Re-cooking ‘the canon’ of Australian literature? : classic 1960s Australian food writing

This paper focuses on Australian food writing from the 1960s to investigate a key moment in the development of Australian writing, reading and publication practice. Internationally, food writers from this period such as Elizabeth David and MFK Fisher are not only lauded as genre writers, but are also accepted as important contributors to their respective national literary canons. This paper focuses on two prominent magazine writers of the 1960s to suggest that this archive contains a buried literature of 1960s food and wine writing that is both a precursor to today’s significant creative industry of food writing and publishing, and valuable in its own right. This archive reveals histories of writers, writing, publishing, reading and the consumption of publications that contributes to understanding why and what we read, as well as what and how we eat. Moreover, while the food writing published in popular magazines is often thought of as providing useful, but relatively banal, practical skills-based information, recent reassessments suggest that food writing is much more interesting and valuable than this. This is because, in the 1960s, as today, Australian food writers such as Margaret Fulton and Graeme Kerr were not only media commentators on important societal issues, but were also forward-thinking activists, advocating and campaigning for change.