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## WILD FOOD: CULINARY COLONIALISM AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF AUSTRALIAN CUISINE.

Cookbooks, Cultivation, and the Taste of Home

By: Micheala Petruso Advanced Migration Studies

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ABSTRACT: In the intersection of food history and colonisation, historical cookbooks are often more prescriptive  than  representative  of  actual  culinary  habitants  of  individuals.  In  the  colonial  setting, cookbooks act as a marker for the subordination of indigenous cuisine in place of cuisines rooted in the heart of the empire-food becomes representative of culture, identity, and civilisation. In the Australian context,  the  earliest  published  cookbooks  date  back  to  the  1860's,  a  period  in  which  Australia  saw extensive cultivation, pasteurisation, and settlement. Thus, as we trace Australian cookbooks through the late 19 th and early 20 th century, the inclusion and exclusion of exogenous foodstuffs becomes indicative of both colonial identity markers and performative campaigns to associate the colony with specific and particular notions of what cuisine should consist of. By analysing the recipes and discourse of historical cookbooks  and  emigrants'  guides  in  Australia,  the  performative  nature  of  food  asserts  the  tenets  of

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culinary colonialism by maintaining spaces of control and occupation through the association of cuisine, identity, and civilisation.

KEYWORDS: Australia, cookbooks, culinary colonialism, identity construction, indigenous cuisine

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## Introduction

'It might seem at first view as if nature had formed the Australians on a low scale, to meet the poverty of the land in which they were destined to live, in the same manner in which it constituted the Esquimaux to live amidst perpetual ice and snow, where no other race of  man  could  live.  Yet,  in  this  land,  seemingly  the  predestined  abode  of  irretrievable savages, there now live and flourish colonies of another race of man differently endowed, and which, in three short generations, have laid the foundation of a powerful and civilised empire' (Crawfurd 1868: 122).

In 1876, Wilhelmina Rawson published Mrs Lance Rawson's Cookery Book and Household Hints , lauded as  the  first  cookbook  published  by  an  Australian woman. Subsequent reprints and publications have positioned her as  a central figure in the creation of Australian cuisine (Woodcock  2016).  That said, however,  recipes  with  pigweed,  rosella,  or  the  array  of  native  game  in  these  books  are  often  far outnumbered by traditional Anglo-Saxon and European cuisine: hot-cross buns, croquettes, German sausages,  and  mutton.  In  the  colonial  arena,  the  quotidian  routines  of  eating  embody  cultural  and historical hierarchies around consumption in such ways that choice and rejection become signifiers of identity  construction.  Long  histories  of  exploration  and  cultivation  crafted  a  dynamic  in  which  the endemic foods of Australia, often called 'bush food' or 'wild food' became battle grounds for tensions around culture and civilisation. In John Crawfurd's 1868 report on the native vegetables and animals of Australia, a work that is more a lamentation on the indigenous food of Australia, the very title of his article leads us to the point of departure for this paper: '...a Comparison between the Australians and Some Other Races of Man.' Similarly, in Emma Etta Neville's 1867 guide for the emigrant home, she states, '...there is certainly nothing here that will compare with the luxuriance and beauty of England' (Neville 1867: 143). In the case of the endemic foods of Australia, the writings of colonial settlers show a consistent hierarchy of comparison in which settlers position indigenous plants and animals as inferior to imported ingredients and cuisine more traditional and palatable to Anglo-Saxon culinary tradition.

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Throughout this paper, I will examine the ways in which real and symbolic foodways-that is, the actual practices of cuisine and cooking as well as the representation and narratives on food and cuisine, real  or  not-  become frameworks  for  creating and  asserting national identity.  By  examining  early emigrants' guides in tandem with historical Australian cookbooks, I will analyse the symbolic nature of choice and the subsequent rejection of certain foodstuffs, even as cultivation, pastoralisation, and the prescriptive nature of cookbooks demonstrate tensions in perceptions of the intersection between civilization and cuisine. The idea that these writings are often prescriptive rather than reflective of the widespread preferences and practices of the settler population assert the productions of cookbooks as instruments of national narratives around culture in such a manner that positions food as a central point in the expansion of empire.

