Food of Australia (H). Wendy Hutton
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replace domestic cooking in Australia, as in much of the developed world. A whole range of new artisan businesses tempt the market with specialty wines, beers, cheeses, breads and other products. Home-based cuisine is replaced by post-industrial production, and this creates consumers who are more individualistic in their tastes. In recent years, however, the advanced economy, technical expertise and "foodie" enthusiasms have put Australians at the forefront of global cooking. Now not just from cans, the full fruits of the earth can be enjoyed by well-informed eaters.
Native Australian Food
The rediscovery of ancient indigenous ingredients
by Andrew Fielke
Australia's newest cuisine paradoxically depends upon its oldest ingredients. When white settlers first arrived in Australia a little over two centuries ago, the country's Aborigines—who had inhabited the continent for some 40,000 years—had a remarkable understanding of its natural resources. However, it is in only in the last decade or so that the non-Aboriginal population of Australia has begun to discover its exciting range of indigenous food, not only obvious items such as kangaroo meat but a variety of wild seeds, nuts, fruit and vegetables known to the natives for thousands of years. Ironically, much of this ancient knowledge was in danger of being lost as many Aborigines left their traditional homelands and adopted new lifestyles.
The Aborigines' spiritual bonding with their land and their knowledge of its produce had been handed down from one generation to the next by their legends and stories. The first white settlers in Australia, noting that the natives were not agriculturalists in the accepted sense, dismissed them as simple hunters and gatherers. It has since been discovered that the Aborigines irrigated some areas of land, regulated the undergrowth and encouraged re-growth and genetic diversity by practicing controlled burning of the vegetation. Certain abundant food resources were actively managed and maintained. Seeds of fruits were often scattered after eating, and when eggs of the magpie goose were taken, a few nests were always left untouched. In South Australia, the Aborigines stored excess live fish from their catch in special traps.
Aboriginal rock paintings in the Northern Territory show an emu and a lizard, both of which would have been roasted over a fire before being eaten.
Most foods were eaten raw, but some required special treatment such as roasting or pounding and leaching in running water to remove harmful toxins. Some foodstuffs were cooked, with witchetty grubs, kangaroos, smaller mammals, crabs, birds and fish being roasting over a fire. Wattle and Kurrajong seeds were roasted on red-hot coals, ground to a flour, mixed with water and baked to make a nutritious damper or seed cake.
The recent discovery of indigenous ingredients by non-Aboriginal Australians was made possible largely by Vic Cherikoff, a research scientist at Sydney University, who was the first person to commence commercial collection and distribution of a range of native foods through his then fledgling company, Bush Tucker Supply Australia, in 1987. His company, and others like South Australia's Creative Native Australian Industries, distribute a wide range of native ingredients. From the handful of Australian chefs who initially took up the challenge of incorporating Australian native foods into modern and conventional recipes, there is now an ever-increasing acceptance of, and interest in, such ingredients.
The range of fruits, herbs, spices and nuts available has increased considerably, with responsible companies ensuring the sustainability of such wild foods through the practice of ecologically sound farming. Such companies also grow and market Australian native food plants for sale to commercial produce growers and home gardeners, and some also manufacture a range of gourmet food products made from the plants and fauna species. At the same time, there has been a proliferation of emu, yabby and barramundi farms.
Today's Australians have the unique good fortune to be able to use fruits, nuts, seeds, herbs, tubers, vegetables and animals just as they were some 40,000 years ago, unmanipulated by man through genetic engineering or selective breeding.
A dragon lizard ready for the fire. A wide variety of seeds were also roasted on red-hot coals before being ground to make a nutritious flour.
Restaurants like Adelaide's Red Ochre Grill are helping to introduce Australia's age-old bush foods to a wider audience, and the consistent success and international attention over the years demonstrates that the concept of a creative indigenous cuisine is far more than just a fad. Native foods are slowly but surely being integrated into Australian cuisine, although it is unlikely that large numbers of Australian restaurants will become dedicated "bush food" restaurants. Young Australian chefs now have the opportunity to use Australia's oldest ingredients to develop a fresh and innovative style of cuisine limited only by their imagination.
Mediterranean Influences
Australia moves from damper to focaccia
by Tess Mallos
One often-quoted statistic which reveals just how many immigrants from the Mediterranean have made Australia their home is that Melbourne has the third biggest population of people of Greek origin anywhere in the world, including Greece.
The immigration of hundreds of thousands of Mediterraneans—primarily Italians, Greeks and Lebanese—has had a profound impact on the cuisine of Australia, yet the changes in mainstream eating patterns happened only relatively recently.
As far back as the 1880s, small numbers of immigrants from Italy, Greece, Cyprus, Lebanon, Syria, Malta and Spain began arriving. In 1947, acknowledging the country's severe manpower shortage, the government decided that more immigrants were needed if Australia was to reach its Ml potential. By this time, only 2 percent of the population of 7.5 million was of non-Anglo-Celtic origin and the government continued targeting the British so that Australia's Anglo culture could be maintained.
But it was necessary to also include continental Europeans if Australia's population was to grow quickly. Displaced persons of Northern Europe and other Europeans were allowed, with large intakes from Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Poland, Holland, Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Yugoslavia, Italy, Greece and Malta. By 1991, almost 18 percent of the population—which had more than doubled to 16.5 million since 1947—did not speak English in the home. Today, Italians are the largest immigrant group after those from the UK and Ireland.
A group of Italian Australians in Perth, Western Australia; Italians form the country's largest immigrant group after settlers from the United Kingdom and Ireland.
While Australia could provide the basic ingredients to allow these "New Australians" to maintain their dietary preferences, they were initially obliged to turn to their own gardens and to their own expertise in the kitchen. They made their own breads, yogurt, some cheeses, preserved meats and pasta, supplementing these with special foods imported by a few Italian, Greek and Lebanese stores.
Back in the 1940s, our "Greek" country garden provided us with the many vegetables and herbs not eaten by Australians of Anglo-Celtic background, as did the gardens of immigrant Italians and Lebanese, A number of Italians then set up market gardens to supply the many Italian-owned fruit and vegetable shops catering to the needs of the general public, as well as customers of Mediterranean background.
Because of the rapid increase in the numbers of immigrants arriving from the 1950s onwards, there was a greater opportunity to manufacture the foods they sought on a commercial scale, such as salamis, prosciutto, pepperoni and other preserved meats, Italian and Greek cheeses, yogurt, pasta and filo pastry. The ready availability of such products now made it possible for other Australians to become familiar with hitherto exotic foodstuffs.
Today, pizza and pasta are very much part of the Australian diet, as are Lebanese/Syrian tabouli and hommus, Greek tzatziki and taramosalata. There are olives galore, and sun-dried tomatoes became so popular in the mid 1980s that imports are now competing