#5 Flavours of Melbourne with Charmaine O’Brien
Charmaine O’Brien, culinary educator and cookery teacher, discusses the diverse history of Melbourne as reflected in its vast culinary range.
Starting with the little-known and diverse diet of Port Philip Bay’s Indigenous inhabitants prior to white settlement, Charmaine discusses the effects of local and global events on Melbourne’s gastronomy. She also explores the relationships between culture, society and changing fashions.
Charmaine's recently published book Flavours of Melbourne: A Culinary Biography (Wakefield Press, 2008) is a mix of culintary history, recipe and guide book and was shortlisted in this year’s State Library of Victoria Summer Read.
Charmaine is also the author of Flavours of Delhi: A Food Lovers Guide, Recipes from an Urban Village and co-author of World Food: New Orleans.
This talk is 30 minutes long. It was recorded at Coburg Library on 29 April 2009.
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Transcript
Charmaine O'Brien: Someone mentioned that there’s recipes in the book. It’s not a cookbook, it’s a history, but the recipes in the book are there to ... it’s my attempt to try and make history live, particularly food, because you can’t really keep food. And all the recipes in the book are recipes that were written by Melbourne writers or they were published in Melbourne and they’re of the period. So I’ve got them out of newspapers or magazines or cookbooks of that time, except for the first couple of chapters where there actually wasn’t anything, I had to go to other sources.
So I was asked by Michael to speak about my book, but on the topic of diversity. So I’ve put a little bit of a talk together. I will read quite a lot from my book. So just on the idea of diversity, I think when we say diversity in Melbourne, we automatically think of the fact that we have a lot of different communities, different ethnic groups in Melbourne, but I wanted to treat it in the sense that diversity means either variety or different. So I just wanted to sort of preface my talk with that. I will talk about the influence on food of having lots of different groups of people coming here, but there’s other diversity that was happening before we were diverse in that way.
I just wanted to start with the diet of the local indigenous people, indigenous people of what we now term Melbourne, and the Wurundjeri are certainly the main group that lived in what is now the greater Melbourne area. They had a very diverse diet, so diverse, in fact, they ate about 900 different plant foods. So I think that’s pretty diverse. Their diet was based on seasonal diversity. They ate what they could get at different times of year. They didn’t cultivate anything. They didn’t try and farm anything. So it was very much based on what was growing at different times of the year. They also moved around their tribal area in relation to the seasons to take advantage of different foods being available at different times of year. In some areas there was more food than others and one of those places was actually at what we now called Bulleen. There was a lot of swamps out there and a particular billabong called Bolin Bolin, which I think is possibly where Bulleen gets its name, but I’m not entirely sure. So I’ll just read a bit from the book.
“To ensure a year-round supply of food it was necessary for the Melbourne tribes to move around their lands with the change of the seasons. With the approach of autumn the Wurundjeri clans would move inwards towards higher ground. They stopped at a traditional clan meeting place, the Bolin Bolin Billabong, now part of the Bolin Bolin cultural landscape precinct in the modern suburb of Bulleen.”
That’s a mouthful.
“During this season, the waters of the billabong were a viscous mess of eels writhing around each other in their annual mating ritual. The men would spend their days catching the eels on spears barbed with emu talons and kangaroo teeth. The most skilled could wield two spears simultaneously, pulling each from the water bearing several wriggling specimens.
Traditional gender demarcation decreed that women were not permitted to handle spears, but some of the women would wade into the water and catch the slippery eels by hand; a feat that required considerable stealth and skill. Otherwise the women were occupied gathering the young roots and shoots of bulrushes and the seeds of other aquatic plants around the billabong.
The bounty of the Bolin Bolin was such that the clans could feast there for up to five weeks. This was not wanton gluttony. It was a way of preparing for the coming winter months. None of the Melbourne clans or tribes seemed to have developed any methods for the preservation and storage of food, unlike the Gunditjamara people of Western Victoria who preserved eels by smoking.”
There is actually an article in the paper today about that particular part of Victoria. I don’t know if anybody saw it?
“Instead, they feasted where opportunity arose and then endured the deprivations of the leaner periods. Animals kept a low profile during the cold months and even stalwart plant foods like murnong were hard to find.”
As I said, there was a lot of plant foods. They also ate a lot of protein food. There was pretty much not an animal that moved that wasn’t eaten. There were certain things around particular animals. Koalas, apparently, were always roasted with their fur on and, depending on what tribe you were, that you totem animals and you never ever ate those animals. So for the Wurundjeri it’s the crow and also the eagle. So they would never have eaten those animals, yet other tribes may have. There were also rituals around food and you couldn’t eat certain foods to a certain age because that would bring sorcerers and all sorts of things, but pretty much they ate most protein foods and, as I said, plenty of plant foods. What they ate a lot of was a thing called a murnong. A murnong is like a root vegetable. It looks a bit like a carrot.