## Historiography

In the intersection of food history and colonisation, gastronomy is used to assert subordination and notions of civilisation. Culinary colonialism, in this vein, is the idea that gastronomy acts as a field beyond law or property in which settlers can exert jurisdiction (Grey and Newman 2018). Grey and Patel posit that indigenous cuisines often see a progression of conquest, assimilation,  and appropriation-in which there is a destruction of endemic foods as a tool of war and conquest, a forced assimilation to settler diets, and finally a revalorisation of indigenous cuisine (Grey and Patel 2014). That said, in this paper, I will focus on culinary colonialism as a denigration of endemic foods to create a national identity rooted in Anglo-Saxon culinary tradition. Rather than examining the effect settler colonialism had in Australia on endemic food systems and thus on indigenous communities, I will consider how perceptions of these food systems (both endemic and exogenous) by settler communities were embedded in frameworks rooted in culture and identity.

To conduct the analysis of this paper, I will use emigrants' guides written by Australian settlers as well as  historical  cookbooks.  In  emigrants'  guides,  a  researcher  can  often  see  a  reproduction  of  initial perceptions-given that these  are written for future settlers,  we see reconstructed  judgements  and comparisons about the suitability of endemic food, Aboriginal peoples, and the success of cultivation. In regard to historical cookbooks, Albana notes, '...cookbooks are rarely if ever accurate descriptions

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of what people actually ate at any given time and place. They are usually prescriptive literature, and thus reflect peoples' aspirations, or even merely the authors' expectations of what readers might like to know rather than actual culinary practice' (Albala 2012: 230). These sources allow a researcher to consider the perceptions and ideologies that shaped cuisine-both through the act of cooking and the culture around cuisine-at the time of writing, whether or not they were actually intended to provide guidance  to  the  average  cook.  The  inclusion  or  exclusion  of  food,  and  the  origins  of  the  recipes included, are prescriptive to the direction of culinary culture in the colony.

In order to consider this intersection of culinary colonialism and the creation of identity, this paper will focus on the mid-nineteenth century to just after the First World War The Australian colony's first cookbook was published in 1864-Edward Abbott's English and Australian Cookery Book: Cookery for the Many, as well as for the Upper Ten Thousand. As stated previously, Rawson published the acclaimed Mrs Lance Rawson's Cookery Book and Household Hints in  1876 . Though these early cookbooks do include foods endemic to Australia, they are also filled with recipes much more familiar to the readers, both settlers and English audiences,  whose culinary palates were rooted in Europe. By the mid- to latenineteenth century, as many of these cookbooks hit both national and international shelves, much of Australia  had  already  been  cultivated  by  settlers-  farmers  grew  crops  imported  from  Europe, pastoralists supplied steady sources of lamb, beef, and other familiar meats, and even exogenous wild game  had been introduced (Mayes 2020). In short-  the  ingredients  recommended  by  Australian cookbooks, despite being European in nature, were easily available to settlers throughout the country.

## Section I: Food, Identity, and Colonialism: An Overview Historiography

Before delving into an analysis specifically rooted in the interrelated nature of cuisine, identity, and perception in colonial Australia, it is important to have a broader look at the intersection of food history, identity construction, and colonialism. Both Singley and Parasecoli reference the 'omnivore's dilemma,'  coined  by  Claude  Fischler,  in  which,  as  omnivorous  animals,  we  are  torn  between 'neophilia' (the desire for new opportunities to feed ourselves) and 'neophobia' (the fear that these new additions to our diet could make us sick or kill us) (Singley 2012). When we are exposed to foreign

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dishes or foods that we might deem exotic from our own cultural standpoint, culinary uncertainty is introduced as the points of reference we may be used to are left behind. As we delve into new and exotic meats and produce, we often attempt to draw these tastes back into a broader culinary reference point-that is, to take something unfamiliar and categorise it through the familiar.

