FEW WA woolgrowers would realise infamous 'Cold War' icon Checkpoint Charlie in the Berlin Wall, dividing East from West Germany, was once a local wool industry trade portal.
For 29 years after its hurried construction in August, 1961, Checkpoint Charlie provided the only access into East Germany for Western diplomats, military personal and the occasional trade representative.
Overlooked by a prominent machinegun tower on the East German side, it was the site of several daring escapes to the West by East German citizens and an exchange point for political prisoner swaps between the United States or Great Britain and the Soviet Union.
For 16 chilling hours in October 1961 the world held its breath hoping a third world war could be averted as 10 Soviet and 10 US tanks faced off across Checkpoint Charlie.
Opening scenes of the 1965 film version of John le Carré's novel The Spy Who Came in from the Cold starring Richard Burton, depicted a British secret service agent being gunned down as he tried to cross the checkpoint.
Veteran WA wool industry identity John Kirkpatrick is one of very few Australians to ever glimpse what life was like behind the 'Iron Curtain' in Soviet-controlled countries like East Germany.
Checkpoint Charlie was the somewhat foreboding place he crossed into East Berlin, which he described as "grey and dull", to sell WA wool.
At age 77, Mr Kirkpatrick's knock-about manner and appearance these days is more reminiscent of his start in the wool industry 62 years ago as a shed hand on a shearing team, than of his career as a successful auction and private treaty wool buyer and export wool marketer.
His gruff manner, jeans and West Coast Wools & Livestock jumper, rather than the stylish wool suits of the past, tend to disguise the fact he is still one of the WA wool industry's most widely world travelled operators.
In the mid 1970s he was WA wool buyer for German family-owned processing trader Lohmann & Co, and his role involved visits to a client wool processing factory in Leipzig, East Germany, behind "the Wall".
At the time Leipzig was a wool processing centre with a large combing plant.
He vividly recalls his first visit.
"I had to go through the Checkpoint Charlie gate on my own," Mr Kirkpatrick said.
"The German company representative I was with had to take the car through a different gate.
"He told me once I left immigration on the other side of the gate to walk straight up the street to the corner and to wait there for him to come and pick me up.
"So after I left immigration I walked up the street to the corner.
"When I got there I went to turn left to have a bit of a look around before the car arrived, but just around the corner was a soldier with a rifle over his shoulder.
"I didn't speak German and he didn't speak English.
"I made gestures to indicate I was waiting for a car to pick me up.
"He made gestures to indicate that I should stand on the spot where I was and wait - so that's what I did.
"I have to say, it was a little frightening."
Mr Kirkpatrick said the Leipzig factory and equipment was very old, but still functional.
"We had lunch in the staff canteen with all the workers, they finished lunch with cognac and chocolates.
"We never went anywhere without an East German in the car and we had to be back in our hotel by 11pm," he said.
There were also business trips behind the 'Iron Curtain' to a processing client in Budapest, Hungary, which was a communist government-funded operation.
Hungary was much more "open" to visitors from the West than East Germany, Mr Kirkpatrick recalled.
He pointed out that Soviet bloc countries had been good WA wool customers.
"People forget Russia used to be one of our largest wool customers - in the 1960s and 70s Russia was quite big in wool," he said.
Mr Kirkpatrick attributes his longevity in the industry to a "natural affinity with the wool fibre".
"I had a feel for the wool - you can't teach that," he said.
His career in wool began when "my father put me on a truck at The Esplanade, Perth, in March, 1958, in transit to Leonora, I was 15".
"Consequently I was working in a shearing team as one of the shed hands.
"We did the (eastern Goldfields) wool stations to the end of June.
"We used to say that the Chomleys at Leinster Downs had Bungaree sheep (historic South Australian bloodlines) which were like Shetland ponies."
After a second year with the team Mr Kirkpatrick get a job with Rex Robertson & Co, a large company at the time.
"Their business was buying (greasy wool) privately in the country which they on sold in Europe, all going to buyers in Italy, France, Germany."
After starting in the wool store and completing a course at the Wool Technical School in Fremantle, Mr Kirkpatrick was promoted to the "reclass" section of Robertson & Co where he learned about styles of wool.
This was in the days before wool testing to establish specifications.
Wool appraisal was subjective by visual assessment and touch to determine whether a particular line of wool suited a client's requirements.
"They reblended a lot of clips and made large lines for some European clients - some of the clips they sold in the original bales and some were sorted for particular quality for the customer," he recalled.
"In 1964 I joined a French company, Wenz & Co, as a junior wool buyer.
"They were in wool exporting and quite large in sheep skins which were shipped to France.
"The sheep were slaughtered at Robbs Jetty (an abattoir operated on shore beside the jetty at South Fremantle from the 1870s until 1992) - we had a skins store right opposite.
"After the first two years Wenz & Co sent me to Melbourne for further training and I did Melbourne, Geelong, Portland, Sydney and Adelaide (sale rooms).
