The monstrously-thirsty actor Robert Shaw, spitting feathers after his iconic performance in Jaws’ Indianapolis speech, barked across the set to a young Spielberg, “Stevie, for Chrissakes, get me a longneck of Southwark!”

Now the fine detail of this may not be entirely accurate, but I’d like to think that the man who played the great shark-hunter, Quint, would’ve been a Southwark slurper. It sits well against his gruff, world-weary until a colossal shark devoured my character when I slid down a sinking boat into its mouth, image.

Of course Jaws was already a classic, and Robert Shaw had long been shark food in 1992 when I made the purchases, and claimed my complimentary glassware. How ancient does this now seem? Indeed, it was half a lifetime ago.

The Adelaide Crows had only just been hatched, and their first flag was half a decade away; Nirvana’s Nevermind was still newish and novel; mobile phones were rare and about as smart as Channel 9’s evening programming.

I remember Southwark beer as something Dad occasionally drank. The distinctive green label. Hot summers and kikuyu grass and World Series cricket. My ten year-old self, riding a blue dragster along the tired streets of Kapunda, with cardboard strips pegged to the spokes.

In 1992 I was in Kimba and bought, over a few months, four cartons of the then recently re-badged beer. Green death was, well, dead. The label was now a stylish dark blue, no doubt a marketing strategy to seduce the wide-eyed kids.

Coopers was but a niche refreshment, and a few hipster laneways behind main street. I think the glasses and not the beer was my key motivation. Like buying a crappy car because the clunking model you test-drove was in your favourite colour.

Among my memories of 1992 are the high rainfall of that summer. It started pouring late in the year, continued across harvest and beyond Boxing Day. Typically, the West Coast is a hot and dusty place around then; a parched and baked land, but it was awash, biblically. Parts of the farming country were sullen seas, and reaping was impossible.

Driving home to Kapunda for Christmas I had to go via Whyalla (that’s a disappointing phrase) because Highway One was blocked. Iron Knob was more Soggy Knob, and as we all know, this is never good.

Despite being amorphous solids, such is their resilience that I still have all four of these Southwark mugs twenty-six years on. Since then we’ve lived in ten houses across three countries and both hemispheres. These mugs have housed cordial, milk, water, Coopers Sparkling Ale, and assorted European lager- beers my old mate Bazz affectionately describes as “kooky stuff.” Even Bitburger, Germany’s eighteenth best lager. The mugs are indestructible. They’ve become nostalgic symbols.

They speak of country football; losing cricket grand finals; punting syndicates featuring forgotten horses with energetic mates; VHS versions of Pulp Fiction; Sunday barbeques that stretch into the muggy dark; Chad Morgan cassettes; buying my now wife a Happy Hour beer in the then great front bar of the Kimba pub; a midnight quiet only broken by a lone long-haul truck.

With last Saturday’s sun setting we were mustered about our patio, and it became medically urgent for Mozz and I to upturn a robust ale into glass. As Dr Hook ministered above the effervescent evening (only sentimental songs from irrecoverable ages will do with ancient friends), out came the old mates, the old muckers, those Southwark mugs: silent servants, patiently working as they have since Mark Waugh had an unironic mullet.

Musically, it wasn’t going well for Sylvia, her mother, or Sylvia’s former and anguished flame, but well into their third decade of faithful companionship, the mugs again came good, and the ale danced in the glass. Now, in a curious first, I toast the brilliance of the Southwark mug by raising the Southwark mug! Meta-toasting!

As IA Healy would nasally suggest, ” ‘Bowling Southwark!”