In Abbott's 1864 cookbook, for example, a note preceding instructions for cooking emu states, 'This is a very unctuous sort of food, and much resembles coarse beef in flavor. At the early establishment of the colony, it was generally partaken of, but we cannot recommend it to the epicure, unless he has the sailor's digestion…' (Abbott 1864: 84). In a description of a using kangaroo on the following page, Abbott quotes an emigrant's guide Mrs Meredith's Home in Tasmania which states that kangaroo is, in fact, very much like hare, after describing a cooking method of dredging the lean meat of the kangaroo in bacon fat 'as if they were illustrious Christmas beef grilling at some London chop-house under the gratified nose of the expectant consumer' (Abbott 1864: 85). Abbott himself notes in a commentary of Mrs. Meredith's cooking recommendation that beef or mutton can be cooked in the same way. This is almost a given, however-the endemic meats listed throughout this section are rarely,  if  ever,  cooked  or  seasoned  in  a  manner that the  average settler would be unfamiliar with. Kangaroo tail is compared to oxtail, just as the Bass-Strait bird is colloquially called the 'mutton bird.' Meat, in this sense, becomes universally interchangeable, with familiar tastes for unfamiliar meats easily reproducible.  To  confront  the  unknown  in  the  cuisine  of  the  settler  colony,  in  which  there  is  a landscape of unknowns, the omnivore's dilemma is addressed through reorienting experience to the familiar.

Yet it is important to note that Abbott's book was never actually printed or published in Australia, and moreover, modern scholars question how representative Abbott's work was of settler cuisine-as stated previously, cookbooks often act as an aspirational source. O'Brian posits that though Abbott was born in the colony, he considered Britain to be the 'parent' culture-by adding in the kangaroo, the emu, the 'mutton bird,' and so on to his cookbook, there was a hope he could expand traditional English cooking (O'Brien 2016).  This is relevant in that Abbot's book acts as a touchstone for the idea of a colonial power actively shaping the perception of food in a settler colony already inhabited

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by indigenous peoples. The publishing of this cookbook in England was an act of actively shaping the idea of food and cuisine in the settler colony for those in England (who may be potential future settlers), whether or not it was the actual reality of food in Australia. Until the 1890's, the vast majority of cookbooks used in Australia were English cookbooks, and the inclusion of 'bush food' in Australia cookbooks (published in Australia or not) is not a widespread marker of the cultural direction of cuisine-as O'Brian notes, 'A singular work could effect such change but when a collective of books proffering similar ideas of food and eating emerges the influence is more certain' (O'Brien 2016: 137). In light of this point, it is important to note that the vast majority of cookbooks I considered for this paper, both those ultimately chosen for further analysis as well as the ones not used as source material, very few contain endemic ingredients compared to a much larger collective of books revolving solely around Anglo-Saxon foodstuffs. The inclusion of 'bush food,' in light of the trajectory of Australian food history and production is often highly aspirational and not extraordinarily reflective of culinary evolutions, given that the vast majority of cookbooks used until the 1890's was English by publication and authorship, and afterwards was heavily influenced by a food production heavily based on AngloSaxon culinary roots.

Tensions  around  unknown  and  known  food  can  develop  political  undertones-food  is  often exceptionally  symbolic  and  can  thus  become  a  marker  for  community  membership  or  otherness (Parasecoli 2022: 86-88). In other words, food is a marker for tradition: 'Traditions open themselves to be integrated in political projects precisely because they are, in many ways, political themselves, in the sense that they participate in determining what a community is and how it sees itself down the line' (Parasecoli 2022: 88). In the case of the colonial project, it is important to note that endemic foods often supplement imported stores in the early years of settlement-however, as food supplies became more stable and as cultivation took hold, this desire for native foods decreased (Singley 2012). Becuţ draws on sociological and anthropological approaches to food studies to note that food choices and  habits  are  constructed  through  collective  identities  (Becuţ  and  Puerto  2017).  As  the  colony develops, more people become involved in the production and preparation of food. Farmers supply crops, pastoralists supply meat in the form of lamb, beef, and chicken, food transportation systems are put in place, markets to buy foodstuffs spring up, colonial administrations form communities of safety

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and nutrition. People throughout the colony become involved in the widespread consumption of food, and thus consumption and cuisine become facets of community and kinship. Food acts as a vector for social membership (Becuţ 2017).

