Tetherd Cow Ahead

Ever since Kevin Cornell posted his sketch of my childhood monster The Prowler a few days back, the image has been lurking in my head (again, after all this time…).

So, herewith a photo portrait of same, so you too can have it in your head.

One of my daily blog reads is illustrator Kevin Cornell’s wonderful Bearskin Rug*. In a recent post about childhood monsters, Kevin asked for readers’ memories of the things that went bump in the night and I mentioned my fear of the dreaded Prowler. Imagine my quivering horror to find that today’s Bearskin Rug features an uncannily accurate rendering of something I thought I had left far behind in the mists of the past.

Gee, thanks Kevin.

Whimper.

Can I open my eyes now…?

*You should be reading Bearskin Rug every day too – it’s not always as scary as this. Sometimes, but not always.

What with all the dismay from foreigners that the Outback Steakhouse is nothing but a farcical caricature of proper Australian food, there are those who have been putting the pressure on The Cow to set things straight. So for your edification, a menu from a typical Aussie childhood, featuring the kinds of food that I grew up with. I need to point out here that there is dispute over some of the following items having an exclusive Australian pedigree (the jury is forever hung on the matter of the pavlova), but this is more a tour through nostalgic food than a comprehensive detailing. I am open to additions and illuminations from my Australian readers – I’m sure everyone has their favourite. I didn’t even get to mentioning iced vo-vos, cobbers, White Christmas, Milo, Anzac biscuits and countless other goodies.

For Starters (or entrees as we call them here):

The Prawn Cocktail ~ cooked small prawns (or shrimp) on shredded iceberg lettuce, drizzled with a tomato sauce & mayonnaise dressing, served chilled.

The Vegemite Sandwich ~ two generously buttered slices of fresh white bread with a thin layer of Vegemite. Best enjoyed with milky sweet hot tea.*

A Serving of Fresh Damper ~ a kind of soda bread, not unlike a scone in texture, wrapped tightly in foil and cooked in the hot coals of a campfire.† Served with a slice of cold lamb and some mustard pickles.

For the Main Course:

Roast Lamb Dinner ~ Lamb roasted with rosemary and pepper, served piping hot with baked potatoes, pumpkin and parsnip, and a generous portion of peas and broccoli. Rich meaty gravy on the side, for pouring copiously across the potatoes.

Meat Pie & Mushy Peas ~ A hot steak & luscious gravy pie served with a topping of mashed cooked peas. Optionally served in a bowl of gravy as a ‘floater’, or in pea soup as a ‘Pea Soup Floater’.★

Carpetbag Steak ~ A thickly cut Scotch fillet sliced open and stuffed with oysters and Worcestershire sauce. Served with mashed potatoes and peas.

Rissoles ~ Patties of meat, herbs and breadcrumbs, shallow fried and served with mashed potatoes and peas. A bottle of Fountain Tomato Sauce presented at table.‡

And for the Vegetarians:

Don’t be ridiculous.††

For Dessert:

Pavlova ~ A sweet crunchy-yet-gooey meringue case filled with cream and seasonal fruits. Strawberries are de rigeur if available. Named in honour of Anna Matveyevna Pavlova, after she toured Australia and New Zealand in 1929.♥♥

A Plate of Lamingtons ~ Small cakes made from sponge and coated with a layer of chocolate and dessicated coconut.

Pikelets ~ Small pancake-like flat cakes, served with jam and honey.

Drinks:

Passiona ~ a passionfruit flavoured soda. The taste of summer.

Tea ~ Brewed in a pot (teabags are a heinous crime perpetrated on humanity). Served black, or with milk, sugar optional. No-one drinks it iced; that’s for sissies.

Lime Spider ~ Lime soda with a big scoop of icecream.

Bodgie Blood ~ Cola with a big scoop of icecream and then a generous splash of raspberry syrup.**

The wine list would of course be comprehensive; if there’s one thing we’re good at, it’s making wine.

As I say, this is a menu typical of my childhood but I dare say you would still find any or all of these things served as part of the every day fare in country Australia. These days, though, especially in the major cities, Australian food can be as sophisticated as any cuisine in the world. Our restaurants do, in fact feature some of the world’s most accomplished chefs such as Tim Pak Poy, Damien Pignolet and Tetsuya Wakada, to name only a few. When I was a kid, we never ate pasta or coriander or even garlic. My dad used to think pizza was an exotic dish. Nevertheless, we have always had an abundance of very fine ingredients, and the extraordinary mix of cultures that we have accumulated makes for some of the most spectacular dining you are ever likely to experience.

*Vegemite is, it is said, an acquired taste. I am of course unable to vouch for that because I must have acquired it as a child. If you’ve never had it, it is a salty, yeasty black-as-tar spread that is traditionally eaten on bread, or even better, hot buttered toast. For me, it is always consumed in conjunction with sweet tea, a combination that has about as much nostalgic effect as Proust’s Madeleine.

