A highlight was going to visit one of the state’s legendary beekeepers. Someone whose honesty, approach and commitment became seared on my mind after I dropped by.
Hedley Hoskinson’s hands, which clutched the kettle at his kitchen bench, weren’t what they had been. As Hedley freely admitted, at 70 years of age his body didn’t quite resemble the youthful figure it had once cut.
Born in Tasmania’s midlands, Hedley, when I met him, was the oldest original leatherwood honey collector still working the state’s south. For 40 years he had collected one of the world’s most prized and rarest of honeys from trees often centuries old. The unique Tasmanian leatherwood understorey doesn’t produce flowers until it’s 75 years old, and it’s only trees that are more than 175 years of age that produce a marketable amount of the distinctly aromatic, unique Australian nectar. Much of the forest where leatherwood honey is produced is more than 350 years old, and most of the accessible bushland was traditionally in areas earmarked for logging.
Now here’s the really interesting bit for a city boy who had just moved to Tassie. Hedley wasn’t always a beekeeper; he once worked as a shepherd. A shepherd. In my lifetime. A man younger than my dad worked as a sheep herder. It was always expected that Hedley would follow the family in sheep. His dad was a shepherd, as was his granddad and great-granddad. But Hedley had honey on his mind, from the time he’d watch and catch bees while waiting for the school bus.
Hedley collected his first swarm while still wearing short pants. He’d been out swimming in a semi-permanent local creek (‘two kicks and a breaststroke across’) when he found the swarm in a prickly box tree. The bees had only just left their original home with a new queen, and their legs and bellies were so fat with pollen and honey that they couldn’t bend their tiny bodies over and sting.
Being too young to know how dumb it was, he wrapped the swarm up in his wet towel. ‘They were getting in and out as they pleased.’
‘My mother was a great panicker, and she’s screaming at me to put it down,’ Hedley said of his mum’s less than enthusiastic (but I think quite appropriate) response when he arrived home with towel abuzz. His mother tipped the junk out of a benzene box then Hedley undid the knots in the towel and popped the swarm in the box, by chance the perfect place for a hive.
In the 1950s there were lots of beekeepers but very few professionals; most farms had one hive or more to help fertilise crops.
Hedley has a calm face with a small, almost elfin nose and features framed by two strong vertical creases. A quiff of soft grey hair stands up Tintin like on his round face, which tops his small frame, his body wrapped in a knitted aquamarine jumper over a red-checked shirt. He sat with his back to the woodfired stove, in the third house he had built in the pristine rolling hills above Woodbridge, a hamlet half an hour from Hobart. He made tea the old-fashioned way, warming the pot on the side of the stove, using tea leaves and a tea cosy—though he made a concession to changing times with the use of ‘skinny’ low-fat milk.
Leatherwood honey trees grow at a reasonably high altitude but flower only in the warmer months. A good stand of leatherwood will produce an enormous number of blossoms for about six weeks a year, but many of the remaining stands are too high up for bees. Bees don’t really like the climate above 600 metres in altitude, they don’t like the cold, and they don’t like rain. They don’t like wind, either, and yet cold, windy, rainy country is now virtually the only habitat of the leatherwood.
Though famed, leatherwood honey doesn’t exactly pay the state’s bills. The leatherwood honey industry is only worth, directly, about $2 million a year. That, however, isn’t the full worth of the industry. Tassie beekeepers make 70 per cent of their money from the leatherwood, while the crops they pollinate for others in agriculture—often for free or for negligible money—are worth about $200 million a year.
In the 1950s, while on holidays from shepherding, Hedley worked with beekeepers. While a much smaller, less revered industry then, even in those days the leatherwood was esteemed, with 4-gallon containers of the prized golden elixir being sent to the UK.
When I met him, Hedley still worked more than 400 hives, all of them in the south of the state. It took an hour and a half to get to his nearest stand of leatherwood, down at the infamous Farmhouse Creek, site of a well known environmental blockade or three. It took two and a half hours to get to most of his hives on the leatherwood, at Strathgordon.