Throughout the nineteenth century, land policies in Australia allowed for the relatively cheap purchase of land to encourage cultivation-wheat became the dominant cereal crop, the rise and fall of the wool market  saw  shifting  strategies  by  pastoralists  in  their  strategies  in  mutton  and  lamb  markets, technological  improvements  allowed  for  the  growth  of  dairy  enterprises,  among  other  changes (O'Brien 2016). There is a distinct development of industry and production modelled on Anglo-Saxon ingredients and methods of production. Though emigrants' guides and early Australian cookbooks may include descriptions of endemic foods (generous or not), how to cook them in familiar manners, or even how Aboriginals may have used them, there is a clear trajectory in Australian food history of a standardisation opposing Abbott's aforementioned ideal of expanding English culinary tradition in the spirit  of  Australian  food.  Food  hierarchies  become  increasingly  polarised  and  stigmatised  as  the accepted framework of food becomes less diversified and more ingrained in specific cultural notions'wild' food is juxtaposed with politics surrounding the superiority of cultivation and pastoralisation. In the case of indigenous plants, the main question for colonial food authorities often revolves around cultivation potential. In the words of economic theorist Jean-François Melon, '...all agreed that to be productive the existing population needed to be well fed. For this reason, a nation's strength was closely correlated  with  its  possessing  the  greatest  possible  quantity  of  foodstuffs.  An  adequate  supply  of affordable and nourishing food was thus essential for the 'security, wealth and glory of a state' (Earle 2017: 174). Cultivation is the key to the productive potential of the colony, and thus the frequent scorn for the cultivation potential of Australian crops sidelines these foods as familiar, imported crops take precedence.

We can see this development by looking at the latest cookbook considered in the scope of this research question, Wattle Blossom's 1924 Off the Beaten Track. Throughout the eighty-eight page book not a single recipe relies on, or even includes any ingredient particular to Australia. In the introduction, the publishing company notes, 'The recipes and hints contained herein are intended for use with standard

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ingredients only. To ensure this standard, which includes quality, purity, and correct blending, insist upon Mitchell's Pure Food Products' (Blossom 1924: 1-2). Consider the title of the book ( Off the Beaten Track) and a note by Blossom herself: 'Some of the methods given are quite different from the old fashioned and generally accepted way of preparing various foods, the new way has been found the better way, and in spite of the prejudice that exist against any new thing where the kitchen is concerned, we are confident that once tried, the methods will be permanently adopted' (Blossom 1924: 2). Blossom's note is immediately followed by the publisher's-yet the only manner by which the book veers 'off the beaten track' are some modified cooking techniques-slow roasting rather than cooking meat at a very high temperature, for example. The book is standardised and universalised for the colonial experience, not just the Australian settler. Recipes within could be replicated throughout the empire so long as cultivation and food management allowed access to Anglo-Saxon ingredients. The publisher goes so far as to recommend a specific food retailer Mitchell's Pure Food Products (who, given the advertisements throughout the book, likely sponsored the publication). The standardisation of ingredients as well as the implication that there was standardised access to food production systems and branding shows a distinct progression from earlier cookbooks drawing from what could be supplemented from the 'bush' to cultivated foodstuffs, or how endemic foods could act as substitutes for the more familiar.

As this develops, Singley notes that the ridicule of foreign foods becomes a way for the in-group to assert its own patterns and habits as superior-and as civilised. In her article on projects devoted to 'civilising' children in Australia, Russell quotes English novelist Anthony Trollope: 'The white man, of course, felt that he was introducing civilization; but the black man did not want civilization. He wanted  fish,  kangaroos,  and  liberty'  (Russell  2009:  335).  Endemic  foods  are  thus  opposed  to civilization-so  long  as  the  Aboriginal  desires  them,  he  cannot  be  among  the  civilised.  Similarly, Singley gives another example: 'one young Aboriginal boy was considered to have been rehabilitated into civilisation only once his penchant for 'scorched' kangaroo cooked in cinders was eliminated and his  palate  was  able  to  become civilised  in  the  European  way'  (Singley  2012:  31).  Becuţ states  the following: '...these historiographies have illustrated how gastronomic heritage expresses the common concern in all human societies for historical continuity and preservation of a shared sense of community membership,  even  though  these  fabricated  past  and  origin  myth  are  the  construct  of  imagined

