If you know something helpful about colonial Australia, can you help?
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Question by Umbreon the Keeper: If you know something helpful about colonial Australia, can you help?
I’m trying to do research into what a family would eat throughout the week in early Australia, in other words a menu. But no matter where I look I can’t find any information that may be helpful. I need this info very urgently so if you could provide helpful links to websites, that would be greatly appreciated.
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One Response to If you know something helpful about colonial Australia, can you help?
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Why not post your question on this specialized web site?
http://www.recipes4us.co.uk/Recipes4us%20Community.htm
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Meanwhile, here are some links that might help:
Although numerous Dutch, Portuguese, French, Spanish, and British explorers had touched the shores of Australia and New Zealand from the late sixteenth century onward, it was only in the late eighteenth century that European colonization of these lands commenced. The 1769 voyage of Captain Cook initiated this process, and the establishment by the British of a penal colony at Botany Bay in 1788 (soon moved to Sydney Harbour) marked the beginning of their (since then) permanent — and largely unchallenged — presence in these southern lands.
Several other penal colonies and one free-settler colony (South Australia) were established by 1840, but in the early years it was Sydney that dominated British affairs in the South Pacific. Among other things, Sydney was the base from which New Zealand’s resources — enumerated as flax, timber, whales, seals, sex, and souls by James Belich (1996) — were exploited, and it was not until after 1840 that the direct settlement of New Zealand proceeded. Even then, Australian influences remained strong, especially with regard to food and beverage habits.
The free settlers (both working- and middle-to-upper class) who went to Australia and New Zealand after 1840 were from very similar socioeconomic backgrounds, and not surprisingly, the economies of the two countries developed in very similar ways. Australia was a little more Irish (and Catholic) than New Zealand because in Australia’s formative years, more than one-third of the settlers (both convicts and assisted migrants) were from Ireland. In New Zealand, by contrast, approximately one-quarter of the settlers were Scots, and only 19 percent were Irish. Nonetheless, according to Michael Symons (1982), the Irish influence on antipodean food included a strong preference for potatoes, the method of cooking them (boiling in a cauldron), and a liking for strong drink consumed away from home at pubs.
English settlers comprised barely a half of those arriving in the colonies, and the overall mixed British — in contrast to purely English — character of the population also had considerable influence on eating and drinking in the region. Indeed, the food and beverage habits carried to Australia, and later to New Zealand, were basically those of Britain’s burgeoning urban underclass: potatoes, bread, and tea, with a little sugar, milk, and occasionally bacon (see Colin Spencer, chapter V.C.4.).
On the other hand, some of the assisted migrants, from the working and lower-to-middle classes, were from rural backgrounds and accustomed to a bit more diversity in their diets (potatoes, bread, cheese, butter, bacon, milk, tea, sugar, peas, turnips, and a little meat). Moreover, the officers and officials of the Australian penal colonies and, later, the wealthier settlers in both Australia and New Zealand brought with them the food habits of a middle class, sometimes with upper-class aspirations. Colin Spencer (chapter V.C.4.) describes a late-eighteenth-century middle-class meal in England as consisting of three boiled chickens, a haunch of venison, a ham, flour-and-suet pudding, and beans, followed by gooseberries and apricots. As a rule, large amounts of meat were consumed by those who could afford it, and such vegetables as cabbages, carrots, spinach, Brussels sprouts, and turnips were common. Beer and ale were the most popular drinks until distilled spirits, such as gin and crude rums, took over during the eighteenth century.
http://www.cambridge.org/us/books/kiple/australia.htm
(Scroll about half way down, past the information about the pre-European era.)
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Australia’s first cookbook appeared in 1864. Written by Hobart landowner and member of the Tasmanian Parliament Edward Abbott (1801–1869), The English and Australian Cookery Book: Cookery for the Many, as well as the ‘Upper Ten Thousand’ was more a grab bag of colonial oddities than a definitive guide. It did, however have a section on game, which included kangaroo, emu, wombat, mutton birds and black swan.
http://nationaltreasures.nla.gov.au/%3E/Treasures/item/nla.int-ex7-s8/nla.int-ex7-s9
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Damper
In colonial Australia, stockmen developed the technique of making damper out of necessity. Often away from home for weeks, with just a camp fire to cook on and only sacks of flour as provisions, a basic staple bread evolved. It was originally made with flour and water and a good pinch of salt, kneaded, shaped into a round, and baked in the ashes of the campfire or open fireplace. It was eaten with pieces of fried dried meat, sometimes spread with golden syrup, but always with billy tea or maybe a swig of rum.
http://www.aussie-info.com/identity/food/damper.php
Ms. Worth
December 24, 2012 at 12:49 pm