That year Hedley managed to get about 30 kilograms of leatherwood honey per hive, though in a good year it’s closer to 80 or 90 kilos. But there hadn’t been a good year for four years.
If there’s a product that speaks of a place, that—by definition—is a reflection of the plant life and therefore the topography and climate of a region, then it is honey. Honey harnesses flavours from the crops, native plants and orchards of a place. Leatherwood is the unique taste of Tasmanian honey. Pungent, almost too floral for some palates, it is an expression of place, garnered by artisans such as Hedley, and now, thankfully, in the hands of a whole new generation of beekeepers.
It wasn’t only the producers I met who gave me a newfound joy about the food I was eating. It was the fact I could oftentimes snaffle a bit of it myself, through my own attempts at hunting and gathering.
One day Nick took me abalone-diving on Bruny. It was two blokes, one snorkel, one knife, one weight belt, and a kelp forest shielding the abalone from view. Despite the lack of equipment, in an hour we managed to prise seven abs from the rocks, five of legal size. I felt giddy from the exertion and needed to eat. Blackberry brambles lined the path back to the car so we dropped the wetsuits and greedily filled our faces, the fruit staining our hands and mouths deep purple.
A mate dropped in to share some of his 50 hand-dived scallops. He had reached his bag limit in 23 minutes. It was the first weekend of the season, so undoubtedly there would be slimmer pickings in the weeks to come. You need a tank to get deep enough for scallops. And a scuba licence. But that doesn’t stop Tasmanians fishing (and sadly overfishing) them.
I stayed on Bruny for the night. In the absence of a big steamer we barely grilled the scallops until plump. The abalone was chopped 1-centimetre thick and wok-tossed for a few seconds with garlic and chilli. The only accompaniments needed were riesling and rice.
After dinner the wind dropped and we went floundering. In a night as dark and warm as Turkish coffee, strange splashing sounds drifted over the water. I tried not to think of what large creature it could be. You don’t want to know what lives, and feeds, in the water at night. We waded hundreds of metres along the shore on a long sand bar, towing an old surfboard, which held a milk crate for the catch and a car battery hooked up to a torch on a pole. The beam of the torch spreads out underwater; the flounder, near the channel’s drop-off, could be seen as vague lumps in the sand. You have to be fast, and accurate, to spear them, using a metal rod with a barbed spike on the end. Ten flounder later, with the water lapping at my, well, my comfort zone, it was time to head home. We popped the fish in the fridge and had a nightcap of twelve-year-old Glenlivet with walnut shortbread formed into the shape of a pear.
I slept dreaming of kelp forests and blackberries and just what might have been making the splashing noise in the shallows. Let’s think positive, and call it a seal.
The kitchen in my little flat was, well, rudimentary. Having just finished renovating a kitchen prior to leaving Sydney, I was suddenly without my Gaggenau oven. My Highland stove top. My soft-closing drawers with Blum hinges. Instead, I had narrow laminate bench tops and an old stove with a broken seal on the oven so you had to hold the door closed with a chair. My shelves were planks on bricks (hello again, student days!), and even my two prized copper pans couldn’t make the place look a million bucks.
But in this space I played at cooking because that’s what you do in a new kitchen, with access to new produce. I sautéed squid that I caught down on the jetty at Bruny. I wok-tossed abalone. I made apple teacakes; I slow-roasted l
amb shoulder with tomato and gremolata, and shopped each day for the evening meal. All the time, I tested recipes for my book.
Once, the cheesery boys went out on a fishing trip, bringing back the spoils to Bruny. I’m glad we didn’t cook the tuna in my kitchen; Nick’s kitchen smelled of blood and of the sea. One tuna was cut down into fresh steaks; the other was quartered and boiled outside in brine for three hours. When it was cool it was bottled in oil and sterilised, ready to eat a month later. As it cooked, however, it reeked like cat food. Luckily, after a month in the jars, it tasted dreamy.
Dinner consisted of sashimi tuna, followed by more of the fish gently warmed and served as a nicoise salad. The salad was made of the most gorgeous Dutch Creams and Cygnet olive oil. It felt like a crime to say the potato was the best part, when such stunning fish had made an appearance.
