What I Cooked Last Night

Three days later. It was a long drive and almost one o’clock in the afternoon when I got out of the car to open the lop-sided gate, which had to be lashed to a tree to stay open, onto the campground. The car crunched down a gravel slope and the steep track curved around and the bend opened up a view of the creek down below. The three stood like figures in a Frederick McCubbin painting; indeed, the soft mist gathering along the creek bed, even at this time in the afternoon, made life resemble art. The tents were flattened and there was a random scattering of bags that always says we're going home, but not yet. Breakfast out of cans had been recent. There had been no mishaps or starvation or death by thirst, but one of the three had a large bruise right between the eyes. Walked into a tree at night, he said. Later, after packing less luggage than they had brought into the same space but it not fitting, I drove off the valley floor and up around curves and over elevations and out of t...

So you drive away and abandon them. It's hard to leave three teenagers in a remote place without phone coverage. Even though you know it's actually good for them. It's the anxiety of the connected age.  There had been no flat ground, so I had helped them use stones from the creek bed to build a kind of hollow cairn in which to place their stove, which was a top-heavy unit consisting of a trivet perched over a gas burner and cylinder. Put a pot of water on that, and the serious burns unit is your next stop if you're not careful. It looked like it was designed to be tipped over. And they would have to boil water because there was no tap water. Of course, I had done the same thing decades ago. Lerderderg Gorge at age sixteen; with pipe tobacco and frightening tales at night of Deliverance-style murderers stalking the valley and carving sleeping campers in their tents. We frightened ourselves half to death. In retrospect it was all good fun. Another time we'd camped by ...

Dennis Waterman, who died this week at 74, was the central character Terry McCann in British TV series Minder. I don't usually post about the deaths of actors, but Minder was my personal favourite television show of all, thanks to its intelligent cliché-free scripting, comic touches, sardonic overtones, gritty British cinematography and deft acting, unlike the ghastly face-pulling today's 'actors' carry on with. Minder's locale was seedy London with shady characters wearing suits as bright pastel colourful as the Jaguars, Capris, Volvos and Rovers they thrashed around the warehouse-lined streets of London. They'll be raising a glass at the Winchester Club tonight. Another one? Cheers, Dave.

And then that déjà vu feeling again when the sound of a soft rumbling like a distant earthquake that seemed to come from the sky but was low on the radio; one of those dreamlike trance tracks that run for seventeen minutes and involve a synthesiser recorded in a wheat silo with two overdubbed voice tracks mixed way down low. It is almost music and almost astral dust. The freeway out of Melbourne pointed east; an arrow on the map quivering around bypassed towns and heading for the mountains. We coasted along it easily, like a laden three-master under a stiff breeze. There were three teenagers on board and enough camping gear for three days. An hour and twenty minutes later we turned north at a town familiar to me from childhood days when I would get off the lazy ex-Melbourne train and be met on the platform by an aunt, my mother's younger brother's wife, who was a dumpy, non-nonsense farmer, and who would drive me in a gearbox-whining old Holden up this same road curving around ...

We haven't held this Easter vigil for two years, the church closed down by the health bureaucrats who fear that faith and spiritual succour is a threat to their earthly ersatz-religious diktats. The church was plunged into darkness. Candles were lit from the brazier, bathing the timber and columned interior in a faint glow like dying embers in a cave. The baritone sang the fifteen minute praeconium, an invitation to the light. The Exultet Paschal Praeconium hearkens, alive like a bloodline running a jagged line down through history, from some seventh-century French or Italian composer. A chill ran through me. The voice was accompanied by that aggressive, clashing, almost classical guitar style that punctuates rather than caresses the vocals, medieval-style. The lights came on. Two thousand years melted away. Happy Easter.

Buying retro crime and mystery can be a gamble if you don't know the author. Of course there are many sources of information and websites such as this one provide much information via reviews and are also quite frightening in the sense of revealing the sheer breadth of authors and titles one has yet to read. There is a certain irony in the fact that that website could now itself be regarded as 'retro', still carrying an early 2000s banner and scroll style. (A search for James McKimmey's The Long Ride led me to the site.)

It's been wall-to-wall The Saints records this week on 3PBS-FM and 3RRR-FM following frontman Chris Bailey's death earlier this week at 65. Tributes are all over the web and the 'greatest' accolades are not hype. The Saints' most well-known song - (I'm Stranded) - was voiced by the late Mr. Bailey, and I was honoured to list it at No. 52 in my list of one hundred favourite songs of the twentieth century. Look for more Saints programming in the next few days across the PBS and RRR schedules especially Neon Sunset at noon on RRR.

The Australian reported yesterday on the strange inability of Australia's chief medical officer to identify fifty percent of the nation's population: Australia’s top health bureaucrat has been slammed for refusing to provide a definition of the word “woman”. ... Liberal Senator Alex Antic posed the question to Health Secretary Brendan Murphy ... “Can someone please provide me with a definition of what a woman is?” he asked. ... The question was met with uncomfortable silence. ... "Department of Health? Definition of a man, definition of a woman? Anyone? Professor Murphy?” Senator Antic said. Finally the chief medical officer ventured a timid reply, like Oliver Twist asking for more porridge or a juvenile delinquent owning up to stealing a pig: “Look, I think there are a variety of definitions ... " "Look" ? That sentence prefix is shorthand for 'I know this is a pathetic answer but I'll give it anyway'. The CMO can't define a female but if w...