“Murnong is crisp and bland when eaten raw and as it can cause flatulence when consumed in this state, it is usually cooked. Large hauls were often roasted in a ground oven until they cooked down into a sweetish mass called mini. Although it could be dug up all year round, murnong is at its best in the spring when it sprouts yellow flowers and long green leaves which could also be eaten. The wild white man, William Buckley, who spent 30 years living with the tribes of the neighbouring Bellarine Peninsula claimed murnong was capable of solely sustaining a person for many weeks.”
The Wurundjeri and reports of most of Victoria’s indigenous people, the early settlers commented on how incredibly healthy they were. Georgiana McCrae makes the comment that they had teeth that a duchess would be proud of and they didn’t seem to have any illness. And an early settler, a Quaker, James Backhouse, he actually said that he believed that it was their consumption of murnong that contributed to their health because he said they were healthier than their Sydney counterparts who didn’t eat these root vegetables.
Unfortunately, when Europeans arrived, they certainly did not see a diverse range of foods before them. What they saw was grass to grow sheep on and very fertile lands to start growing the sort of foods that they wanted to eat. Just before I move on to that, unfortunately, because they weren’t interested in indigenous foodstuffs, particularly the plant foods, or just didn’t recognise them, it was one of the main contributors to the demise of indigenous people in the area because early European settlers weren’t interested in murnong, but their sheep certainly were and they very rapidly ate a lot of the foliage, ate these plants. They destroyed a lot of the waterholes around which indigenous people collected a lot of food from. So it had a big impact on how people could eat.
And then there was all the stuff about clearing land, fencing off properties so indigenous people couldn’t travel around and collect the sort of food that they were used to. And then we started feeding them a diet basically of beef, pork, sugar, white flour and, for people that had gone from eating 900 plant foods and an enormous array of animals, that had a serious impact on their health. So, as I said, early Melbournians didn’t actually see diversity around them, but, as I said, they saw potential for growing things that they liked to eat and because the soil, the land, was untouched, it was very fecund and things grew very quickly.
John Batman, who set up his home property on the hill that was where Spencer Street Railway Station now is, he immediately planted cereal crops, orchards, et cetera, which all took off really well. And John Faulkner had his men, his team, plant a large part of the southern side of the river of what would have been a huge market garden. He planted it out with a variety of common European fruits and vegetables.
“Peas, French lettuce, radish, potatoes, cherries, damsons, apples, carrots, turnips, cauliflower, savoy cabbage, curly parsley, corn, pumpkin, melons, vegetable marrows and cucumber.”
I put that list in because I think, you know, we have this sort of general idea that, you know, the early settlers ate meat, damper and a bit of cabbage and, look, they probably did, but you can see from that list that they certainly were making attempts to create a much more diverse diet for themselves than we probably consider. They also would have been prey to the seasons because there weren’t, you know, flying in oranges from Spain and strawberries from Thailand and all that sort of thing. So they may have had this type of variety of food in the spring and summer and in winter they probably did eat a lot of cabbage.
It’s very interesting, as you go through, various people coming out from the British Isles and reporting on what they found in Melbourne and some of them would be gushing about the food and saying how wonderful, you know, the variety was and others would be really disparaging, and I think that was probably seasonal. I think, depending on when you came here, there was probably wonderful, you know, fruits and vegetables in spring and summer and if you happened to land up in the middle of winter, there probably wasn’t a lot on offer.
I wanted to talk about diversity within the population. We seem to think just Anglos, but at that point you would have identified yourself as English or Welsh or Scottish or Irish and you would have seen yourself as different to your Scottish or Irish counterpart. Now, one of the things that was very common in Melbourne and nobody seemed to have much difference of opinion on, although there were some, was drinking. So drinking was very popular. There were a lot of hotels, but there was diversity in the hotels as into who went to what hotel. So the names of these hotels will tell you who went to which hotel. So there was the Glasgow Arms, and I know these names still exist, but at this point they meant, Glasgow Arms, you would have been Scottish, possibly from Glasgow. (10.51) again, (10.53) Limerick and then the Farmers Hotel, the Mechanics Arms and the Oddfellows Hotel. So you may have gone based on your nationality or on your profession. So, as I said, drinking was consistently popular but there was some diversity of opinion.
Very early on a Temperance Society was established. Do people all know what temperance means? It means people that, you know, certainly don’t ... well, are not meant to drink.
“By 1841 there was a temperance hall and in 1842 the Melbourne Total Abstinence Society invited Mrs Isabella Dalgarno to give a public lecture on the evils of alcohol. She was a fiery Scot and a well-known temperance evangelist. Her husband was a merchant seaman and wherever they stopped in a port she took the opportunity to deliver a sermon. Dalgarno had a reputation as a fervent and persuasive lecturer and a consortium of Melbourne’s publicans decided they were going to thwart her attempts to persuade people to drink less.
In the middle of her lecture the group entered the hall and rushed onto the stage and one of the men jostled and pushed Mrs Dalgarno. She was hurt in the ensuing scuffle and the following morning she and her assailant appeared in court over the matter. The presiding judge happened to be a man who enhanced his public income through his alternative occupation as a wine and spirit merchant and although she had been the victim, Dalgarno found herself receiving a savage admonishment from the judge for having had the audacity to stand up and speak in front of men. Her attacker was set free without any punishment at all, receiving not even a stern word.”
