What I Cooked Last Night

Eye fillet with garlic butter. Slice two inches off a 250 gram stick of butter. Allow it to soften but not melt. (Not difficult in this climate: at the time of writing it was 32 degrees outside (we’ve gone from Fahrenheit to Celsius in two posts) with black clouds and storms approaching the city). Assist the softening process if necessary by cutting into smaller cubes. Chop a sprig of parsley as finely as you can including the fine stalk. One way to do this is by placing it in a glass and chopping it with scissors. This works surprisingly well. Peel four cloves of garlic and chop them as finely as possible. Combine the butter, parsley and garlic: best done with a fork, in a cup. Add salt and cracked pepper to taste. (Vary the relativities in this mixture depending on your preferred garlic Beaufort Scale.) Transfer to a piece of aluminium foil, roll up and shape into a cylinder. Refrigerate. Meanwhile peel, chop and boil four large potatoes; trim twenty green beans. If you are n...

Sunday, 19 December 1971 It was another brittle morning, one of those summer daybreaks that brings a gentle roar from the horizon like distant thunder. The last cool breeze had long gone. Eight in the morning, and I was dripping sweat onto the back seat of a 1967 Valiant that had already been laboring for two hours. People collect them these days, but then it was just a car with green vinyl seats and an AM radio and no headrests and windup windows. We were heading directly west and it felt like the home straight, if any home straight was ever 600 kilometres long. Earlier the sun, rising behind, had made a long shadow of the car on the road ahead. Now it was rampaging across the sky. Like so often before, I dozed. If you happen to doze because you are trapped in a stifling car driving across an endless lanscape, you start dreaming the heat. First I was standing too close to a campfire; then I was shovelling coal into the firebox of a 4-6-4 steam engine; then I was a steelworker in...

She says chain bookshops often failed because they were overlit, treated customers like cash cows and sold populist books that ironically catered to a small, occasional reader market. They neglected the 'real readers' who read voraciously but wanted intelligent staff and a wide choice. Paradoxical? Condescending? No. The owner seems to have a very good instinctive grasp of the business. The fact is, buying books is difficult when you have to reach your purchase across a counter stacked high with ephemera designed for the impulse purchaser. Into this category, I place books with one ‘wisdom’ quote on each spread opposite a picture of a sunset; books filled with pictures of cats; books filled with pictures of flat white buildings in Greece; books filled with pictures of cats sitting on flat white buildings in Greece; books that spin off from television shows; and books with ‘Little’ in their titles (e.g., The Little Book of Calm ). This last has sold two million copies, accord...

Souvlakis: Carlton When I was a student (because only students eat souvlakis) I was in the habit of crossing five suburbs to Twins, on the corner of Elgin and Lygon streets, for what were the best souvlakis in Melbourne. Soft, fresh pita were jammed with juicy lamb drowned in yogurt and lemon juice and served in a greaseproof-lined brown bag that collected all the lemony, garlicky juices in the bottom. Slurp. On one return trip, the exhaust manifold came away from the engine. English cars are great until they break. Navy blue 1964 Morris Minor Traveller (the wood-panelled estate) Hamburgers: Ballarat I used to drive to Ballarat for hamburgers. It was a small shop on the Melbourne side of town on the north side of Victoria Street opposite one of the old churches. The burgers must have been good, because it was a three-hour round trip. The crazy things you do in your early twenties, but it was a fun car to drive. White 1965 Ford Falcon XP Lebanese: Russell Street In the o...

Yesterday I walked into a room, and there were no elephants in there.

Friday, 17 December 1971 The day before, during the torrid drive northwards, I had wondered why someone hadn’t built a detour; a giant hypotenuse to slice a triangle off the journey. I did some back-seat mental calculations. Norseman to Kalgoorlie, 191 kilometres. Okay, build a road north-west to strike the Great Western Highway the same distance west of Kal. That’s a saving of 112 kilometres, I figured, thanks to third-form mathematics. I turned my head. What do you think, cousin? Cousin, bored - even with the music now, at this stage of the journey - was drily not sure the Kalgoorlie chamber of commerce would like passing traffic diverted 179 kilometres (mid-point of the hypotenuse) away. To hell with the chamber of commerce, I said, and we kept driving up the first leg to the right-angle vertex. After a few hours of this nonsense, we had arrived. Like far too many places in this story, mining town Kalgoorlie was surrounded by desert. Its gold rush occurred during the 1890s dep...

