Australian History
Book Details

One Continuous Picnic

A Gastronomic History of Australia

Michael Symons

Foreword by Gay Bilson

A frequently acclaimed Australian classic on the history of eating in Australia. It now contains a major new section on developments over the past quarter-century.

Opinion

The striking relevance of Symons' book--and its 25th anniversary--prompted Melbourne University Publishing to reprint the spritely, readable account of the history of Australia via its palate. A new foreword by chef Gay Bilson asks rhetorically: "Was it, perhaps, a book before its time, or, more to the point, a book that addressed a culture of denial?"

-- Helen Greenwood, The Age, 13/3/07

First published in 1982, Michael Symons' ground-breaking history of Australia's eating habits, a sort of history seen through the stomach, has been republished on its 25th birthday with "an additional chapter that summarises subsequent developments", up to the present obese day.

-- Don Anderson, Bulletin with Newsweek, 3/4/07

About this Title

2007 marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of the first publication of One Continuous Picnic, a frequently acclaimed Australian classic on the history of eating in Australia. The text remains gratifyingly accurate and prescient, and has helped to shape subsequent developments in food in Australia.

Until recently, historians have tended to overlook eating, and yet, through meat pies and lamingtons, Symons tells the history of Australia gastronomically. He challenges myths such as that Australia is 'too young' for a national cuisine, and that immigration caused the restaurant boom.

Symons shows us that Australia is unique because its citizens have not developed a true contact with the land, have not had a peasant society. Australians have enjoyed plenty to eat, but food had to be portable: witness the weekly rations of mutton, flour, tea and sugar that made early settlers a mobile army clearing a whole continent; and the tins of jam, condensed milk, camp pie and bottles of tomato sauce and beer that turned its citizens into early suburbanites. By the time of screw-top riesling, takeaway chicken and frozen puff pastry, Australians were hypnotised consumers, on one continuous picnic.

But good food has never come from factory farms, process lines, supermarkets and fast-food chains. Only when we enjoy a diet of fresh, local produce treated with proper respect, when we learn from peasants, might we at last have found a national cuisine and cultivated a continent.

About the Author

Michael Symons was born in Adelaide in 1945, and was educated there and in Hobart before completing a science degree at Sydney University. He has been a journalist on the Sydney Morning Herald, worked for the ABC and was a partner in an Adelaide restaurant for 15 years. He has a PhD in the sociology of cuisine from Flinders University. His other books include A Shared Table and The Pudding that Took a Thousand Cooks.

978-0-522-85323-0