**This concoction was served at The Blue and White Cafe in Goulburn, the small country town where I grew up. Only very few Australians remember the Bodgie Blood, even though it was widespread enough for it to be more than merely a local invention, but there are enough of us that we can vouch reliably for its authenticity.

In the comments on The Cow’s last post jedimacfan was moved to ask:

“I suppose the next thing you’re going to tell me is that Outback Steakhouse isn’t really Australian food?”

This reminded me of the one and only time I have ever been to an Outback Steakhouse, near Wilmington NC, and what a jolly old time three of us Australians had therein. And yes, jedimacfan, I’m going to tell you that this isn’t really Australian food. Not even close.

One of the things I remember is that our waiter, dressed in ludicrous faux ‘drover’s attire’ (or something), on hearing one of my friends’ very mild swearing, asked “Do you kiss your mother with that mouth?” We knew right away that these people had very little experience of Australia.

And then we saw the menu. Oh how we laughed! Let us examine it:

♦Bloomin’ Onion – An Outback Ab-original from Russell’s Marina Bay

The ‘Bloomin’ Onion’ is not an Australian invention. It is certainly not an ‘Ab-original’ invention and I sincerely hope that there is nothing more than a bad pun involved in this description. This is about as close to the wind as you could sail with a gag like this without being racist and/or condescending. As far as ‘Russell’s Marina Bay’ is concerned, well, there is no such place. They just made it up! Look it up on Google – all the hits you get are… yep, the Outback Steakhouse. Also, these are frikkin’ big onions. Where do you even get an onion that size outside the perimeter of a nuclear power plant?

♦Aussie Cheese Fries – Aussie chips topped with Monterey Jack and Colby cheeses and bacon served with spicy ranch dressing

It’s hard to imagine a foodstuff you are less likely to find in Australia. Sushi, yes, Goat curry, sure. kimchi, falafel, Chinese-style pig’s trotters, Thai octopus salad, gado-gado, sucuklu, burek – any of these I could go pick up for dinner right now. Foraging further afield I could get barbecued crocodile, kangaroo steaks, scrambled emu eggs and even roast camel. But sorry folks, no-one serves cheese on top of chips here. It is, I think I am right in saying, pretty much an American idea that you should take perfectly edible food and then completely drown it in melted cheese.

♦”Gold Coast” Coconut Shrimp – Six colossal shrimp dipped in beer batter, rolled in coconut, deep fried to a golden brown and served with marmalade sauce .

As bizarre as this sounds, I have to admit that, yeah, in Queensland that’s entirely possible. The Gold Coast is the Australian twin city to South Carolina’s Myrtle Beach. I’m sure jedimacfan will understand the comparison.

♦Walkabout Soup – A unique presentation of an Australian favourite. Reckon!

What? What do they mean by this? Aborigines don’t carry soup on walkabout. It would be utterly idiotic. Indigenous Australians would have NO idea what this was. Furthermore, you could stop anyone on the street here, anyone, and ask them what ‘Walkabout Soup’ was and I will guarantee that not one person other than someone who has been to an Outback Steakhouse would be able to tell you. Reckon.

♦Drover’s Platter – Generous portion of ribs and chicken breast on the Barbie with Aussie chips and cinnamon apples.

Ah, the old traditional Australian cinnamon apples. Yes, they feature a lot in the OS menu. But guess what! WE DON’T EAT CINNAMON APPLES HERE. (Except maybe, like, once every ten years at Christmas time. Maybe). Cinnamon is the dessert equivalent of melted cheese; take any perfectly edible dessert and add cinnamon to it. Genius. I’m surprised no-one in America has yet invented the perfect all-in-one meal: cinnamon coated melted cheese! (In fact I am totally afraid that someone has and I just haven’t heard of it yet).

Botany Bay Fish O’ The Day – Fresh catch, lightly seasoned and grilled, with fresh veggies

You don’t eat anything that comes out of Botany Bay. Or Sydney Harbour for that matter. Seriously. Recently there was a government-issued warning about doing so.

I could go on. Suffice to say that the entire menu is risible in one way or another. There is no ‘Rock Hampton’ although there is a Rockhampton; we have never called mushrooms ‘shrooms’; no-one says ‘Hooley Dooley’ anymore (the last user of this phrase died twenty years back, and he was a hundred and fifty eight); ‘bonzer’ is generally spelled ‘bonza’; and there is not, among the choices of burgers on the OS menu, anything remotely resembling a traditional Australian-style hamburger (and yes, we do have beetroot on hamburgers).

About the only thing that is acceptably Australian on the Outback Steakhouse menu is the wine list. So, if you should find yourself in one of these places, my advice to you is therefore to get completely plastered as quickly as you can on one of our great Australian wines. Hopefully you will wake up the next morning with no hangover and no memory at all of where you’ve been. Then you can come visit us down here sometime and find out what our food is really like.

My shout.

Well it’s not often that you get the scoop over boing-boing, so I have to gloat that we were well ahead of the wave here on The Cow:

This article from this morning about a guy who’s just discovered that FAEs can be used for underground pest control.

