By Cara Waters
Melbourne’s street corners were strewn with shells back in the 1850s when native angasi oysters were the street food of choice and sold in shacks and street stalls.
Now we are more likely to snack on a dim sim doused in soy sauce or grab a takeaway coffee.
Artist Kenny Pittock at the Town Hall with his sculptures for The Dirty Dozen exhibition, celebrating Melbourne’s street food. Credit: Penny Stephens
The 12 street foods that made Melbourne are the subject of The Dirty Dozen exhibition at the Town Hall, featuring ceramic sculptures created by artist Kenny Pittock of oysters, saveloys, ice-cream, meat pies, fruit, coffee, fish and chips, dim sims, hamburgers, Chiko rolls, souvlaki and a halal snack pack.
Journalist Richard Cornish curated the display for the Melbourne Food & Wine Festival and said the items had to be recreated in ceramics because street food, by its very nature, wasn’t long-lasting.
“All the food eaten by hand, the food of the poor, the food of the working class, is never celebrated,” he said. “You don’t see paintings by Vermeer of people walking down the street with stroopwafels.”
Cornish said street food was something that could be eaten on the run, even though in Melbourne it is often cooked inside.
“We don’t have food cooked on the street but we also have really strict food regulations as well,” he said. “If you try and cook some satay sticks out in the open air you’re more likely to get a crowd of blowflies than you are a crowd of people.”
The exhibition details the stories behind Melbourne’s street food, which at times reveals a confronting history.
“The angasi oyster once populated the bay by the millions and fed the Bunurong people and Wurundjeri people for thousands of years and they got wiped out within 35 years of settlement of Melbourne,” Cornish said. “We were eating them on the streets, we were washing them down with champagne imported from France, chilled on ice imported from Canada, and we just ate our way through this amazing ecosphere.”
Melbourne’s street food is also a story of immigration with Chinese immigrants creating the dim sim while trying to make a classic dim sum dumpling “more durable” by changing the filling and deep-frying it.
Cornish said Melbourne’s street food traced a history of strife, war and struggle.
“In the future we’ll probably see a lot more Middle Eastern food as that region is more unsettled,” he said. “Follow the struggle and the food will come.”
Cornish said at the exhibition people could see street food, quite literally, put on a pedestal.
“We’re putting it under a spotlight to show that the food that we eat every day is important, and the food we eat every day has a back story,” he said. “It comes from somewhere, it’s made by someone, and it has a connection back to the land.”
Pittock’s sculpture of a souvlaki for the Dirty Dozen exhibition.Credit: Penny Stephens
Artist Kenny Pittock said he made a lot of food within his art so The Dirty Dozen exhibition was a natural fit for him.
“My work celebrates the mundane things that are in our everyday lives and invites us to think about what these seemingly mundane things can reveal about who we are,” he said.
The 12 street foods that made Melbourne
Native oysters
Saveloy
Ice-cream
Meat pie
Fruit
Coffee
Fish and chips
Dim Sim
Hamburger
Chiko roll
Souvlaki
Halal Snack Pack
Pittock said street food was often fast food, made very quickly, and so it was nice to be able to create representations out of clay, an “extremely slow medium”, which cannot be rushed.
“I just hope people leave the show thinking about their own memories associated with food and also maybe with a rumbling tummy,” he said.
Entry is free to The Dirty Dozen exhibition which is part of the Melbourne Food & Wine Festival and runs from March 21-30, 2025 melbournefoodandwine.com.au
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