From MasterChef to the Torres Strait, acclaimed chef returns home for her own show

On the eastern Torres Strait Island of Mer (also known as Murray Island), birthplace of Eddie Mabo, children run through the beachside communal kitchen, excitement building for the Coming of the Light Festival, which marks the 1871 arrival of English missionaries.

This year, the occasion is extra special, with the return home of celebrated chef Nornie Bero after a 30-year absence. The owner of Melbourne restaurant Big Esso by Mabu Mabu in Federation Square, the name of which translates as “the biggest thank you” and “help yourself”, and a familiar face on television (MasterChef, Gardening Australia, The Cook Up with Adam Liaw), is overcome with emotion as she sets foot on the island to film her first solo series, Island Echoes with Nornie Bero.

Renowned Melbourne chef Nornie Bero is returning home to the Torres Strait for her first solo cooking series.Credit:

“I was losing it when I saw the island from the plane,” she says. “To see the waters and the traps of Mer, that’s home. I carried that for my dad as well. I think he would have had that proud moment of me going back home for both of us.”

Bero describes her late father as a “black Elvis”, always singing and playing guitar. A single dad, he raised her from 18 months of age, sending her to high school in mainland Australia, from where she went on to Europe to train in Italian and Japanese cuisine.

“I didn’t work with somebody from the Indigenous community until I opened Mabu Mabu,” she says. “I started off with a condiment business because I wanted to talk about flavours of Australia, and then I created my events team, and it was all education. People just did not know where I came from.

“I was like, ‘You know that blue flag that’s next to that other flag that you see flying everywhere? Well, we have these traditions and this culture’. What we’re doing now is a chance for modern Australian food for the future. By the time my nieces and nephews come around, this won’t even be a conversation. It will just be the flavours of Australia.”

Nornie Bero lugs her cast-iron pot around to cook for different Torres Strait communities in SBS’ Island Echoes with Nornie Bero.Credit:

Bero is keen to build on the exposure of Aaron Fa’aoso’s 2020 series Strait to the Plate, also on NITV and SBS Food, and on which neither she nor the island of Mer appeared.

“Strait to the Plate had a connection up in the Torres Strait, and Aaron was awesome, but it didn’t go out big enough to the roots of the wider community,” she says. “Because I have developed this platform around food and culture, [Island Echoes] is able to showcase it even better.”

Carrying a cast-iron pot from Mer to Badu, Moa and Masig, Bero puts her twist on traditional dishes. Like many a TV chef before her – but with a rarely seen authenticity – she cooks on the beach. Her creations, such as lemon myrtle kingfish puffs on sugar cane skewers, scallops with sea spray and desert lime paste, musu steak with wattle seed, and vodka-infused crayfish, go down a treat with locals.

“You see it in their faces. They’re gobsmacked because they never would think of doing it that way,” she says. “It was amazing to be able to cook anywhere … There’s this great moment of the kids walking out to the ocean and getting giant clams, and we just open them up, put them on the fire, and cook them straight there and then. That’s just us – we cook whatever just came out of the ocean.”

Woven throughout the series is the inescapable subject of sustainability.

“All these beautiful islands that we have, in 50 years’ time, a couple of them might not exist,” she says. “And on some of the islands where flooding happens, and the salt water gets into the soil, they can’t plant anything. So that means you’ve got these beautiful tropical islands where people get all their food out of the ocean, but what if one day they can’t get it out of their backyards? That means we then have to import everything, and you don’t want to end up losing those traditions.”

Island Echoes with Nornie Bero premieres on Wednesday, January 8, at 8.30pm on NITV; and Monday, January 13, at 7.30pm on SBS Food.

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