Let the Land Speak

by Jackie French

  Most English cake, pudding and biscuit recipes begin with ‘cream butter and sugar’ or ‘rub butter into flour’. But in the heat of a drought summer, without fridges, air-conditioning or sophisticated insulation, keeping butter in a Coolgardie safe may keep it slightly firm, but as soon as it is taken out to cook with, it turns semi-liquid. Anzac biscuits are made with melted butter. They can also be sweetened with golden syrup, not sugar. Sugar dissolves or turns solid in hot humid weather, or the little black ants get into it, especially before rain. But the ants – and humidity – can’t attack a can of golden syrup. Desiccated coconut, available from about the 1880s onwards, also stores well.

  A harsh land gave us a tough biscuit.

  Pack the cart, and don’t forget the lamingtons

  The harshness of the Queensland climate, and the distance a plate of food needed to travel when its owner went to a dance or a tennis picnic after church, also led to our love of lamingtons, though there are many theories on how the lamington came to be.

  One of these says lamingtons were named after the governor of Queensland, Baron Lamington, sometime in the 1890s. The story goes that the Government House cook dropped the sponge cake she was making for dessert into a bowl of chocolate sauce. So she carefully arranged the chocolate-covered cake on a plate and scattered shredded coconut over it, then bore it out proudly, saying: ‘Look, Baron Lamington, I have invented a new dessert and named it after you – the lamington!’

  There is another claim that lamingtons may have once been leamingtons, named after Leamington Spa in England, but despite much leafing through cookbooks of nineteenth-century England I can’t find any reference to a ‘leamington’, or even a cake covered in moist chocolate icing and desiccated coconut.

  Back in the 1980s on radio stations around the country I called for listeners to send in their earliest lamington recipes. Several of my oldest informants declared that a lamington cake was invented by Amy Shauer, who taught cooking at Brisbane Central Technical College from 1895 to 1937, and one claimed to have eaten them at a tennis party after Amy Shauer first made them for a visit to the school by Lady Lamington. Amy Shauer also wrote three very popular cookbooks, developed cookery courses for schools and colleges across Queensland, and was a famous cakemaker and cake judge at shows. Lady Lamington was the college’s patroness. My oldest informant told me in most decided terms that Lord Lamington was ‘a horrid man’ and that no one in their right mind would name a cake after him, but that Lady Lamington was much loved and vigorously encouraged girls’ education.

  Maurice French (no relation except in our joint fascination with lamingtons), author of the The Lamington Enigma, describes the lamington as an ‘evolving’ recipe.5 Desiccated coconut – essential for making lamingtons – wasn’t readily available until the 1870s. Maurice French found several pre-1900 recipes for iced cakes topped with coconut. But they were not called lamingtons, nor were they cut into cubes or dipped in liquid chocolate icing.

  * * *

  Real lamingtons

  125 grams butter

  125 grams caster sugar

  1 teaspoon vanilla

  2 eggs, beaten

  150 grams self-raising flour

  100 grams plain flour

  half a cup of milk

  Cream butter, sugar and vanilla till soft; add eggs one by one, mixing well before adding the next one. Then add flour and milk bit by bit, mixing it all gently. Rub a square cake tin with butter, then add a little flour and swirl it around till it covers all the greasy butter. Spoon in the mixture and bake at 220° C for about thirty-five minutes; it should be pale brown on top. Up-end the cake tin onto a wire rack and let it cool.

  It is much easier to handle the next stage if you can make the cake a day ahead and allow it to become just a little stale.

  Cut it into squares and make the icing.

  Icing

  4 tablespoons water

  2 teaspoons butter

  1 teaspoon vanilla essence

  500 grams icing sugar

  4 tablespoons cocoa powder

  250 grams desiccated coconut

  Put the water and butter in a saucepan and heat till it just boils. Take off the heat and add the vanilla essence, then stir in the icing sugar and cocoa. The icing should be just liquid - not too thick, but not too runny either. If it’s too thick, add a bit more water about a teaspoon at a time, as it’s very easy to add too much!

  Put the runny icing onto a wide plate. Put the desiccated coconut onto another wide plate.

  Now take a knitting needle or bamboo skewer and thread some squares of cake onto it. Roll the squares on the needle in the icing, leaving them for a few seconds on each side to really soak it all up, then roll them in the coconut.

  Now take them off the knitting needle. All but two sides will be chocolate and coconut covered.

  Dip each uncovered side in icing then coconut, lick your fingers, wash them and thread another lot onto the needle. Repeat till they’re all done.

  Store the lamingtons in a sealed container till you want to eat them. And if you have to take your lamingtons on horseback in blistering heat to a dance half a day’s ride away, you’ll know your lamingtons at least will still be moist and fresh.