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communities….food products and technologies have entailed transformative processes impacting local cultures,  consumer  tastes,  regional  economies  and  political  developments'  (Becuţ  2017:  2).  This racialisation of food in the vein of civilised/uncivilised conceptions will be discussed in greater depth in a following section, but nonetheless, this paradigm is an incredibly significant marker in settler food history. The history and utilisation of food in the colonies-in regard to exogenous imports, denial of the endemic, the strategic use of perceptions, and so on-is a history of inclusion and exclusion. As the settler colony explores competing tensions of new frontiers and heritage and tradition, perceptions around food shift and fluctuate around political and economic frameworks set in motion by settlers and their colonial authorities.

## Section II: Bush Food: National Identity and Cuisine in Australia

Australia, by the mid nineteenth century, was far from an unknown mass of land-records of Europeans sailors sighting the 'Terra Australis Incognita' (unknown southern land) stretch back to Dutch explorer Willem Janzoon in 1605 (Ma Rhea 2018). The first settlers arrived in 1788, bringing their agricultural technology with them (Henzell 2020). By the time  the source material for this article was published, the processes of cultivation, pastoralisation, and food production  were well under way. By 1864, when English anthropologist John Crawfurd wrote his previously mentioned report on the vegetables and animals of Australia, three generations of settler colonists had worked and toiled to cultivate the land in the image of civilization, something that Aboriginals, in his view, were incapable of conceiving. In his own  words:  'With  equal  advantages,  we  can fancy  no  such  advancement in  the  Australians,  who, although corn and cattle have been presented to them in abundance during three generations, have never grown a plant or bred an animal, but are now the same naked, houseless, wandering savages, living on the wild productions' (Crawfurd 1868: 122). Throughout this section, I will consider how the narratives in reports and emigrants' guides combined with recipes and commentary in Australian cookbooks use cuisine as a performative marker of national identity.

In  previous  pages  I  have  noted  the  prescriptive  nature  of  historical  cookbooks;  frequently,  these

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cookbooks  were  less  representative  of  what  citizens  and  settlers  were  actually  eating  and  more dogmatic. Some of those used for this paper include only recipes European in origin and ingredients, others include endemic flora and fauna but were only distributed in England, suggesting themes of exoticism and individual gastro-cultural intent rather than actual culinary phenomena. That said, in the case of emigrants' guides and reports such as Crawfurd's, the audiences are far clearer. Crawfurd's report,  published by the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, is directed towards the academic sector-which has further influence on the political and economic sectors of the colonial machine. In Earle's article on food and colonialism, she notes that commercial botany in the  colonial  empire  formed  an  enterprise  of  seeking  new  staples  from  colonised  land  to  feed  the continuously  growing  labouring  populations  of  both  Europe  and  her  colonies  (Earle  2017). Anthropological reports such as Crawfurd's outline the potential commercial viability of introducing foodstuff endemic to the empire to the global commercial market.

Emigrants'  guides  are  directed  simply  at  the  potential  emigrant-filled  with  anecdotes,  advice, descriptions, and comparisons, they seek to prepare future settlers. In the case of food and Australia, for the purposes of this analysis, one major purpose of emigrants' guides is the comparative nature of these guides . Neville's 1867 Life's Work as it is makes several points of comparison: 'Australian turkeys are much bigger than the English turkey, and more delicious than any kind of game found in Australia' (Neville 1867: 122). In another paragraph, she remarks, 'We would have to remark that the fish of South  Australia  is,  without  a  question,  rather  inferior  to  that  in  England'  (Neville  1867:  122). Commenting on the flora of the colony, 'Speaking of trees, the Australian foliage is totally different to England in every way…we certainly must say the trees can neither in foliage nor form vie with those of England. The writer has a great partiality to the Australia bush and its peculiarities, but there is certainly nothing here that will compare with the luxuriance and beauty of England' (Neville 1867: 143). The image of the colony is always set against the backdrop of the homeland-a hierarchy of beauty and taste.

