We should be happy when people such as Dominic Perrottet bag Adelaide | David Penberthy

When people such as struggling NSW Premier Dominic Perrottet bag SA, we shouldn’t be upset, writes David Penberthy – but the opposite.

Here’s a demonstrably mundane anecdote that ended up revealing several great truths about the city we are lucky to call home.

Last Friday after I finishing my newspaper and radio duties for the week I went to the Central Market to buy a few items for a dinner I was making for friends that night.

I had a bit of time to kill and was feeling peckish so I decided to go to one of my favourite restaurants, Asian Gourmet, the little Malaysian joint that has been dishing out superb laksa, noodle dishes and curries for the past 30-odd years.

I first ate there in the late 1980s while working part time during uni at McMahons fruit and veg, with my beloved old boss Stef. We all used to wear big leather aprons at the fruit shop, which served as handy body-length laksa-eating bibs during our meal breaks.

A few of us would go to Asian Gourmet every Friday night and order their Friday special, the Sarawak laksa, and sit cross-legged on the ground on the western wall of the market, slurping up the noodles, bean shoots and fiery coconut broth using our leather aprons as protection. It’s a killer meal the Sarawak laksa, and I realised last Friday that it had been more than a decade since I’d eaten one.

I ordered the laksa but, as is sometimes the case at Asian Gourmet, it was so busy there was nowhere to sit. Eventually a table of two departed and I pounced, but noticed another solo diner stranded at the counter surveying the room for a seat.

A normal, busy day inside the Central Market, where parking doesn’t cost $50. Picture: NCA NewsWire / David Mariuz

As I motioned at him to join me, I realised I knew the bloke but couldn’t work out how. Then it clicked: “Hey, you’re the guy who sells that great cheese,” I said. “Yep,” he replied, “And you’re the guy who buys the great cheese.”

The bloke’s name is Gerard Callanan and he’s been living in South Australia for four years down at Victor, where he runs a small business called Lilyarra Artisan Cheese in an industrial estate and sells his wares every weekend at the Willunga and Wayville markets, and also at the Say Cheese stand. This is what brought him to the market last Friday.

He makes a stack of different cheeses all of which are excellent but my favourite is his Irish cheddar. I got his whole life story as I slurped away on my laksa and he tucked into his pork satays and hokkien mee. He grew up in Victoria but moved to Ireland to study the art of cheesemaking.

He was working at pubs after that in Victoria but always wanted to start his own cheesemaking business and eventually decided SA would make the best location, with its climate, affordability, ease of travel and food culture.

I told him a few old war stories from working in the market, about how some Friday nights a few of us would go out and get on the turps, come back to the market at 2am and shout out to the security guard who would secretly let us in. We would make beds above the fruit shop out of potato sacks and then wake up bleary-eyed for our Saturday shift four hours later.

Gerard and I prattled on a bit more, then said our goodbyes and I headed home. I’d been at the market for less than an hour and the grand total for the carparking was just $2. Two bucks!

The happiness I took from this hour at the market sustained me into the weekend. And I was reflecting on it in the context of that Dominic Perrottet misery guts, soon to be an ex-Premier if the polls are to be believed, who took time out last week from doing a poor job running NSW to take a tired potshot at Adelaide’s expense.

NSW Premier Dominic Perrottet, unhappy with Adelaide generally. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Julian Andrews

Sydney was my home for 12 years and while there is much to like about the place, it is no longer designed for happy and sustaining human existence. Unless you’re a crook or a merchant banker, or both, you can’t get a house within cooee of the water anymore. Indeed, even a crappy one-bedroom apartment in Parramatta costs the same as a solid suburban home in any of our many middle-class suburbs here in SA.

If you had tried to head from any part of Sydney to park your car, have lunch and return home in less than an hour, you would by the end of the hour either still be driving or still looking for a park. The idea of paying just $2 for the privilege of doing anything in Sydney is simply unthinkable.

I know a lot of people here fired up about the Perrottet quip. I read with interest the good piece by Sam Shahin on these pages yesterday saying we need to do a better job promoting ourselves to challenge these stereotypes. I’d beg to differ with Sam, though.

We should encourage people such as Perrottet to persist with their nonsense jibes, as they have the happy effect of keeping the riffraff out. We all know what Perrottet says isn’t true, but we should keep that a secret to ourselves.

The last thing we want is a sudden influx of Dominic Perrottets clogging up the Central Market and making it even harder to find a seat at the Asian Gourmet on a Friday when you’re having a Sarawak laksa.

Returning to Sydney in July for the first time in ages, the thing that struck me the most was the hardness of it all. The reward of seeing the Harbour or going to some great restaurants or their excellent zoo did not eclipse the effort and expense of everything.

You can’t leave the house without losing fifty bucks over there. And you rarely get those pleasant and unexpected moments of humanity such as the one I recounted here at the Market last Friday, the moments which sustain us in life.