Stepping up to the palate
Food and wine have been key ingredients of The Australian since its inception 50 years ago.
IF evidence were needed of how this country’s food and wine scene has advanced in the past half century, a glance through the pages of The Australian would provide it.
The newspaper in 1964 declared its intention to chart the “sweeping revolution in our culinary tastes”, and has pursued that goal ever since.
It first entrusted the task to Miss Ethel Brice, an expert in “the subtle use of spices” who taught readers sophisticated dishes such as the classic French tournedos Rossini: “truffle optional”, her recipe said.
The Australian, then as now, was ahead of the game. While it carried the latest food and wine bulletins from the civilised world, out in the sticks, restaurants delivered grey lamb, mashed potatoes, carrots and peas, presented at 6pm by staff with a uniquely Australian attitude to service.
Vigneron and restaurateur Len Evans, whose popular Indulgence column ran across three decades, reported a memorable encounter on one of his early trips to the Hunter Valley.
Staying in a small establishment, Evans ordered tea with his breakfast.
“Do youse want sugar in your tea?” the waitress asked, setting the steaming mug on the table.
“No, thank you,” said Evans.
“Then youse had better not stir it,” she replied, and walked away.
But gradually the nation was moving on, and the newspaper responded in 1968 with the introduction of its Eating and Drinking pages, edited by Neville Baker under his imposing title, “Foodmaster of the NSW Food and Wine Society”. In his first article Baker wrote of the misery of having to pay $2.50 for bottles of the “superb reds” made by Maurice O’Shea at Mount Pleasant (good luck getting hold of one for less than $1000 today), and marvelled at tales of posh restaurants in London where, if reports could be believed, “you wouldn’t get out for under $20 a head”.
James Halliday, the nation’s undisputed master of wine writing, whose weekly column still appears in the Weekend Australian Magazine, remembers receiving commissions from Baker long before taking over as the newspaper’s wine correspondent in the early 80s. “The Sydney Morning Herald offered to improve on whatever the Oz would pay me,” he says, “but I wanted the national audience.”
Halliday was the cerebral counterpoint to Evans’ playful Indulgence page for many years, and the men were lifelong mates.
“I went to one of Len’s lectures out at the Sydney showground and that’s when we became friends,” he says. “In the mid-60s Len was the only wine educator in the country. You have to remember that in 1964 maybe 95 per cent of wine made in Australia was fortified, so there was very little knowledge of wine beyond the technical skills of winemakers.”
Not so today. “The difference in knowledge between me at 25 years of age and a young wine professional now is vast,” Halliday says. “In comparison my knowledge was non-existent.”
The Australian, he says, helped bring about that improvement: “There’s no doubt it was one of the vehicles, like a stone dropping in the pond, sending out ripples. It was one of the very first providers of wine information.”
Meanwhile, other writers were establishing themselves in the food and wine pages: Leo Schofield wrote some fine entertaining pieces, as did Geraldine Pascall, a great talent who died tragically young.
Di Holuigue, one of Miss Brice’s successors, has had a ringside seat for the passing parade of taste. She started her Melbourne cooking school in 1969, and measures the growing sophistication of the Australian palate in the 65,000 students she has taught and the readers who treasured her recipes.
“In the early days, when I put squid through the classes it would often come back uneaten,” she says. “Rare steak was simply not on, and even less so lamb. Now look at us; we love our lamb pink.
“Multiculturalism and immigration have helped expand our palates, and our markets have improved dramatically. I’m thrilled these days that you can find a million things we didn’t use to have. We’re right up there at the cutting edge of food in the world: our restaurants are among the world’s best.”
Holuigue remembers the late 80s and 90s as a significant point in the newspaper’s culinary offering.
“We were the leading newspaper,” she says. “When James, Cherry Ripe and I were writing, we were the leading people in our fields. There was no other publication doing what The Australian was doing. Cherry wrote from that more intellectual base, while I tried to demystify food.”
Ripe concurs. “The Oz was the only outlet covering international food issues,” she says, proudly listing some of the topics that first appeared in this newspaper: food miles and the locavore movement; the danger of hydrogenated fats; Mad Cow disease and its implications for Australians who had lived in the UK; the promotion of aquaculture; and the first alert of “Frankenfoods”, where Ripe wrote of strawberries engineered with a fish gene to prevent frost damage.
Today’s food and wine coverage across newspaper and magazine is coordinated by food editor Necia Wilden and writer and reviewer John Lethlean; recipes are provided by David Herbert while Halliday’s wine writing is complemented by the edgy work of Max Allen.
Wilden is determined to live up to the standards set by her predecessors. “In a world swamped with cheap online opinions and celebrity rubbish masquerading as news, the role of experienced professionals in curating information is more important than ever,” she says.
Lethlean believes the newspaper has taken restaurant reviewing to a new level.
“Its commitment is unequalled in the Australian media,” he says. “I suspect few think about the costs, or the effort, of having one person covering Australia.
“I’m not saying my opinion is any more useful than anyone else’s, but at least it’s consistent, it’s one voice.”
Commitment and consistency. As The Australian shows, they’re not a bad recipe for success.