‘You don’t know what you’re missing out on’: Meet Australia’s new Mrs Thrifty
There’s a new generation of people finding fresh reasons to preserve their homegrown food.
By Andrew Hornery
Mick and Maris Cummins with some of her produce, including (top shelf, right) bottles of her “adult” cordial called “No Going Back!”Credit: Edwina Pickles
Looking back, it seemed like the unlikeliest of friendships. What could a leftie, art-collecting, inner-city gay couple possibly have in common with church-going, devoutly conservative grandparents from deep in the ’burbs?
And yet, over a bubbling kitchen cauldron and alongside rows of antique jars filled with all manner of preserved goodies, it turns out, quite a bit. Oatley retirees Maris and Mick Cummins are now dear friends who inspired a revolution in my pantry.
I am no longer a slave to the supermarket, my garbage bins are significantly emptier and I have rediscovered a lost family tradition of preserving nature’s abundance.
I first met Maris and retired accountant Mick inside the bustling arts and crafts pavilion at the 2012 Royal Easter Show among the prize-winning doilies and championship fruit cakes. My art-collecting partner, Scott, was negotiating to buy an intricate floral sculpture Maris had entered into competition, replete with tiny bees and caterpillars, meticulously crafted out of thousands of tiny glass beads.
I mentioned the impressive preserves in a nearby showcase and that I had inherited my late mother’s 70-year-old Fowlers Vacola stove-top preserving kit. My mum’s old metal boiler was nicknamed “Macbeth”. It would spend days on the slow-combustion wood stove when Dad’s peach, apple and pear trees were heaving with fruit. Fowlers, which is still going strong today, even had its own cartoon mascot, Mrs B. Thrifty.
Maris’ eyes widened with excitement. “But why aren’t you using it?” she demanded to know after I lamented that the preserving kit was gathering dust in a shed. I was never really a fan of the “mushy” peaches. “I’ve got one too,” she said. “Forget about the peaches, you don’t know what you’re missing out on.”
Fowlers Vacola’s mascot was Mrs B. Thrifty.Credit:
Over the next half-hour, Maris evangelised the merits of “bottling” (the insiders’ term for preserving), detailing the vast store of homemade pickles, relishes, jams and chutneys, along with preserved “boozy” fruits and vegetables, curries, chickpeas, lentils, soups, casseroles and sauces, all stashed in hundreds of pressurised jars under her house.
A week later, we arrived at the Cummins’ house in Sydney’s southern suburbs to collect the beaded flowers. It soon became clear Maris was, in fact, a modern-day, real-life Mrs B. Thrifty, living atop an Aladdin’s cave of gourmet delights that could easily feed a small village for a year.
Touring the backyard, we were shown beehives that produced up to 220 litres of honey a year (every drop assiduously recorded by Mick). Their flock of chickens laid at least five eggs a day. “Too many for us!” Maris boasted smugly as we tiptoed through the chook poo in our pristine designer sneakers.
I was never a fan of “mushy” peaches … Today, however, I am a preserving convert.
Later, she opened the fridge. “Voila!” she declared. It was filled with homemade yoghurt, an impressive range of their own cheeses, including a veiny blue and delicious ricotta, and their own salami. Her shelves were stacked with homemade tomato ketchup, homemade baked beans and bottles of an “adult” cordial labelled “No Going Back!” . In her bathroom were lavender and sandalwood DIY soaps, a vast slab of which found its way home with us along with jars of goodies. I was amazed. How did this petite, devoted grandmother who volunteered for the church, was a passionate line dancer, beader and seamstress and still worked part-time, manage to do it all?
“I did have a pet chook growing up which I would make clothes for – smart little capes – but really, most of it I’ve done courses in and taught myself,” she said. “It has to be practical, though. I like to keep busy, to make things with my hands … Mick has no choice but to go along for the ride.”
In the early days, when trying to make tomato passata left the place looking like a murder scene, I felt a little like television’s Margo Leadbetter, the social-climbing housewife from the BBC’s 1970s sitcom The Good Life, hilariously clutching her pearls as her muddy neighbours, Tom and Barbara Good, wrestled pigs in their living room.
Today, however, I am a preserving convert – and I am far from alone. The post-COVID-19 era, cost-of-living crisis, wellness trend, climate change, egg shortages and food-security concerns have conspired and inspired a new generation of everyday Australians to embrace a way of life more akin to how we lived long before supermarkets and online shopping.
Mick and Maris Cummins show writer Andrew Hornery (right) their bottling system.Credit: Edwina Pickles
Inside arguably Australia’s most successful community garden, St Kilda’s Veg Out, a preserving and bottling shed is being built. Veg Out now has a list of 15,000 people who engage either directly in the garden or shop at the adjacent farmers’ market under the shadow of Luna Park.
