Space to play or pause, M to mute, left and right arrows to seek, up and down arrows for volume. Listen Duration: 4 minutes 58 seconds 4 m 58 s Trevor Hart talks about his cheese travels through Europe ( Marty McCarthy ) Download 2.3 MB

Editor's note: A quote claiming cheeses were first recorded in Homer's Odyssey about 8,000 years ago, has been removed from this article. While there are varying estimates, it is widely held that Homer's Odyssey was written around 3,000 years ago.

One of Australia's top cheesemakers has been travelling the world to study hairy goat's cheese and other millennium-old dairy products.

Trevor Hart, from Maleny on the Sunshine Coast, was given a Churchill Fellowship to learn cheese manufacturing techniques that are thousands of years old.

Churchill scholars are recognised as being some of the best in their field, so the honour makes Mr Hart one of Australia's finest producers.

He recently returned from his travels abroad, which included Spain, France, Italy and Turkey.

"I hand-make cheese and there's not too many people who do that," Mr Hart said.

"I wanted to go parts of Europe to see how they've been doing it traditionally, before industrialisation came along.

"We know our cheddars and camemberts, but there's not a great knowledge of old-style cheeses."

Mr Hart said he wanted to explore the original art of cheesemaking, using all natural processes.

"All cheesemakers in Australia can coagulate the milk and start their cheese with ingredients that are manufactured in a laboratory," he said.

"That's been going on for 50 or 60 years, but in the history of cheesemaking that's just a blip.

"I thought 'there must be something else out there' and I went in search of that."

Trevor Hart now makes his buffalo mozzarella using ancient and natural processes ( Marty McCarthy )

Mr Hart had planned to visit the Carpathian Mountains in Ukraine, but changed his plans due to the ongoing civil war there.

Instead he travelled to Turkey, where he stumbled upon hairy goat's cheese.

"It's a very very ancient thing, and what I came to realise is they stuffed the cheese in the skin of a goat," he said.

"It's like white goat cheese, but on the outside is an actual goat that hasn't been shaved.

"It's actually quite confronting when you see it."

Mr Hart said the overall experience had taught him how to produce cheese from scratch.

"I don't use a single ingredient that's an industrial ingredient. I'm using the whey from the batch before to make the cheese," he said.