What I Cooked Last Night

The sun setting later at night is becoming a concern for lockdown-loving curfew zealots, whose statements are now regularly exceeding even the most wildly satirical excesses of the savagely incisive university comedy revues of the pre-PC 1980s. Example: Canadian (resident in Australia) health bureaucrat Nancy Baxter said (Herald Sun, 28/9), ‘ ... sunset really shouldn’t be setting the timing of the curfew. ... If it’s getting lighter later (sic), one would think there would be more movement. And the whole point of curfew is to reduce movement.’

The coffee machine was dripping its black magic into the cup. Vito was holding the stainless steel frothing jug. He pulled the lever, and I waited for the familiar throaty muffled roar of steam in milk. Instead, the floor shook. Vito's hand froze on the lever. The espresso glasses on top of the machine danced like crystal fairies. Ten eyes instinctively swung to the window.  Where do you look when an earth tremor strikes? There's nothing to see, unless you're really unlucky. There was also nothing to hear, but the shaking makes you think there is noise. There is only noise from damage, and where I was, there was no damage. Just a bunch of jangling coffee glasses. The five people in the cafe went outside. The five were two customers (one being me), and staff Vito, Katerina, and their father Sam (who is in his eighties and still makes the best coffee of all of them). People were looking at the sky. Wrong direction. Others were gazing in the direction of the tramline. Better g...

Saturday. The city's public transport system shuts down to thwart lockdown protestors. Earlier in the week the drawbridge comes up on Ballarat, population 100,000, when a covid-19 case is detected. Maybe two. Maybe four. The Australian Capital Territory, where Autralia's bureaucracy lives, is given a further four weeks detention (prefixed - as always - 'at least') in the face of a few dozen infections. Back to Melbourne: photographs of several ultra-orthodox residents of the Balaclava/East St Klda area are repeatedy - meaning across many days - published in newspapers and social media following reports of 'illegal' religious meetings. When the truly insane ban on children playing in playgrounds is reversed the obeisant press prints pictures of smiling adults and children jumping for joy at playgrounds - as if gifted with a privilege - instead of being white-hot angry at the sheer stupidity, cruelty and utter pointlessness of the ban. Today: s man flies into Dar...

That lazy afternoon, with Blue Juice dying on the radio towards one o'clock, the kitchen table had Sunday written all over it. The wreckage of someone's - or several persons' - late breakfast of maple-syruped pancakes lay almost buried under the outspread weekend newspapers. Yes, newspapers plural. At least three weekend newspapers find their way into this house. The death of the newspaper will not be on my head. I cleaned the table. I like cleaning it. It is a mid-twentieth century original, of smoke-patterned pale green chrome-edged Laminex, over a tubular stainless steel frame that cleverly curves down at each corner into twin chrome legs that stand on the polished timber floor in neat black rubber stoppers, like little socks. It is as quintessentially 1950s as an R-Type Bentley. (And as long-lasting. Every year I see Ikea tables thrown in disgust onto hard rubbish collections, pathetic legs snapped like twigs, and deep scratches in their faux-timber veneers.) I had pre...

Early Saturday afternoon, about one o'clock. The path led north, hemmed in by a cliff on one side and the creek on the other. Occasionally a ramp or stairway, cut into the hill, cascaded down from a street above and into the valley. Eucalypts scissored the oblique sunlight and I walked on through the flickering kinescope. From my house I had turned west to the corner, north uphill, and east again, to meet the path following the stream’s s-curves. It used to be an undefined dirt trail, then one year the council concreted it and painted a line down the middle with a pedestrian and cyclist symbol. Today - meaning literally today - it was a human superhighway carrying refugees from the torrid hatefulness of their own four walls, moving north and south like somnolent zombies. Floral-masked Brunswick and Coburg hipsters bearing takeaway coffees; family groups with prams and dogs and toddlers wobbling on first bicycles; old people making painful physical progress towards death; joggers, w...

Greater Dandenong Council Mayor Angela Long said (reported Herald Sun, 24 August) police tape had proved ‘futile’ in stopping children going to playgrounds. She will support removing the swings - literally out of the ground - and asking for increased police patrols. Dandenong is a migrant suburb with poor housing stock and a high percentage of units, flats and apartments with no play areas. Play-starved children craving recreation have no other options. Mayor Long said, ‘I’m supportive of taking swings down if it’s to save children’s lives.’ Next day, Dr Seamus Jones of East Geelong wrote (Herald Sun, 25 August), ‘Damaging the younger generations to protect ourselves is ...  immoral. ... heartless and selfish. ... one day (we can) look back at this time ... as the only nation that hid behind its children.’ Herald Sun front page headline, 28 August: Teen Toll: Top Doc Reveals Devastating Health Scars on our Young.

  ' ... but old dogs and children and watermelon wine'. - Tom T. Hall 1936-2021

2021, somewhere near Boston. Ben Turnbull lives in a big old house with a number of empty rooms and attics with creaking pipes. His wife is busy with committees. Ben Turnbull survived the Sino-American war. Many didn’t. This is the aftermath. The west coast is unreachable; wiped out. Entrepreneurs are making brave talk about reinhabiting China’s radioactive wastelands. Parts of New York lie in ruins. China's bombs didn't reach that far: Chinese Americans, sympathetic to China, were responsible. (This book - for it is a novel - was written four years before 2001.) Local thugs ransom Ben Turnbull for property protection. He pays. There are no police. Ben lapses in and out of time-warp consciousness; becoming at one point a monk in 793 Britain during a Viking attack on their territorially-valuable island during which the other monks are slaughtered. He sees the head monk depart along with the invaders. Traitor? No, when they pass a fence, he perceives the monk’s head is on a pike....