John Willox, in his 1858 Practical Hints for Emigrants' to Our Australian Colonies, is slightly more subtle in his establishment of hierarchy. 'While nature has dealt thus lavishly with Australia in respect to mineral wealth,' he writes, 'she has not been less bountiful in supplying a soil, which taken in

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connection with the fineness of its climate, is capable of yielding in abundance nearly every description of vegetable growth which man can require for his necessities… The indigenous vegetation of Australia is at once remarkable and interesting' (Willox 1858: 38). Rather than spending an abundant time considering this indigenous vegetation, however, he immediately shifts to discussing the successful growth of vine, olives, wheat, oats, barely, and more. He lauds the success of cultivation of all those 'culinary vegetables' introduced by British colonialists. Similarly, in Philip Muskett's 1893 The Art of living  in  Australia, the  author's  plea  to  increase  the  vegetable  consumption  is  followed  by  a  list describing 'relatively unknown vegetables'-notably, however, all of the vegetables he precedes to list of exogenous vegetables originating from Europe or, in some cases, America (Muskett 1893: xi-xx).

All of the preceding works excluding Muskett's, which becomes a cookbook in the second half of the book,  predate  the  boom  of  cookbooks  published  in  Australia  in  the  1890s.  Before  settlers  began publishing works and recipes that prescribe the growing culinary culture, these works show distinct hierarchies of desirability, usefulness, and beauty-even when endemic Australian foods are described positively, they are quickly sidelined by the superiority of crops and animals imported from elsewhere. Willox states, 'None of the fiercer beasts of prey were met with; not, on the other hand, were there any congeners to those most useful domestic creatures, the horse, or the ox, or the sheep' (Willox 1858:  39).  The  true  success  of  the  colony,  in  some  sense,  is  replicating  market  and  landscape throughout empire-and though the colony will never quite measure up to the homeland, and the nostalgia of this can be read in the aforementioned comparisons, attempts to replicate it can be seen in the culture and production of food and landscape. Rhea takes note of this sentiment as seen in another emigrants' guide in her study on Australian national cuisine, '…its natural productions, particularly those of an animal or vegetable kind…its birds, its insects, are all new, and what is very remarkable, none of them of great utility. Its trees produce no excellent fruits…The native shrubs are generally harsh, ugly, and dark coloured - the flowers are many of them very pretty…The Colonist however need not complain of this barren list, for although the native productions are so useless, yet he will find  at  Sydney  all  the  fruits  and  vegetables  of  his  own  country,  and…all  these  things  are  already cultivated at Adelaide and other parts in abundance' (Rhea 2018: 181).

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To  date,  the  only  endemic  Australian  crop  developed  as  an  international  trade  product  is  the macadamia nut-originally eaten as a 'bush nut,' the very name 'macadamia' indicates a specific banality and differentiation from other types of 'wild food,' given that it was named after an amateur British botanist (Wessell 2022).' In his article on the history of macadamia nuts, Wessell notes that native plants were less familiar than local animal products to settlers-some local fruits were used in jams and cordials (familiar preparations), but macadamia were considered in particularly high esteem. However, as aboriginal communities were not consulted in the cultivation process, until the twentieth century, they remained a backyard, bush, and garden staple. It was not until the mid-twentieth century that the crop was definitively named and exported to other current and former colonies throughout Africa and the Americas (Wessell 2022). Notably, the macadamia nut does not appear in any of the cookbooks researched for this paper-very rarely do  any endemic  plants  appear.  Even though  the macadamia  nut  does  not appear,  this  is  relevant  due  to  the  simple  notions  of  availability  and standardisation. As noted previously, there is an increasing standardisation in the ingredients required for the recipes of these historical cookbooks. Rawson's occasional usage of 'wild' plants such as rosella or pigweed is remarkably uncommon, and she is the only author of the cookbooks used in this paper who uses or even mentions endemic plants at all. Despite its status as the only endemic Australian crop to be cultivated in Australian trade, it had little to no place in the creation of national culinary identity.

