Captain, my Captain wherefore art thou?

ON Friday a distressed reader rang to complain that his favourite biscuit had unexpectedly vanished from the supermarket shelves.

Arnott's

ON Friday a distressed reader rang to complain that his favourite biscuit had unexpectedly vanished from the supermarket shelves.

What, he wanted to know, was the Sunday Herald Sun going to do about it?

As it happens, I shared his opinion that an Arnott's Thin Captain is the prince of biscuits, or as some would have it, the prince of crackers.

By coincidence, lately I too have noticed their absence from the shelves of my local supermarkets.

In fact, I have to confess I love Thin Captains so much that I recently drove from my local Coles to the nearby Woolworths in a fruitless search for a box.

These days it doesn't do to ignore readers' requests so I said I'd investigate.

"Don't worry Dad, I'm on to it," I promised.

And so it came about that I found myself ringing Arnott's to query the Thin Captain-less state of our supermarket shelves, only to be told it has joined Rosella's tomato sauce and the McFeast in the Valhalla of discontinued iconic Aussie brands .

The email from Renee McCarthy, Arnott's "Global Communication Manager", explaining its demise was a masterpiece of the spinner's art.

"Thank you for your inquiry regarding Arnott's Thin Captain biscuits," she began.

"Unfortunately, we stopped making them in March this year because sales had dropped to a level that meant we couldn't sustain them on-shelf."

Or one imagines off-shelf or under-shelf either. Alas, the Thin Captain was no longer shelf-financing.

"We know how frustrating it is when you've had a favourite product and all of a sudden it disappears, but ultimately, it's our consumers who decide what stays and what goes to make way for new, exciting products that we're launching all the time."

Somehow, I'm not sure Renee does know how frustrating it is for middle-aged columnists and their parents to lose a family favourite, and I'm not interested in Renee's new and exciting products. I just want to keep eating Thin Captains.

With the wisdom of hindsight, it strikes me that some of the most recent - alas final! - boxes were perhaps not as fresh as they might have been, suggesting they were not exactly jumping off the shelves.

But that said, Renee's email still hit me with a jolt and her jaunty sign-off - "We apologise for any inconvenience this may have caused you, and hope you continue to enjoy our products" - struck me as a flippant way to mark the passage of Arnott's oldest product, one it had been making since 1867.

It also left me with the sad job of explaining to the old man, that barring the happy accident of discovering the odd box still lurking on the shelves of a milk bar somewhere, he had eaten his last Thin Captain.

"Well, that's your article for Sunday," was his response. "You'll have to do something about that."

I share his outrage of course, but what can I do? Start a Facebook page to call for the Thin Captain's restoration?

That's what everyone seems to do these days when outraged at something.

Indeed, in a parody of Marshall McLuhan's mantra that "the medium is the message", in many cases activism these days doesn't go much past setting up the Facebook page and sending out the tweet.

I toyed with the idea for a moment until it dawned on me that Thin Captain eaters are unlikely to be social media people. Looking back I should have taken as a bad omen the blank looks I got from the youths who work in my local supermarkets when I had asked where they had gone to.

But still I can't let it go, this Australian icon, four years short of its 150th birthday. I feel I must do something to preserve it for future generations to enjoy.

Because the Thin Captain is an Australian classic with no peer anywhere in the world. Waterford crackers? Too thin and prone to becoming soggy in dips. Captain's Table crackers? Ditto.

Saos? Too thick and they don't complement cheese well. Neither does the Ritz, a very overrated cracker in my opinion.

But the Thin Captain . . . aah the Thin Captain. If you love them as I do, you should write on Arnott's Facebook page, call them and email them and demand they keep making this prince of biscuits.