Abalone
‘Good day for a dive,’ said Nick with a smirk, as I scraped the ice off the windscreen with a Medicare card.
‘Are you sure we should be doing this?’
It had been a few months since I’d moved to Tasmania, and I was in the process of looking for a farm. But in the months that passed while I drove country lanes and surfed the virtual countryside in the hope of finding the dream small-holding, another potential project had come up. Essential Media, a Sydney-based production company, had been talking to SBS about doing a telly show on my move. That’s right, piqued by the possibility of me looking like a goose on television as I learnt about things agricultural, suddenly everybody was interested. Without ever seeing us in action, however, they wanted to film a pilot for the television show. The problem was, of what?
Because of our own increasing interest in where and how things grew, Nick and I had been trying to set up some long-table lunches featuring regional produce. The idea was to host a meal on the same piece of ground where the produce came from. In an apple orchard. By the jetty where the octopus came in. On the wasabi farm, that kind of thing.
But with little idea of what it would entail, and no funds to buy the equipment we needed, our plans had hit a stumbling block. We’d enlisted a couple of other chefs in Tassie to help out too, but as both chased their own dreams and businesses, the idea for the lunches had fallen fallow. Nick and I were left to carry the load on our own so we gradually made our ambitions more modest.
For a mini event, we thought it best to keep it close to home. Nick’s home, because I didn’t have one of my own (I was still renting the flat at Maria’s house in Hobart). The idea was to host a regional produce dinner at Nick’s cheesery: invite the producers to come along, and get some paying guests to make it profitable and hence sustainable. And cook up what we found at that time of year, all from within the region, as best we could.
The time of year, however, was winter. And the idea quickly fell foul of not only the season but also the space. In the absence of another decent indoor venue (trust me, in Tassie in July, you don’t plan on eating outdoors), we had to clean out Nick’s cheese factory, putting all other preparations on hold for a couple of days. We moved the cheese vat so we could set up a communal table, and organised the place so the cheese, while present, wouldn’t be compromised. And the seating only allowed for the food producers, plus a few others like Ross O’Meara, who was cheesemaker for Nick at the time. In the end, we invited the producers’ spouses instead of selling the seats, so we lost any financial benefit. But because we’d flagged a television show based on regional produce, it did dawn on us we could use the dinner to film a pilot that could be shown to SBS.
It was a mad weekend. We dived for abalone (something we couldn’t have done if we’d charged money for the dinner, because only licensed commercial divers are allowed to sell these molluscs). We sourced mussels from icy water off a point in Great Bay. We picked up terrific local lamb from the sheep station that dominates North Bruny. We used Hans and Esther’s Tongola cheese, made from hand-milked goats near Cygnet. We sourced artisan honey, old-breed pigs and lovely local wine, and collected much of the produce on camera over the space of two days. Then we cooked it all and made a dinner, filming the whole time.
The result? Well, someone at SBS must’ve seen something in it. I look at that old footage now and think about how naive I was about television, about farming, about cooking in unfamiliar surrounds, and I wonder. What the hell were we thinking? It took days of work, a couple of thousand dollars, and no small amount of favours to pull off a meal for just twenty people.
And it makes me wonder too, what life would have looked like if I’d followed the same path without the eventual television show, Gourmet Farmer, being filmed as I moved to the farm. How would Puggle Farm have been managed, or been allowed to sit fallow, without the pace and intrusion demanded by a television crew?
Because, it must be said, grass growing doesn’t make good telly. It makes for very fertile land, perhaps, and well fed sheep, and good carbon storage in the soil, if managed correctly. But grass growing is a bit dull on the small screen. Getting a milking cow, however? That makes good telly, especially when you’ve never owned one before, and the only time she kicks is when a sound guy or a bloke with a camera lurks behind her in the dark as you empty her udder into a bucket.
