John Curtain

About twenty years ago, we were offered a house on Stradbroke Island for a winter holiday. Cheshire, the publishing company I had recently left teaching to work for, was also a bookseller; so not only was there a fortnight, kids willing, to catch up on all those books we had meant to read, but they were available at staff discount. Before we left, I went through Cheshire’s paperback section lik ... (read more)

In one of the more matter-of-fact paragraphs of that rare and sentient book, Celebration of the Senses, Eric Rolls reflects on how ‘until the nineteen-fifties eating was seldom an adventure in Australia’. The Greek community had taken over the country town cafes and ‘by serving food that was a parody of the worst Australian food they prospered astoundingly. Slabs of steak fried ten minutes t ... (read more)