What I Cooked Last Night

There was this musician in the 1960s, I told them. He was huge, everywhere - when commercial radio played intelligent music. Sergio Mendes, I said. His band, which was more of a combo or even an orchestra, I went on, was called Brasil ‘66. Nothing they recorded then sounds dated today by even a second. I was chopping parsley at the time. Heavy in the garden right now, on the poised starting gun of spring, is that herb along with its three song compatriots; hence the conversation, driven by random semi-conscious thoughts rather than by any ordered progression of script-like dialogue. It’s a lesson I’ve been teaching ad nauseam to my screenwriter-aspiring older (at least from this marriage) child: write dialogue like it’s not a script. I bluetoothed Scarborough Fair and kept chopping. The searing strings chased the ethereal voices around the kitchen, bouncing off the walls. The 1960s were so long ago that when someone asked if Sergio Mendes was still alive I said he’d have to be about ...

Historian K. A. Austin, in his 1967 work The Lights of Cobb & Co. , described the vast Australian network of routes serviced by the company founded by Freeman Cobb: By 1883, Cobb and Co.'s operations were ... gigantic. ... total length of lines operated in Queensland and New South Wales was over 6,000 miles. Such ... can be compared with ... the Great Southern Overland Mail, which ran between San Francisco, California and the railhead at Tipton, Missouri, ... claimed to be the greatest staging enterprise in the world, ... (however) W. and G. H. Banning in an appendix to their book Six Horses , calculate that the length of the route was 2,325 miles. It is probable that, at their fullest extent, the (Cobb & Co. lines) constituted the most extensive system of coach routes in the world. In 1886 Cobb & Co. decided to transfer its coachbuilding operations from Queensland's capital Brisbane and Bathurst, NSW to outback Charleville, 500 miles inland; on the face of it, to ...

I was given this recipe from someone who knew old Bologna, the Italian city; must have had relatives there, I don’t know. The recipe for the sauce, he told me, was heretical to the accepted wisdom; but as historians know, ‘accepted wisdom’ is just the published ‘truth’ of the time. Housewives knew different. Meat sauce for pasta, in the style of the Bolognese.   First, saute a carrot, an onion, and a stick of celery, all diced, in some olive oil in a pan. Set aside.  Remove the casings from three Italian-style pork sausages, squeeze the meat into a rough burger shape, then sear it on both sides in the pan in which you sautéed the vegetables. Set aside. Do the same with a 500-gram pack of minced beef or beef and veal: flatten slightly and sear the whole thing on both sides. This is messy - yes. But the searing gives a more robust, rustic result without the stewing that sometimes results from the usual browning process. And the meat, seared, takes up the cooked ‘soffritto’ flavo...

Geoff Chambers, a scrupulously fair journalist, doesn’t hold back (The Australian, 9 August), on the wanton woke wreckage that is the national capital: 'Canberra is a town where bikies (outlaw motorcycle gangs) thrive, pitbulls roam, meth heads goon and hard drugs are legalised, while the Greens-Labor government bans gas appliances, locks up cats, installs 40km/h speed cameras, forcibly seized a Catholic-owned hospital , considers abolishing wood fires and imposes massive rate hikes during a cost-of-living crisis.’

Someone, out on a walk, said, ‘Oh, you have a rescue dog - what a sad life he must have led!’ I was walking towards the Northern Memorial Park with Zorro, a greyhound. ‘No,’ I replied. ‘The racing dog eats premium vitamin-balanced food that puts the average African child’s diet to shame. He lives with other dogs, is exercised twice a day and travels the state weekly. He is groomed, cosseted, and patted by trainer, owner, spectator and admirer. He is never alone.’ The sympathiser snorted. Like a horse. ‘Then why did you rescue him?’ came the question. ‘I didn’t. He didn’t need rescuing. On the other hand, the dog left all day in the suburban back yard needs rescuing. The dog locked up in an apartment needs rescuing. Every lone dog in the world needs rescuing. He is not a Hawaiian Monk Seal, nor a Desert Turtle, nor a Snow Leopard. He is a dog. A dog is a pack animal. He will seek companionship even over food.’ They don’t listen. ‘Racing is cruel,’ came the aped response, as if heard fro...

Poet Bernard O'Reilly's prose was arguably better than his verse, which is no real criticism apart from damning by faint praise. O'Reilly's autobiographical trilogy Green Mountains , Cullenbenbong and Over the Hills encompass staggering imagery-laden stories of a pioneer family's new-century Queensland mountain-top selection (land granted by the government on the proviso that it be developed) in virtual jungle; early access to such via a sixteen-mile uphill (virtually cliff) walk prior to a track being cut in the bush to allow avenue on horseback. O'Reilly's language is old-school baroque without slipping into provinciality. His sentences are musical journeys showered in punctuation. People don't write like this any more. A semi-colon could be a truck. ... the change of seasons, each with its own attractions and each eagerly looked forward to in turn; Spring with its coming of warmth and flowers, young willow leaves and baby animals; the return and nes...