He broke out of the water and pushed towards the piling. His brother was already there. They rode up and down on the swell, must have been three or four feet, and wore wetsuits against the crusted mussels and other shells on the piling. They pulled themselves up the ladder and went off the edge of the pier again. Tom surfaced and called out he’d been to the bottom. We were four hundred metres from the shore. The pier was a swarm of people, loose boards rattling under hundreds of feet. Flags were everywhere. People were wearing them. There was even one in the sky, trailing a biplane. The plane flew east and disappeared over Arthur’s Seat. The boys jumped into the water from the lower landing, swam under the pier boards, out again, up the ladder, into the water. A muffled rhythmic whump echoed from the shore. It was three in the afternoon. They pulled off their flippers and we walked down the pier. Away from the water it was hot. The whump from the shore formed itself into a noise fr...

Favourite vegetable? Depends on the season. Right now, as summer sails serenely into the bloom of early middle age, I’m enjoying: • eggplant brushed with garlic-infused olive oil on the outdoor grill at sunset; • zucchini done the same way; • warm salad of sweet potato, toasted macadamias and snipped coriander; • silverbeet cooked with aromatic fenugreek (dried) with a touch of yogurt and chilli flakes swirled through; • potato salad with spring onion and crisped prosciutto tossed over the top; • asparagus not much more than merely blanched then rolled in cracked pepper and dipped in orange-flavoured mayonnaise - snap! crack! zing!; and • Brussels sprouts tossed with butter, pine nuts and chopped chili peppers. Not all at once, of course. Another favourite vegetable is the one that looks like a cross between a duckling and a flying saucer: the yellow button squash. Pasta with vine-ripened tomatoes and button squash Trim and quarter six button squash. (Choose squa...

The advertising industry knows how to milk an idea and run with it until it is as dead as Burke and Wills’ last camel, as anyone who has switched on a television, radio computer recently might know. Sam Kekovich isn’t dead by a long shot, but for the eighth year in succession he barks his way in an obnoxious monotone through a sea of bad puns in the Australia Day lamb campaign. It’s done to death, like a barbecue chop that has fallen into the coals. Throw it to the dog. But don’t let the campaign put you off. Buy a lamb rack and light the barbecue. These long warm nights won't last forever. Go outside and enjoy the aroma of barbecued lamb with a hint of mint and garlic drifting across the garden. The mint is reaching for the sky in its captive cell in the back garden, so let’s use some. Pick a dozen sprigs of mint and use these to line a large square of foil. Place the lamb rack on the mint. Give it a generous squirt of vinegar, and a good shake of salt. Toss in a few unpeeled...

Now this is complicated, so let’s go back a step. I drive old cars, because old cars are better than new cars, and because driving a car manufactured twenty years ago is better for the environment than buying a new car - even a Prius - every other year, or every ten years for that matter. Those batteries are murder on the environment, and the electricity just shifts your emissions into someone else's air. Plus, electric cars kill people because they are silent. Last year I was nearly run over by a Prius driven by an inattentive vegetarian backing out of the organic fruit store car park at the top of Lygon Street where the old Liberty cinema used to be. Old cars mean vintage technology: each of mine has something called “stereo with Dolby”, which is prehistoric sound reproduction equipment installed in the dash, where in today's cars you would find video screens, coffee cup holders, geographic positioning systems, internet interfaces, iPod docks, phone chargers, and maps that ...

Thursday, 16 December 1971 There comes a stage in every journey when you just want to get there and to hell with the scenery. The salt shower was the turning point. I had slept the night in the top bunk feeling grimy in the intense heat, and all I wanted was to plunge into the Indian Ocean at the end of the road. OK, that’s salt water too. But different. My cousin and I had been patient. We’d crawled a thousand miles in a westerly direction and it was progress. But then, at Norseman, we ran smack into the world’s biggest detour. Perth is directly west, but to get there you have to drive 150 miles north to Kalgoorlie or 200 miles south to Esperance. How do you decide? Toss a coin? It’s desert whatever way you choose. I wondered how many motorists had felt inclined to just crash the road barrier and plough straight through the dust. At 8 a.m. the car sat at the intersection with its right indicator ticking patiently while several northbound road trains thundered past. Then we turned...

I needed a stamp to post a letter. I fought my way to the post office through the pigeons that plague Victoria Mall, and managed to enter without hitting one or one hitting me. They are everywhere. They sit on the wires and the shopfronts like fat brown and grey sentinels and scrabble about on the ground and swoop onto the tables and chairs outside the cafes and get under your feet. All the shops in the mall have signs reading 'Do Not Feed the Pigeons' but people feed them anyway. The queue in the post office was long and full of people not buying stamps, and it snaked its way around merchandise including boxes marked 'large telescope', alarm clocks in football team colours, childrens DVDs, a table of Christmas decorations marked '50% off', and a display of flatpacked birdbaths.

The label on the wine bottle said the wine inside was 'affable'. It was a Victorian shiraz, 2008. I have forgotten the maker, who might be an affable chap. But I suspect he meant either quaffable or approachable, or a meaning in between those words. Happy new year.

Alexandra, with early morning hair, and books. William at the same age. Thomas, same age.