bomber in a field, and spent two years in Stalag Luft III prison camp, the same camp immortalised as the scene of The Great Escape, where seventy-six British soldiers tunnelled out of the prison.
Released in 1945, weighing 45 kilograms against his 80kg normal weight, Mr Kahl married his sweetheart, Jean, and joined the family farm in California with the zest of a man who knows how short and unsweet life might be.
By 1961, he and Jean and their six children had moved to Wee Waa and set in motion the modern Australian cotton industry.
When they picked their first 65 acres of cotton, "I could tell then that we had it," Mr Kahl said. "There was no question about it. We had detractors, but I wasn't sweating any."
Mr Kahl later contributed to the development of the Chinese cotton industry. When not farming the couple have led a rich life of travel and sailing.
Mr Kahl is now going on 95, Mrs Kahl 93. They still keep in touch with the affairs of the cotton business they founded, Merced Farming, run by sons Robert and James.
Their legacy lies not only in Australian cotton. The couple has 26 grandchildren and 50 great-grand children.