This afternoon’s  Stolen Moments  on 3RRR offered a fine three-way tribute to musical artists who have recently departed this mortal and musical coil.  Starting with a brilliant tribute to Tony Bennett featuring the superlative 1964 space-jazz version of A Taste of Honey,  the show featured selections from Sinéad O’Connor including You Do Something To Me followed by an extensive João Donato set. Thank you Bailey, announcer extraordinary. https://www.rrr.org.au/player-items/go/300382

Fragrant celery-like flavour with a herbal nose comes from celeriac, the ugly vegetable at the back of the greengrocer’s shelf. They were a dollar each so I picked two and made an excellent alternative to the usual potato mash. No recipe really required. Peel, boil until soft, mash with lashings of butter, salt and pepper.  I served the ugly vegetable alongside a slow-roasted slab of beef and a whole cauliflower lightly boiled and then drowned in bechamel over which I crumbled blue cheese and walnuts and baked, covered, for an hour in the same slow oven.

Barry Humphries' view of Moonee Ponds was pre-dated by the writer quoted above, who opined that, rather than being a hive of insular housewives, the inner suburb was a microcosm of broader Australia. (Extract above from The Moonee Ponds Club: Celebrating One Hundred and Twenty Five Years by Paul Kennedy, published by Clarity In Design 2021.)

The books were in a quiet room, high up on a shelf, in between the Leon Urises and Richard Papes and 1950s Readers Digests, and the middle-brow 1950s coloured-spine Book Club selections that confettied a million safe middle-class bookshelves in the post-war years. I pulled them out when no-one else was around. I was ten or eleven. I could just reach the highest shelf. They were grouped together, like breast-to-breast Zebra Finches perched in an aviary of budgerigars, their own special little genre. The dozen or so books had black-and-white photo sections. No colour: black-and-white is artful, shocking, intimate. You couldn't help looking. Bodies, naked. Skin, too much skin, too much detail. Thin. Multiple. Arms, legs in all directions. Rolling over each other. Then other photos. Strange objects that looked obscene. Then the clothing that the bodies had discarded. Massive piles, like some rag trade warehouse that had been upended. Teeth. False. Shoes. Shoes were the worst. Shoes are...

It was early afternoon in spring, one carefree year in the early 1990s. We were camping deep in the Victorian alps, having left Melbourne in warm sunny conditions that morning. Up in the mountains, it was cooler and fresher. Clean water flowed down from the peaks and it was drinkable straight from the stream.  We were as far in as you can get via four-wheel drive; you could hike deeper into the bush but we were there for only two nights. We had approached the location via Licola (the southern gateway to the Alpine National Park, population 11, and the only Victorian town not connected to the electricity grid), and from there we had proceeded slowly along a narrow four-wheel-drive track through a valley between two rises. There were four of us. Paul Murphy; one of his mates; and me and my son from my first marriage. He was about twelve.   At the campsite, ridges towered above us on both sides of the creek. The campfire was crackling and a billy had been set over it. Sun sl...

High up behind Arthur's Seat, a muddy trail winds off from a large barn near Main Ridge Road and heads south, following the road towards Westernport Bay. As the narrow dedicated horse trail is set well back from the road, cars pose no hazard; the horses sometimes face advancing mountain bicycles whose riders expect the horses to execute a sideways jump into the bushes. Below from left, Princeton; his rider Alex; Harley.

Coddle, bluntly, is a loose combination of two types of pig accompanied by onions and potatoes. It is also an unbeatable winter comfort dish, emitting while cooking warming aromas that will bring them running.  Coddle: as Irish as James Joyce. Dice four thick strips of bacon and slice two brown onions into rings and lightly fry them in whatever medium you prefer. Remove. In the same pan, lightly brown four pork sausages.  Layer the onion and bacon mixture in a casserole with the sausages and the potatoes.   Add a little dried sage, some white pepper and half a cup of chicken stock, just enough to steam the contents of the casserole. Bake 30 to 45 minutes. Garnish with parsley. Serve with Irish soda bread; or any bread for that matter, you could use a crusty Vienna loaf with that typical not-crumbly but slightly gluey orange-yellow crust which is my current favourite, to mop up the gravy. Red wine? Guinness? Barry's tea?

I followed the freeway, first east and then south and then south-west; just over half a clockface around Port Phillip Bay. Free of roadworks again the road gets you to the peninsula in ninety minutes; at least from where we are in the inner north. The elevated southbound bridge circles the city passing a million lights, which drift behind like some passing galaxy.  City behind, the car slid south, engine a sleepy purl, while the radio burbled notes out into space, a slipstream of sound that will never die but reverberate out into the universe and infinity. The program: Passing Notes on PBS; track, Whisper of Fall by Respira. Night driving music, as long as you don’t drift off.  Alex in the big comfortable velour seat (the car is a lounge room on wheels) behind me talks, falls silent, finally snoozing; past where the lights from the houses on the cliff-face of Mount Martha shine like trinkets on a Christmas tree.  Then west again and through Capel Sound and Rye, and  ...