Australian agricultural history tells the story of 'brave and resilient men triumphing despite repeated failures and threats to life, family and community' (Mayes 2020: 50). These narratives tell of the clearing of eucalypts, planting crops on untilled land, and slow transformation of Australia to civilization. They use agriculture and cultivation to reinforce the history of Australia as a nation under white ownershipit was the settlers who tilled and worked the land, who opened forests for grazing, who created a food production system for continued population growth, and thus white settlers are situated in permanent states of belonging (Mayes 2020). This pride in cultivation and agriculture begins to cement ideas of national cuisine and identity around sovereignty and labour. In Abbott's preface to his 1864 cookbook, he states, 'The following pages will show the British and Colonial mode of rendering the vast articles that God has been pleased to give us for our use, nutritious and wholesome, as well as palatable to our tastes' (Abbott 1864: v.) The 'rendering' of land and food useful is the colonial project-cultivated land is civilised land.

The addition of  meat  and  game  in  historical  cookbooks  is  another  significant  marker  in  national identity construction around food.  The wild game of  Australia, throughout emigrants' guides and cookbooks, is more acknowledged and remarked upon than endemic plants. As discussed in the last section, there are frequent comparisons to more familiar meats so as to render the game of Australia more familiar and palatable, particularly when cooked in methods familiar to the Anglo-Saxon settler. That  said,  however,  the  animals  are  consistently  viewed  as  wild  game-there  is  no  cultivation  or breeding on a broader scale to put endemic animals at the forefront of the meat supply in the colony. Of the three cookbooks that include Australian game, Abbott's was published only in England and often  seems  to  glamorize  the  meats  by  including  small  excerpts  from  other  sources  to  portray  an exoticized enjoyment of certain animals. Tasting roasted wombat, for example, would allow one to discover new pleasures, just as ortolans are the 'most delicious morsels' (Abbott 1864: 85-86). The reliability of Abbott's work in reconstructing settler cuisine at the time of writing has already been discussed, however, and thus Rawson's description of 'bush meat' remains the only source written by an Australian for Australians under the scope of this paper. Henrietta McGowan's 1911 The keeyuga cookery book includes no native game at all, though it does include specific sections for mutton, lamb, and beef; Muskett's 1893 The art of living in Australia and Blossom's 1924 Off the beaten track similarly include meat sections with no native game; and Pearson's 1889 Australian Cookery does, in fact, have a specific section for wild game without including any wild game that has not been imported.

Mayes argues that to eat mutton and potatoes, rather than kangaroo and yams, allows the settler to take steps beyond physical and legal possession towards 'ontological possession' (Mayes 2020: 7172). In order words, I have noted culinary rhetoric throughout this paper that diminished endemic foods as lesser than and as opposed to civilization. Adapting to foods that settlers have historically held as inferior acknowledges the existence of aboriginal food cultures and dynamics of food sovereignty. By changing the very landscape of available food and standardising food production around the AngloSaxon model, there is no longer any need to substitute 'the real thing' with endemic meats; to cultivate these would invite them into the culinary culture and would diversify a cuisine looking to reproduce

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tastes of home. Mayes quotes cultural anthropologist Claude Fischler, who theorised the omnivore's dilemma:

'...food  and  cuisine  are  a  quite  central  component  of  the  sense  of  collective belonging…culinary systems…play a part in giving a meaning to man and the universe, by situating them in relation to each other in an overall continuity and contiguity' (Mayes 2020: 71).

In this sense, pastoralists, farmers, colonial authorities, and the settlers themselves, as they take up certain habits and routines including cooking and choosing certain foods above others, created a spatial imaginary of control-rivers, plains, constructions of what 'vacant land' consists of, and so on. The settler colony works at different levels to institute methods of control and occupation, and the control of cuisine takes the form of narratives insisting the labour of settlers in establishing routes of food production give them sovereignty over land. Narratives of sovereignty based on agriculture reinforce the cuisines built from the fruits of that agriculture.

