Oceans by Andrew Dwyer
Recipes and stories from Australia's coastline
Robyn Lewis
Oceans by Andrew Dwyer [©Melbourne University Publishing Ltd]
Summer is the time of year in Australia when things move at half-pace – you’re either on holidays, or staggering (perhaps raring) back to work after a well-earned rest.
As well as recharging those batteries, the holidays are bound to be full of food, drinks, relaxing, casual entertaining – so how to prolong that summer feeling as far as possible?
For many Australians, summer holidays means one thing – the sea – so what better way than with lashings of fresh fish and seafood? You may not still have your fishing rod in hand or be at the local pier in thongs and shorts picking up some catch of the day for tonight’s barbie, but the return to school which signals the final end to holidays is still weeks away – so let's try some new ways with seafood to get 2010 off to a relaxed and healthy start.
Oceans by Andrew Dwyer might be the book to do it, at least for the healthy part of the equation. Dwyer runs outback expeditions and is an experienced bushman and chef with a great love of the Australian outdoors and cooking, which shines through in Oceans.
He has been involved with tourism for twenty years, has presented cooking programs on The Great Outdoors and conducted cooking classes on outback cuisine in the USA. He’s obviously well travelled, too. So he’s pretty qualified to teach us a few tricks, whether you want to cook your seafood round the camp-fire, on a barbecue or in the kitchen. His recipes work, because they have to.
Dwyer obviously likes a ‘good yarn’ as we say in Australia, and I’m sure his tales have enlivened and perhaps terrified many of his fellow expeditioners. As we know, Australia is an island continent, and with nearly 35,000 km of coastline – plus over four centuries since white man started exploring it – there have been plenty of opportunities for shipwrecks and seafaring tales.
However despite the great recipes and visual appeal of Oceans, this review has taken me a while to write, because I’m not sure this combination work so well in print.
Smack bang in the middle of the first section on soups, between the New England clam chowder and the prawn bisque, is a graphic account of the shipwreck and subsequent brutal murder of the passengers aboard the ill-fated Batavia in 1629, which must be one of the most unappetising stories in maritime history anywhere in the world. It’s a bit like having you fish and chips wrapped in Martin Bryant headlines or a detailed account of the Columbine massacre in your latest copy of Jamie Oliver – hardly likely to get you in the mood for food – and we’re only on page 8.
Get past that (if you have a strong stomach), endeavour to appease yourself by reading a couple of Asian soup recipes, and it’s quickly onto the life and death of Bungaree, ‘Australia’s first Aboriginal circumnavigator’, who perhaps needless to say also met a sad but thankfully less violent end. Blue swimmer crabs with macadamia and wild-lime mayonnaise and piri-piri prawns come between this and mutiny on the Bounty. I think I need to drink the whisky in the following sautéed lobster tails with whisky and lime to continue. This is not a recipe book to leave open in front of curious children or to give to those prone to nightmares.
Which is a pity as the recipes are great. So let’s give it a MA (mature audiences only) rating and press on....
Next follows the fish section, which has many Asian-inspired flavour combos, plus some good recipes for easy entertaining including barramundi with lemon and olive dressing and swordfish poached in champagne and lime.
Tales of the theft of the Ferret and of the truly remarkable French explorers Baudin and Hamelin in their ships the Naturaliste and Geographe – who left many names on maps of the Australian coastline – are fortunately more digestible. All the history is extremely well researched by Dwyer and his assistant Jenny Hadlow; I’m just not convinced that a cookbook is the place for it. But you may disagree.
Dwyer showcases his international repertoire in this section with ceviche of sweep (a common fish off the NSW coastline and around Victoria to South Australia), Mesopotamian carp (at last, something to do with carp other than fishcakes!), Indonesian snapper, Greek baked eel, Tanzanian fish masala and Tunisian-style flathead with harissa and olives, amongst others which will get you salivating before Captain Bligh pops up again, closely followed by Australia’s worst civilian disaster on land or at sea: the wreck of the Cataraqui on the west coast of King Island in Bass Strait, where 400 people lost their lives in one terrifying night. I’ve been there and even on a calm day the place is forbidding, the shoreline like an open jaw lined with sharp stone teeth….
And thus to shellfish, via a milder account of the artist Ian Fairweather (if only) and thence to the Loch Ard, which in part is responsible for the naming of Victoria’s ‘Shipwreck Coast’. Perhaps a therapeutic fire on the sand to barbecue some cockles Aboriginal style might restore me, or some razorfish (or scallops) with warrigal greens. I look forward to trying the winter squid stew when the winds from Antarctica start up again, and recreating Singapore chilli crab at home.
Tales of the young convict girl Mary Bryant and seven-year-old orphan Betsey Broughton follow, and the wreck of the Pandora on the Great Barrier Reef – I’m beginning to feel like some rum. Make that overproof. There’s a Flinders Island recipe for mutton-bird (shearwater) curry, which reportedly masks the strong fish oil odour; one to try outdoors, perhaps.
So through sauces, salads and desserts, most easy, summery and appetising, before the somewhat-too-recent 1998 Sydney to Hobart yacht race disaster and The Star of Greece in 1888, which lost eighteen souls in the worst shipwreck yet off South Australia. I’m not sure I can face the mango bavarois with coconut sorbet after that, although the irony that this tragedy now lends its name to an excellent restaurant on the Esplanade at Port Willunga doesn’t escape me.
I’m not particularly squeamish but like a lot of people I look to a cookbook for inspiration, salivation and maybe a touch of the lifestyle that the evocative photographs usually promise. There’s no doubt that TV host and chef Pete Evans is right when he says that Dwyer’s dishes ‘are as diverse as this amazing country and ones I love to cook time and time again’. Whether you want them seasoned with some of the less palatable snippets of Australia’s maritime history is up to you. I know a few old sea salts who would relish Oceans, however.
But you’ll sure have some ripping tales for your next beachside barbecue – and some great new dishes to try out – as the rest of the Australian summer shines on.
Oceans by Andrew Dwyer with photographs by John Hay is published by Miegunyah Press (hb, Melbourne, 2009; RRP A$59.99).
Subscribers of VisitVineyards.com and Winepros Archive can buy Oceans from our book partners Seekbooks at 12.5% discount off RRP (postage extra).
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