There are now 'international days' for literally everything. The concept of the 'International Day of' (or 'for') started in the middle of the last century as a promotional tool designed to advertise an issue instead of dealing with it, an idea that is now known as the largely useless modern invention of 'raising awareness’. I had to laugh, metaphorically (I didn't actually guffaw) when I was informed that today was International Carbonara Day. I'm not sure who issued or initiated the day (once again, I don't know the correct verb for the invention and dissemination of an 'international day') but it appeared in an email I receive occasionally from a magazine about Italian food. The article went on to prescribe the correct recipe for the apparently often badly-made dish, which is a simple combination of pasta, egg yolks, and cheese; or, more specifically, pasta, guanciale, egg yolk, grated pecorino, salt and pepper. 'There is no compro...

Yes, of course, the central character in The Stranger by Albert Camus, gets a bad rap. Meursault is sentenced to be executed. That's as bad a rap as you can get. I first read it (in French: L'Étranger ) in high school. It took me several decades to read it again, in English this time, one sweltering day on a beach under a torrid late summer sun, comme un été en Algérie. Plot: Meursault's mother dies, but the vague telegram by which he is informed leads him to be unsure of the date of her death. This fact causes Meursault's growing reputation as indifferent, dispassionate and even heartless. He is surrounded at her funeral by an assortment of ugly characters whose piety nevertheless raises them Pharisee-like above Meursault's supposed detachment: a priest who calls Meursault 'my son' even though they've never met before; an aged 'boyfriend' from the mother's nursing home who ostentatiously doffs his hat; the funeral director, 'a little ma...

The price of meat has gone through the stratosphere as has the price of everything else so it's back to austerity cooking, if it ever left. I always cook austerely, if austere means making the most of everything and paying the least for the best. The money goes on paying too much - mixed salad leaves in a plastic bag cost anything up to $50-plus in supermarkets, but at the greengrocer they are $11-$12 in bulk. You're paying for the packaging which increasingly is ending up in the environment and ultimately ingested by animals and humans (see current reporting on the subject - no hyperlink required; it's all over the news). So it's back to lamb shanks. Yes, I do realise the net kilogram price is higher because you can't eat the bone, but it still works out cheaper than eye fillet steak for example. I've done lamb shanks a thousand ways over the years but versatility is what makes them work so well. Throw them in a pot with water, salt and aromatics and you've...

It was autumn and humid, early evening. A Handel opera, Giulio Cesare, was playing on the radio on 3MBS. It had been composed in 1724, the announcer said: two years short of three centuries. Given what is going on in the world now, no one can really get their head around that. I had been looking in the back of the cupboard. I had a packet of spaghetti, and some olives and capers in the larder. What to make? I found a can of tomatoes. Listening to the countertenor, I fried some garlic and onion in a little olive oil and added the tomatoes to the pan. Then I threw in a dozen pitted black olives chopped in halves, and a handful of capers, and left it to reduce slightly. The aroma filled the house. It hit me when I went out to the back garden to get some oregano and parsley from the herb patch, an old concrete laundry tub. It hit Casper, too, the foster greyhound who might be staying and might not be staying, depending on his behaviour, who raised his nose to the north-west breeze that sou...

We came out of the ti-tree tunnel and walked onto that beach of memories, the two teenagers the age I was then, seeing with eyes I once gazed through, not yet carrying the burden of having seen too many things. It was as if I were accompanying my own past, times two. They went off with their sister and their mother on a walk along the sand to the yacht club, where a giant arc of shoreline cuts right in close the clubhouse, buttressed by a wall of stone. I did what I often do on beaches these days. I fell asleep. * It had been a torrid January day. I had spent most of it floating around on a sea as flat as a tennis court on an old tyre inner tube. Then I'd returned to the old rambling house that my parents rented each summer for a fortnight. That year I'd made it, through seniority, since a couple of siblings had left home, to the double-room bungalow that was an annex to the old house. It was all old stained timber and panelled walls and a picture window overlooking the bay and...

The steep shaded path from the road down to the beach was as it had been all those years ago, winding under a ti-tree canopy and levelling out before opening suddenly on blinding sand and sea. One difference: the path was shorter now, the relentless circular wash of the bay having eaten into the foreshore over time. They were always building groynes and piling up rocks and trucking in sand, but the cruel sea just swept them all away again. It was a humid Sunday, early afternoon. We had driven across the peninsula from the carnival side, past vineyards and through forested valleys where knots of brown ponies carrying school children can sometimes be glimpsed through the trees, like questing hobbits. Half an hour later a Westernport Bay slideshow had appeared from behind the crest of a hill. Somers sits on a lip of the peninsula midway between quiet southern seaside towns with hedges as clipped as their accents, and a naval base and deep-sea harbour at Hastings to the north. At low tide ...