“People want to preserve their harvest … the key to this garden’s success is keeping people involved,” explains founder and president Rob Taylor, an actor who rallied the community and fought to save the former bowling club site from being sold off to developers.
“We got political. We got people out of the bars and cafes and into the garden, that was the only way to save the land from developers. This has been public recreational land since 1881, and we fought to keep it. Yes, there’s a waiting list, and if you want a plot you have to show up and contribute to the gardens, but you don’t have to wait for someone to die, you just have to earn it.”
While the toilet paper shortages made pandemic headlines, Aaron Whitehouse, the MD of Mr Fothergill’s Seeds, noticed different items flying off the shelves. “We had people going into shops and buying out the entire fruit and vegetable seed ranges – I’m talking seven-kilogram boxes of seed. People thought the world was ending,” says Whitehouse, whose company is one of Australia’s biggest horticultural players.
Post-pandemic, sales remain in double-digit annual growth and above pre-COVID levels. Whitehouse says, “A new generation of people want to know how their food was grown, they’re interested in freshness and want to take some control over their food supply.” The company recently launched an indoor hydroponic benchtop vegetable garden for apartment-dwellers, which comes with its own LED “grow” light.
“ ‘Sustainability’ has become such a fashionable term now, but this company has been doing exactly that for over a century,” says Fowlers’ owner John Roy, who runs the North Melbourne business with his sister, Nicole.
Fowlers started in 1915, when Joseph Fowler launched his eponymous preserving kit, which helped a generation survive the Great Depression. The company peaked in the 1950s and ’60s but went into decline as supermarkets dominated and suburban blocks shrank. The Roy family bought Fowlers in 1993. Today, they are witnessing a renaissance. Fowlers now has its own Instagram page and celebrity ambassadors – and social media influencers – Maggie Beer and Stephanie Alexander have replaced Mrs B. Thrifty.
In 2024, the Australia Institute and the Grow It Local urban farming movement conducted a national survey that indicated about 9 million Australians are growing some form of food, from a full-blown vegetable patch on a large block to a pot of herbs on an inner-city windowsill.
A sample of Maris Cummins’ homemade produce, including soup.Credit: Edwina Pickles
Grow It Local co-founders Andrew Valder and Darryl Nichols established the enterprise over a decade ago, but the business “got more serious around COVID”, says Bondi Beach-based Valder. Television personality Paul West, who featured in the series River Cottage Australia, joined the company that now has 45,000 registered members. An undisclosed number of them pay a subscription fee for which they receive seeds, detailed growing information and regular tutorials. In late 2024, a crowdfunding initiative among members raised more than $500,000, which Valder says will fund further growth.
“We had all sorts of investors, from mums and dads to self-managed super funds,” Valder says. “Some people invested $250, while I know of one who put in $50,000 … they all share our belief that growing your own food on any scale can help build healthier and more resilient communities and contribute to a more sustainable world. As our relationships with mobile phones and screens grows ever deeper … we offer an antidote for that.”
Darryl Nichols (left) and Andrew Valder founded the Grow It Local urban farming movement, which has 45,000 registered members.Credit:
In Byron Bay, beehive innovator Cedar Anderson is in total agreement: “I think fundamentally humans yearn to farm, to produce their own food, whether that be a vegie patch in the backyard or keeping honey bees and harvesting honey.” Anderson is co-creator of the revolutionary Flow Hive, which has transformed home beekeeping – 140,000 of the handcrafted timber units have sold globally over the past decade. With hives priced from about $1100 each, the business has ballooned into a multimillion-dollar operation, with a percentage of sales raising more than a million dollars towards bee preservation initiatives around the world, including combating the devastating Varroa mite.
As the national backyard chicken and fancy-breed domestic fowl population heads towards an estimated 2 million, former Wollongong builders Trevor and Dayna Tougher were inspired by Paul West’s River Cottage series to quit the “steel city” and buy a property in NSW’s bucolic Southern Highlands. Today, their chicken coop business, The Poodle and the Hen, is booming. They also sell chooks for both eggs and meat.
“There has been a huge interest in chooks since COVID, especially now with all the press about egg shortages and people becoming more aware of aspects of the commercial egg and chicken production industry, specifically what they put into it,” Trevor Tougher says.
Large, deluxe coops cost up to $50,000, while the more compact “studio” range of coops for suburban homes are about $2000. Tougher has enough orders to see out the next nine months. “Chooks are our main business now,” he says.
Back in Oatley, rummaging around her underground food bunker for GW’s photographer, Maris Cummins has selected a few jars for us to sample over lunch, including a batch of her latest prized concoction: pickled red grapes. They look like plump jewels and taste sweet and juicy with a refreshing tartness.
I now have a dozen jars of them in my own pantry. “Better than mushy peaches, eh?” Maris laughs. Indeed they are, Mrs B. Thrifty.
To read more from Good Weekend magazine, visit our page at The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age and Brisbane Times.