In McGowan's 1911 The keeyuga cookery book, she notes the definition of 'keeyuga' at the start of the preface- 'Keeyuga: Western District broad-lip native dialect, meaning 'within.'' She provides no further explanation naming the cookbook as such, and beyond simple reasoning that there is, in fact, recipes within this book, one might assume the use of a name drawing from an aboriginal dialect would reference the aboriginal roots of the colony in some capacity-not so much in terms of aboriginal inhabitants, but in the capacity of foodstuffs. This is not the case. McGowan mentioned no native flora or fauna over the course of the two hundred- and twenty-six-page cookbook. She states, in her preface, 'Twelve years' experience in supplying weekly large numbers of recipes to the public through the medium of a well-known journal has proved pretty thoroughly what the manner of recipes the Australian cook wants mostly' (McGowan 1911: 4). Cultivation, pastoralism, and food production systems  based  on  the  growth  and  sale  of  exogenous  foods  standardised  available  food  based  on exogenous imports. What the Australian cook wants, McGowan implies, is rooted in the colonial systems of food production, a superseding of one cuisine over another. The national cuisine, to cement sovereignty and authenticity, mirrors a 'taste of home' rooted in settler pasts.

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## Conclusion

In studies of Australian national cuisine today, the influences of migration after World War II and the decreasing  costs  of  travel  in  recent  decades  have  created  an  increasingly  multicultural  culinary identity-a 'mongrel cuisine' or one of 'migrants and mavericks' (Newling 2022). Yet, prior to these influences, the history of Australian cuisine has been rooted in establishing sovereignty through the exogenous. Cuisine is performative-and deeply rooted in identity construction; frameworks around cuisine assert national identity, and in a settler colony, assert spaces of control and occupation. Though few of the cookbooks used in this paper utilise endemic foods for their recipes, this is not to say that there was no appreciation for these foods  in the  colony  (Albana  2012:  235).  That  said,  however, individual appreciation is not representative of culinary narratives produced on broader scales.

With the rapid growth of land cultivation and colonial structures of food production, the endemic foods that once supplemented the frontier settlers' diet became increasingly racialized and propagated as  undesirable.  Few  endemic  ingredients  made  their  way  into  the  Australian  household,  and  the mechanisms of colonial industry seized on opportunities to import the familiar rather than learn to cultivate the unfamiliar (Newling 2022). As a settler colony in which the vast majority of settlers traced their roots to the same culture, food became a marker of sovereignty and civilisation. The focus of lamb as the national meat of Australia, an idea that continues in modern culinary culture, acts as a metaphor for the civilized/uncivilized paradigm of food history in the country-the settler colony 'tamed' the wilderness of Australia and effectively repressed or completely destroyed the alternate food pathways and systems developed by aboriginals over sixty thousand years (Newling 2022).

The  array  of  emigrants'  guides,  research  reports,  and  cookbooks  (authored  in  both  Australia  and England) are indicative of how early the colonial shaping of cuisine in Australia began-from the first time English explorers made their way into the unfamiliar land, England remained in the foreground as a point of comparison: a juxtaposition between the tamed, capitalist centre of empire and wild, uncivilized and unsettled land ripe for cultivation. Food became a step on the path to the colonial idea

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of civilisation. Food is racialized even as it is used to supplement the survival of frontier households: indigenous cuisine is utilised in a manner that imposes sovereignty on aboriginal knowledge in order to  sustain  the  household  while  attempting  to  recreate  the  homeland  with  a  mixture  of  imported exogenous supplies and available endemic foodstuffs. Endemic food is nearly always supplementary.

In Albana's article on using cookbooks as historical documents, he states, 'Cookbooks written for specific immigrant communities are a way to maintain and express identity when surrounded by the forces of assimilation' (Albana 2012: 235). Culinary colonialism in Australia, when looking specifically at  discourse  and  perceptions  around  food,  took  the  form  of  directly  connecting  progress,  culture, beauty, and civilization with Anglo-Saxon cuisine. Indigenous food was rarely more than a substitute, and always inferior-novel, strange, and exotic. In the words of John Crawfurd, 'This strange region of the earth was even more remarkable for the plants and animals which it wanted than for those it possessed' (Crawfurd 1868: 117).

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