One Continuous Picnic

We have Vegemite, Violet Crumbles and dishes from around the world, but where is Australia's national cuisine?

Michael Symons, author of One Continuous Picnic: a gastronomic history of Australia 

What is Australian food? Do we have a national dish? To those who might put forward the meat pie, I would respond by querying how often most of us actually eat them. School night meals in most households are more likely to feature pasta or perhaps a stir-fry. Or the cliched meat and three veg, albeit tizzed up 21st-century style with a supermarket "simmer sauce", exotic relish or spice mix.
Why is this so? It is a question at the heart of journalist, restaurateur and academic Michael Symons's revised work, first published in 1982. At the time little had been written on what academia might now describe as "Australian foodways" - the new word for cuisine or food culture, and the anthropology and sociology thereof.

There have been some landmark titles since, including several key publications by the University of Adelaide's Barbara Santich, as well as, among others, the writings of long-time food journalist Cherry Ripe, including Goodbye Culinary Cringe (Allen & Unwin). Symons himself has written two other books on Australian food. My shelves are becoming increasingly crammed with works that grapple, in their own way, with the what, why, where and how of Australian gastronomy.

Symons's bold and controversial thesis is that Australian food owes less to "Englishness" and even to immigration, than to the early industrialisation of our food supply. Since colonial times, he says, Australia has been bereft of a peasant culture, in contrast to the rustic idyll Symons experienced in 1970s Tuscany (and which, he admits, "flavours this book"). Hence, he posits, we have almost exclusively nourished ourselves with a "mechanised, chemicalised and rationalised" version of factory food, far removed from the point of its origin.

As for creating a unique national cuisine, he says, it's an opportunity missed. Between the late 1800s and early 20th century, before the processing and industrialisation of food took full hold, we had city farms and markets and a host of keen, cosmopolitan gourmets. A Queensland farmer's wife, Mina Rawson, wrote in her Queensland Cookery Book (1878) of cooking wallaby and bandicoot. A Sydney medical educator, Dr Philip E. Muskett, argued in The Art of Living in Australia (1893) in favour of a more climatically appropriate diet, advocating that salad replace "tea and damper" as our national dish.

And yet, 100 years on, we're left with the meat pie and sauce: "borrowed, crude, of dubious contents, portable, factory made and by mostly foreign manufacturers," Symons says. Australian food is celebrated on a daily, if superficial basis (witness the growth in food blogs, for example, along with the obvious examples of the food-mad print and broadcast media) but Symons remains cynical. He cites the havoc of globalisation, the loss of culinary skills, the rise of fast food, not to mention the new evil, obesity. On the other side of the culinary divide, however, are farmers' markets; well-travelled, cosmopolitan food-lovers in search of produce with provenance; activists concerned for the economic and environmental sustainability of our food supply; school gardens and organics. Australian food, Symons concludes, is better and worse than ever before.

Author - Michael Symons
Genre - Food/Diet/Recipes
Publisher - Melbourne University Press
Pages - 384
RRP - $34.95