WHEN the earthquake hit in 1989, Adam Murphy thanked his lucky stars he collected beer cans and not beer bottles.
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"A lot of bottle collectors lost some very valuable items that day," he said.
Mr Murphy, of Whitebridge, is the acknowledged owner of the world's best collection of Australian beer cans, ranging from the first Aussie cans in the late 1950s to the hybrid aluminium bottles now coming into vogue.
A founding member of the Hunter-based Gladiators motorcycle club, he began collecting cans in 1961, when he was old enough to drink.
"I did a motorcycle trip around Australia and I found cans were better to carry than bottles since they didn't break if you had an accident," Mr Murphy said.
What started as a modest ambition to have a can from every state has grown exponentially, and now Mr Murphy and his wife Shirley have at least 15,000 cans between them.
Mr Murphy collects Australian cans and has about 4500, while Mrs Murphy handles the foreign examples and has about 9500. Her collection includes a wall of kegs from across the globe, many sporting risque designs.
Even the ceiling in their home is full of thousands of duplicate cans for sale or swap.
Beer can collecting is a serious business, and the Australian club has about 300 members, who sometimes resort to extraordinary strategies to locate rare examples.
"The earlier beer cans from England and America were shaped like Brasso tins, with a neck and a crown seal," Mr Murphy said.
One holy grail for collectors is the all olive-green US army-issue can, supplied through the Pacific Islands in the thousands during World War II but now extremely scarce.
Interestingly, Mr Murphy's career has been in wine - he has worked for Tulloch's at Pokolbin for 40 years.