We started filming before I moved to the farm, partly because I was struggling to find (and fund) the right property, and partly to capture the real-life mission to change from city slicker into hobby farmer. We also started filming because, with Nick and Ross as co-conspirators, we began projects that might make interesting viewing before I’d even sighted the land that would become my first farm.
That first regional produce night on Bruny, we filmed the tossing of the mussels with samphire from the beach. We showed the braising of the lamb with olives that were grown a few hundred metres away from the table. A cameraman filmed me, in a borrowed wetsuit, so cold I couldn’t feel my legs, getting washed up on a boat ramp after diving for abalone, one mollusc tucked inside my suit and fastened to my skin like a limpet. They filmed Nick and me setting up the dinner venue and visiting the pig farm. They filmed while I cooked a recipe I’d been taught by Tetsuya Wakuda, to slowly heat abalone from below until the shell is warm, so the meat would be sweet and tender, the flesh flavoursome but not taut. And they filmed as I checked the shellfish, our dinner guests only minutes away, because the abalone tasted awful, with the texture of rubber, even the finest slivers impossible to chew. And they also filmed as I threw all the remaining abalone in a pressure cooker, and turned them into a surprisingly delicious abalone and bean salad.
I can’t vouch for that meal. There was too much going on. I think it was good. The D’Meure wine certainly was. Many of those same food producers have kindly given their time to the filming of three series of Gourmet Farmer over the years, or been great supporters behind the scenes, so it must’ve been all right, or at least they’ve forgiven me.
I still go diving for abalone, almost exclusively in the winter months because my schedule just seems to work out that way. I still find it a good reason to swim among the kelp forests and let Nick do the cooking because he’s much better with abalone than me. And I still say it’s a good day for a dive every time I have to scrape ice off the windscreen of the ute.
Pork (to market, to market)
One of the things I’d been banging on about for years—to friends, family and occasionally in print—was pork. Particularly the quality I’d found overseas compared to in Australia, but also the decrease in local standards even in my lifetime. So after moving to Hobart, but before I’d found my Tassie farm, when a share in a stall came up at a big market in Hobart, it was my way to walk the talk.
Nick’s cheesery was joining another stallholder at Salamanca Markets, the huge Saturday market that dominates Hobart’s historic heart. Salamanca attracts 300 stalls and up to 25 000 visitors each weekend. It’s nearly a kilometre long and for much of its length has two lanes, taking up all the car parking and the road outside the old sandstone warehouses. Along this two-lane stret
ch are stalls lining both sides, and the foot traffic is incredible.
Ann Dechaineux owned the stall that Nick was about to share. A former Melbourne restaurateur with a range of preserves and pickles, Ann had the side facing the heaving crowds, who marched to and fro, emptying their pockets at the stalls. Her stall seemed to crank when I checked it out. It was sited at a busy junction in a fairly central location, where a large corridor gave access to and from the market from the footpath. It looked like a cracking spot, where we’d be neighboured by other good food, while much of the market is more angled towards souvenirs or clothes.
I was very excited by the potential of the stall I’d be able to share. But it came with a condition. I wasn’t going to be the only one to share the site. Through Nick I’d also met a couple of other people who were going to change the course of my Tassie life. Andrew Cameron, a farmer of free-range, old-breed pigs from the Huon Valley, had great quality Berkshire pig meat for sale, so there was something fantastic to work with. And Ross O’Meara, a former chef who had been travelling the country with his wife of six years, Emma, camping in a troop carrier. Ross was interested in learning to make cheese, and had offered to work for Nick, for free, for a month while he trained. And Nick being the generous soul he is, let him. And then offered both Ross and Emma jobs—Ross as cheesemaker, and Emma working the cellar door on Bruny Island. I’d met them both casually over the months; they were a warm-hearted couple who knew their tucker. It’d been a joy to cook for them at the Bruny regional produce dinner.
I’d also found, from intermittent conversations, that Ross, like me, was into pork. Its versatility. Its taste. The way Europeans boasted such astonishing pork butchers and curing of their product. And when we kept harping on about it, Nick told us to set up a market stall or shut up.
The Dirty Chef Page 5