The cookbook must have dated from the 1970s, if not earlier; but I could not ascertain this, as the title page with publication details on the reverse had been torn out or lost somewhere along the way. But you can carbon-date a cookbook by the names of its recipes and, sometimes, its typography. Not to mention, of course, its rich heritage of photography which in the case of the 1970s featured chocolate brown glazed soup tureens, Byzantine-style green-coloured stem glassware, tapestry tablecloths and stained glass lamps casting a multi-hued glow over the chunky candle-laden refectory tables.  The book I had in my hands featured 'Apricot-Glazed Ham Steaks', 'Pork Roly Poly' and 'Chicken in a Pot' among its quaintly-named dishes. The book was one of those community efforts with each recipe contributed by an individual. One recipe was 'Virginian Chicken'. Why Virginian? Was it first cooked at Shiloh Ranch? Or featured in an early episode of the TV series? I...

The road led north out of town on a vast hard plain pointing straight towards Australia's dead heart. We had emerged onto this flat superhighwayish landscape out of a series of curving roads through gulch, valley, pass, fissure; the land fractures that yielded 1850s Bendigo gold, whose evidence still lines that city's main streets. I drove the B-roads via Heathcote and Axedale to avoid linear Bendigo's endless stoplights and because I prefer B-roads anyway. The houses along the northbound highway grew fewer, then the big industrial yards and warehouses muscled in, like in every other outer-suburban industrial wasteland in the world. A steel fabricator's warehouse, a wool-buyers' yard, a refrigeration works. Open fields, and then a lonely church, its sign recommending:  Let Jesus Carry the Burden 1 Peter 5-7, in three different typefaces. A larger sign on the next property, a farm machinery sale yard, proclaimed:  Kubota: This Is the Life, which was almost as spiri...

That clichéd Russian casserole dish from what, the 1950s? 1970s? had been in the oven for several hours the other day, using cubed gravy beef, rather than strips of whatever: fillet? scotch? rump?  Anyway, the whole thing is a sham. Onions, mushrooms and wine were not in an early Russian recipe. On the other hand, cubed beef - rather than strips to be sautéed - were. Who cares about genuine? In the 1960s they invented manufactured stroganoff mix, in a packet. They sold millions. Convenience food.  I had shaken the cubed beef in a sealed bag with enough flour to coat it and enough paprika to colour the flour. And salt. And pepper. Then I had sealed the beef in oil in an open pan, transferring it to a casserole with a scattering of marjoram, and then sautéing a couple of thinly sliced onions in the same pan with some halved button mushrooms, before removing them to the casserole. Then a good amount of white wine and beef stock had been sloshed into the pan to coax out the cooked...

There was a little sun as high morning swung into early afternoon. I sat at the kitchen table. The radio sat on the fridge, Off the Record playing the result of a station survey about the best songs ever recorded in Melbourne. There had been three opened rice paper packs in the bottom drawer. It's one of my pet hates, several of something all open at the same time. I had them on the table, along with chicken thigh fillets poached in garlic and a few drops of soy, capsicum, carrot, cooked rice noodles, beanshoots - and a jar of that Vietnamese dipping sauce that tastes like what a rollercoaster feels like to a teenager. A massive salt attack followed by a sugar plunge with a chilli chaser. I had hot water in a shallow bowl to soften up the rice paper, and a damp teatowel to roll them on. Brian Wise on RRR-FM played the predictable Daddy Cool, Spectrum and Skyhooks songs and then announced the number one, towards midday, as a controversial choice: From St Kilda to King's Cross , ...

That Top 100 was meant to demonstrate the sheer arbitrariness of list-making. An example: I deliberated over No. 2 before choosing the Aretha Franklin version of Lucky Old Sun over Ray Charles’. Why? I don't know. Something to do with that old novel title, the singer not the song Later I found as good a performance of Stardust as Nat King Coles’. Ultimately all of this is inexplicable human subjectivity and it changes day to day, like moods or seasons.

Last weekend's front page Covid story led off its third paragraph with: 'Friday marked another grim milestone ...' . Bodies piling up in the streets blocking the view of jaunty kangaroos bouncing along in the distance? Black-hatted cart drivers, medieval-style, yelling 'Bring out your dead'? No. The sentence continued: ' ... with 97 new cases recorded.' 97 Covid infections in New South Wales is another grim milestone? More than half of Australia - 14 million people - are currently under house arrest. No, wait. It has just gone 3 o'clock Tuesday. The following breaking news just hit the ticker (the radio speaker in my case): South Australia has recorded a new locally acquired case on Tuesday as the state is plunged into a full lockdown. One new case - later revised up to four - and the entire population of South Australia has been placed in lockdown. So add almost two million more people to the 14 million above. The South Australian premier, greedily pur...