Australians are no strangers to success on the global stage. They’ve won Olympic gold, Nobel prizes and Oscar statuettes. They’ve run multinational companies and international organisations. They’ve topped the pop charts. They turn up everywhere. But no Australian has ever run a restaurant that has won three Michelin stars. Until now.

The conquest is fresh – it happened only in February – and the victor, at first sight, seems a little unlikely: Brett Graham is a motor-mouthed, handlebar-moustached man in his mid-40s who knows how to handle a firearm. He’s of blue-collar and agrarian stock from the hardscrabble end of NSW’s Hunter Valley. His boyhood dream was to be a champion swimmer, and he wasn’t far off the pace.