Again, just to push my point a bit about how, I think, people were eating a more diverse diet, not everybody, than we allow for, this is from an advertisement and there were many. I’ve sort of compiled it from other lists from various advertisers. Anyway, this is an advertisement for Anand Smith & Co, retail and family grocers of Collins Street in 1846. Now, amongst their offerings ... I mean, they had all their pedestrian offerings sugar, flour, et cetera. They had:
“Cake barley, Carolina rice, Labrador salmon, Dermon mustard, Indian preserves, Liverpool rock salt, Jamaican ginger, Bermuda arrowroot, West Indian pickles, Italian liquorice, Naples macaroni and salad oil, Indian soil and mulligatawny paste, Chinese preserves and ginger, North Wiltshire cheese and fine patina rice. In addition to stocking a variety of Chinese and Indian teas, many of the town’s grocers roasted and ground their own coffee beans.
Amongst the offerings were a wide range of spices, curry powders, pickled mangoes, chutneys, assorted pickles, again rice and lots of dried lentils and beans.”
Which comes from the whole Anglo-Indian thing, but I won’t go into that even though India is another one of my areas of speciality, which is why I managed to get it into the book but it fits. Okay. So at this point, there wasn’t a diversity of ranges of places to eat. You either ate in your home or your hut, or you ate in a hotel, not what we call a hotel but a pub. So they were basically your two options for eating.
But in 1851, what happened? Gold. And Melbourne really benefited that because Victoria had the richest goldfields and Melbourne was a port through which, you know, many of the hundreds of thousands of people who arrived from around the world came through. They would get off the boat, they didn’t immediately go off to Ballarat or Bendigo, they would, if nothing else, at least spend an evening in Melbourne.
So there arose this need to accommodate and feed people. So you suddenly get a massive growth in the number of eating places. So they go from being the home or the hotel to ... they had these restaurants called six-penny and four-penny restaurants and what that meant was, for that price you had a complete meal. And I’ve picked the menu here from the Western Dining Room bill of fare, and all these things were six pennies; tripe and onions, beefsteak and onions, hot and cold meat with pickles, and mutton chops. Those meals would have come with bread and tea and there may have been a dessert. Apparently there were never a lot of vegetables happening. They were meat-based meals.
Then you started getting quite a lot of fancy restaurants. We had the Criterion on Collins Street and the Union Hotel on Bourke Street and they served classical French food and if you’d done well on the goldfields, you went into one of these fancier restaurants. Apparently ... apparently, urban myth probably, that the less sort of educated men that had done well on the goldfields would present themselves in one of these restaurants, buy a bottle of champagne and sandwich a hundred pound note between, you know, a couple of slices of bread and eat the money. It’s probably a myth.
So now you had these very fancy establishments and you had people coming from all over the world. Some of them opened little establishments. One was a man called Antony Fortiori and apparently the character of the lover in La Boheme is based on this very dashing Frenchman. He opened a little café in 76 Little Bourke Street which was quite simple, but he catered a lot to what he described as people who came from countries that ended in “i-e-n”. So Canadians, Mauritians, Indians, so he had quite a diverse population. He was just serving very simple food. Here’s another one, a restaurant called Universal Restaurant, 45 Little Bourke Street West.
“First class French kitchen and excellent culinary artistes in it. Dishes: English, Italian or al la Francaise. Continental and oriental languages spoken: French, Italian, German, Spanish, Greek, Turkish, Arabic and Russian.”
Sort of indicates … what do you notice that’s not on that list? The biggest group of people to come, after British immigrants, to Melbourne during the gold rush were Chinese. If you came to Melbourne and you weren’t from the British Isles but you were French or Dutch or Russian or any of those, you didn’t actually look different. You might have sounded different, but you could get away with looking different. Chinese people, as you know, look completely different, so they were completely ostracised.
In general, we were completely paranoid. We thought they were going to take over, take people’s jobs, lower the standard of living. I mean, this is a theme that went ... you know, many of you are probably aware of things like the White Australia Policy. This is a theme that ran from the gold rush. I think one of the reasons, too, is that the Chinese did come in very large numbers, whereas, unlike all these other groups, there might have only been a dozen Mauritians in Melbourne, you know, but there was very large numbers of Chinese people and we certainly at this point were not interested in Chinese food. So I’ll pick that up a bit later.
So then just moving through, the gold rush made Melbourne an extremely prosperous town. It was, you know, the jewel in the crown of the colony for a long time. Many of you probably know that by the 1880s it was being called, you know, the Paris of the Antipodes. It was a very wealthy city. It was the biggest city in Australia. It was the financial capital of the country. It was the wool capital.
And this was very much to do with the money that gold brought into the city. Even when people stopped prospecting for gold because, you know, it got to the point where you needed machinery. It became an industry in that sort of bigger industry sense, but it really bequeathed Melbourne a lot and it became a very prosperous town. And, you know, you started getting many different types of other places to eat, a lot of street food.