Yawn. So Last Century…

Now, I have to confess that there are no giant rabbits in Australia and I actually made up some things in that last post. Yeah, yeah, I know, hard to believe that I would just make something up but there ya go. Normally I would not feel the need for such a disclaimer, but in this post I am going to tell you about something almost as bizarre and yet it is entirely true.

Both jedimacfan and Joe Fuel were of a mind as to how Australia’s rabbit problems could be addressed, and indeed, their suggestions are not far off the mark. Let me tell you about the rabbit control program that we had in place at Treehouse.

First of all, you need to erase from your mind the image of the fluffy cottontail Watership Down hippity-hoppity bunny. Those are not rabbits – they are the cutesy concoctions of evil minds who lived in some place where the rabbit has natural predators. Not Australia.

As I intimated in the last post, what Australia means to the rabbit can be summed up in one word: smorgasbord (well, I don’t know if rabbits understand Swedish, but whatever the rabbit equivalent to that is. Probably “ee–eeee–e-eee-ee”).

Some statistics:

Rabbits breed awful fast, and have a lot of baby rabbits. Gestation period for a rabbit is 30 days and they typically have between 5 to 8 kittens. They reproduce for about nine months out of every year. That’s about 40 new rabbits every year. One single rabbit can deplete an entire hectare of Australian native vegetation in the course of its natural grazing habit. And Australian native plants are not just tasty to rabbits, they are gourmet yummy treat delights. Rabbits will eat native flora in preference to just about anything else. This is devastating to the vegetation, but also debilitating for native animals and birds which depend on that habitat. One eighth of all mammalian species that once lived on the Australian continent are extinct due to rabbits. I was not able to find figures for native ground-dwelling birds, but you could probably assume a similar number.

Rabbits in Australia have virtually no predators. There are introduced foxes, but the foxes prefer to eat the native wildlife because, well, before foxes there were no predators and so everyone was a little relaxed with the ‘run-away’ response. Eagles eat some rabbits, as do snakes, but all-in-all, it’s Rabbit Côte d’Azur.

Well, except for the myxo and the calicivirus, two biological control methods that have been released with varying and unexpected effects.

So, say the Côte d’Azur with bird flu.

When one becomes a landowner in Australia, as I did with my 25 acres of bush around the Treehouse, one is legally obliged to deal with the rabbit problem that comes as an added bonus with that land. On flat outback farms, this is a relatively simple matter – you get the tractor and plough the burrows (containing bunnies) under. Done. Or, in difficult areas, you chuck in a couple of sticks of dynamite and kablooey! Goodbye Flopsy, Mopsy and Cottontail.

Treehouse was in the Kanimbla Valley, however, a genteel allotment of ‘lifestyle’ acres and hobby farms. Sort of suburbia with neighbours too far away for their hi-fis to annoy you. Very hilly and rocky, so not good for ploughing, and a little crowded for dynamiting.*

So there are a number of other rabbit eradication measures available: poisoning by phostoxin and 1080; shooting, trapping and ferrets. Aside from the poisoning, which is pretty ugly, we tried all the others. None were as effective as…

The Rid-A-Rabbit.

Here’s how it works: you have a cannister of LPG which you lump around to the burrows. The LPG sublimes into a white heavier-than-air vapour when it comes out of compression, and you let some of that flow down into the burrow. It will automatically find the lowest point underground. You put in just a small amount of gas – you don’t want the burrow full of gas because you need oxygen in there too (yep, I can see that the Fuels and Jedimacfan have raced well ahead here).

Then, a second person places what is essentially a fancy oven-lighter on a very long extension cord in the mouth of the burrow. Then everyone runs like hell to get as far away as possible, and the person with the oven-lighter fires the switch.

One of two things generally happens:

A: Nothing. The gas/air mixture is not right.
B: There is an earth shaking kaboom, flashes erupt out of every burrow entrance attached to that hutch (rabbits are canny enough to realise that several doors are better than one, especially when it comes to ferrets), and the sound echoes impressively across the valley (which alerts all your neighbours that you are being virtuous and they should be doing the same).†

Oh, a third thing that sometimes happens is that callous unfeeling Rid-A-Rabbit operators feel the need to start singing “Bright Eyes, burning like fire…“

*Although I was tempted, on occasion, to think about lobbing a stick or two down into the place below me which was owned by some halfwit who, for reasons known only to himself, felt compelled to light up his driveway with airport runway lights at night.

†I know this sounds cruel, but of all the methods available, it is actually the most humane. The rabbits die of instant concussion and/or asphyxiation; all the oxygen in the burrow is instantaneously consumed by rapid combustion. I’m not saying it is pleasant, just better than dying of phostoxin poisoning, which is essentially slow painful death by a form of mustard gas. The Geneva Convention would appear to agree with me: many countries are allowed to have weapons that use the ‘Instant Air Evacuation’ or ‘thermobaric’ principle in their armoury, but chemical weapons such as mustard gas are illegal. That’s People-Testing for animals. You can read about Fuel/Air explosions in warfare here if you have a strong stomach.