My interest in Australian cookery began growing up in a household eating Australian food and watching the kookaburras come in the morning to breakfast on scraps from the chops, while families of possums lined up in the evening for suppers of apple, or bread and jam. The table was presided over by my mother, and the rituals of her kitchen were all observed; but venturing outdoors I experienced my father’s campfire cookery, with its scent of gum leaves and wood smoke.
However, like most of my compatriots, I was ignorant of what exactly constituted Australian cookery. Consuming it, immersed in it, does not provide the necessary perspective to analyze and understand. Cultural cringe, then prevalent, did not help: so many Aussies discounted any idea of there being such a thing as an Australian cuisine.
It was only one Easter, when baking figolli (almond pastries) from a Maltese cookbook purchased the previous year during a trip, that I began to wonder what an equivalent Australian cookbook would look like. So began my long journey of researching and writing How to Cook a Galah, published in 2002 with the help of food writer Barbara Beckett and with a Foreword by Margaret Fulton. I travelled widely throughout Australia, tasting and collecting recipes as I went, with long hours in Sydney’s Mitchell Library poring over old cookbooks, and equally long sessions in the kitchen testing. Having studied both the sciences (Honours in Botany) and the arts (a PhD in Literature) gave me the breadth of expertise to try out bush tucker on the one hand, and on the other to read and interpret cookbooks and memoirs of living and eating on the land. My long involvement in the Reconciliation movement as well as a career at the University of Technology, Sydney, brought me into contact and friendship with Kooris locally, and led me to work in several Murri and Torres Strait Islander communities in the Far North besides Indigenous communities overseas, thus confirming my strong faith in Indigenous culture as the foundation of all that has come after.
‘Traditional Australian Cookery’ is the result of my research and love for the culinary traditions of this land – Indigenous, colonial, twentieth century and present-day. It is, like most projects, a work in progress, with more recipes, more topics and more reflections to be added as time goes forward. The future of the Australian cuisine will be built on its traditions, on an acceptance of our great Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander inheritance, on a rediscovery of our colonial culture, and on an imaginative and genuinely Australian use of our migrant foods and our too long neglected native ingredients. The Australian cuisine is, at heart, a cookery of the people, a cookery which meets the needs of ordinary women and men trying unselfconsciously to do their best with what the Australian environment has provided. It is a cookery over which the necessities and conditions of place inevitably exert their influence, as they have done for over sixty thousand years. I hope that visitors to this website will try some of the recipes and gain a greater appreciation of the foodways of our wonderful nation.
(Dr) Laurel Evelyn Dyson
Contact: Laurel.E.Dyson (AT) uts.edu.au
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Traditional Australian Cookery 