"In those days the majority of the overseas companies - UK and European - were privately owned and in many cases their wool buyers had been trained in the UK and Europe and transferred to Australia to represent their particular company.
"The wool buyers were toffs - well dressed, well paid, they were an image of wealth.
"Working alongside these French, German, Italian and Swiss guys was an experience, wool brokers treated these guys as gods," Mr Kirkpatrick said.
He quickly learned his trade from them as most of the wool in those days was bought to order by these companies.
"Buyers were given the orders (for the types and quantities of wool required) from their home office in whatever country - head office gave you the bidding (maximum) clean price in pence per pound.
"You had to get the order right," he said.
Back in Fremantle as Wenz's buyer he also followed the European buyers in becoming "very particular about the appearance".
In the early 1960s Japanese companies entered the Australian wool market and remained major players until the mid 1990s.
"They sent representatives and they were very aggressive in wanting to take control of market share and that was also at the time of the demise of some of the
smaller European companies," Mr Kirkpatrick said.
"They (Japanese companies) were buying 20-30 per cent of the production - taking about 650,000 bales nationally a year."
In 1972 Wenz closed and Mr Kirkpatrick joined Lohmann & Co.
"With Lohmann we used to buy privately and at auction and I become the rep responsible for selling to the Japanese," he said.
"I travelled for 11 out of 12 years to Japan every year - the same as people go to China now.
"I made some friends out of some of these companies.
"The Japanese wool companies were basically all corporates (divisions of much larger business conglomerates like Mitsubishi) and as you moved up the ladder you went and paid more for your suit - the boss wore the best quality suit and the dearest in the place.
"In that period of the 1970s to early 80s, 30pc of WA wool production was sold outside the auction system - it was all bought privately.
"The Japanese sort of initiated purchasing from one month to six months out, taking contracts.
"To counter, we then as Lohmann would offer woolgrowers a price in February-March for their clip in July, August, September and on-sell it to the Japanese.
"That was big business as 70pc of the wool was shorn July-December."
In 1983 Lohmann was purchased by Standard Commercial Corporation, a US-owned conglomerate with business interests that included tobacco.
Once Standard took over Mr Kirkpatrick travelled further afield selling wool and visiting client mills, including in East Germany, Hungary, France, Italy, Turkey, Egypt, Israel, Croatia which was then part of Yugoslavia, and to China every year where Standard had wool offices in Beijing and Shanghai.
"You gleaned more information visiting mills, it gave you an idea of what microns or types of wools the customer preferred and then you would offer them containers of these wools," he said.
There were also two corporate meetings in the US and visits to mills there.
"Burlington was very big in wool, a famous name, they had a mill in Clarkesville, Virginia, which we visited," Mr Kirkpatrick said.
"A lot of scoured cardings went to a company called Forstam and they made pullovers and knitwear for women - these mills closed in 2003.
"I travelled around the world, I was very fortunate because not many Australian wool buyers travelled to some of these countries because the overseas companies had their own people."
Much of his world travel was curtailed in the 1990s as Australia's wool industry shrunk by about two thirds from what it had been in the early 1970s and struggled to survive in the wake of the 1991 demise of Australian Wool Corporation (AWC) and its protectionist Wool Reserve Price Scheme.
Mr Kirkpatrick has no doubt about who brought the booming wool industry he had been a part of crashing down.
"I firmly believe that AWC was a monster - I got into trouble because I spoke against it at the time," he said.
"It crippled the overseas industry and the timing was critical as it paved the way for synthetics which probably would not have had the immediate impact in fashion (without the collapse of the wool market).
"The floor price was too expensive in the late 1980s to early 90s.
"You basically had one year's production as the stockpile.
"AWC bought that much (wool through the reserve price scheme) they starved the market.
"Many of the Europeans and Japanese (woollen mills) closed down, in the UK all combing mills closed except one, they couldn't get supply.
"Ironically, as AWC sold down the stockpile, China was coming on board and starting growth.
"It deregulated in 1997 and emerged as the largest single processor for wool.
"When I first trained in Melbourne in the middle 1960s there were probably 80 companies buying wool.
"Now you've got about 20 on the list, but predominantly eight companies buy 60pc of the production," he said.
Mr Kirkpatrick was part of a wool strategy group 1992-1998 chaired by Monty House, WA Primary Industries Minister 1993-2001, who had a vision of trying to salvage former wool glory days for WA woolgrowers.
He travelled to India and China with Mr House to investigate boosting wool sales.
Mr Kirkpatrick joined Westcoast Wools & Livestock in 2004, bringing with him a portfolio of Japanese contacts he had retained and WA woolgrowers he had serviced for years.
After 40 years of working for overseas family and international wool corporates, he was working for a WA-owned company.
Mr Kirkpatrick no longer travels overseas for business and he stopped buying wool on-farm about four years ago.
"These days I'm basically a consultant, I do a bit of everything," he said.
Mr Kirkpatrick still fronts up at the Western Wool Centre on the days Westcoast is selling and any plans he has for retirement keep getting shuffled further off into the future.