  * * *

  The first mention of ‘lamington cake’ is in the October 1901 Sydney Mail, in response to a reader’s enquiry. The recipe calls for a cake to be cut into cubes, with chocolate icing covered in coconut. In December the same year a Queensland reader sent a request for lamington cake to a Brisbane newspaper. But once the lamington first appeared, it bred like rabbits, because the lamington was the perfect cake for both Australia’s climate and culture of the time.

  Cake goes stale fast in an arid climate, but not if dipped in moist chocolate icing then covered in coconut. The outside crust of chocolate icing and coconut also helped preserve the structural integrity of the cakes on long or bumpy journeys. (A slightly squashed lamington will slowly regain its original shape.)

  But most of all, lamingtons were perfect ‘finger food’ for after-church socialising on Sunday afternoons, tennis parties, cricket or Friday night dances. You could eat one without a plate and without ending up with sticky fingers that might need to be licked or wiped on your cricket whites; the coconut keeps your fingers clean, or at least no dirtier than when you began to eat it. Lamingtons didn’t need slicing, either, so no servant or put-upon mum was needed to cut and serve them. They were also thrifty: they lasted well, and day – or even week-old butter cake (or, at a pinch, leftover scones or, better still, drop scones) could be turned into makeshift lamingtons.

  Look at a lamington, and it will tell you who we were in the first half of the twentieth century: affluent enough to eat cake, and for women to have the time to make fancy cakes, and a gregarious people; most districts, rural and urban, had dances on Friday nights with ‘ladies, bring a plate’ suppers, cricket on Saturday afternoons with a lavish afternoon tea, and (in rural areas) tennis or picnics after church to make the most of the journey there – all informal affairs where you ate with fingers, not cake forks or often even plates, especially as you might have a cup of tea on its saucer in your other hand.

  Lamingtons speak of hot, dry summers, where sponge and even butter cakes dry out fast, but not one coated in moist chocolate icing. But most of all, they come from a land of bumpy tracks and roads, where a layer of cream will slide off your cake before you get to your destination, and iced cakes stick together. But the dry coating of coconut prevents that, even in a humid Queensland summer.

  Lamingtons were – and still are – made to sell to raise money for charity, though these days most lamingtons sold at ‘lamington drives’ are made in commercial bakeries, not at home. They’re made of cheap dry sponge cake too, not the traditional moist butter cake.

  By the 1970s, with widespread commercial refrigeration and cold storage, you could buy factory-made lamingtons with jam and cream in them. They are not real lamingtons.

  The last r
eal lamington I ate was early this year, cooked by a farm woman in the hot Cooma summer and transported over the mountains to the kitchen where I ate it, made for the same reason that a 1915 or 1932 lamington would be: it was extraordinarily moist and delicious, despite the heat and its long bumpy journey. The only thing lacking was the preceding week of heavy farm and domestic work, which would have left me needing to eat at least half a dozen of them.

  CHAPTER 12

  How a drought made us one nation

  For 60,000 years the dryness of much of the Australian continent kept the groups of people separate. But in the late nineteenth century, a drought would draw us together into one nation.

  From 1877 to August 1903 Australia experienced its worst drought in recorded history. It became known as the Federation drought, although often only the final, most horrific years are counted. Without that drought there would not have been the bank crashes, nor the hard economic times that led to demands to drop excise duties and tariffs between the states, nor the uniform immigration policies to protect what many unionists saw as the threat from Asian immigrants who might accept lower wages.

  It was the lost farm income from the drought that led to the need for farmers to cut the shearers’ wages, which led to the shearers’ strike, which led to the Australian Labor Party.

  And it was the economic problems from drought that made men like Henry Parkes believe so passionately that to survive economically we had to be as one country, with unified immigration and tariff laws, and no tariffs between the states. Without the 1877 to 1903 drought we might still be a collection of unfederated states.

  It was also the savage effects of the drought that led to the fervour of the women of the temperance and suffrage movements, who thought that a new federal parliament would bring down fairer laws – not just votes for women but laws that would stop children as young as eight being employed in factories, sleeping on the factory floor, often working for only food, and living short and horrific lives because factory owners too were hard-pressed by drought and the subsequent depression. For every speech given by Henry Parkes there were a hundred given by these women, who collected petition signatures demanding a referendum on the federation question, too, waiting, armed only with their parasols, outside the pubs till the men were too drunk to know what they were signing.

  Our nation was founded on desperation and ideals. Most of the ideals of the fathers – and mothers – of our constitution probably aren’t ones we’d agree with today, like the passion to keep Australia ‘white’, and the religious freedom that was only meant for Roman Catholics (like England, the early Australian colonies were officially Anglican). But that drought possibly shaped modern Australia more than any other event in the history of humanity on this continent.

  A drought-bred boy

  In 1873 a five-year-old boy moved with his parents to a small, marginal selection at Pipeclay (now known as Eurunderee) in New South Wales, a town on the Grenfell goldfields. His father was Norwegian and worked on and off as a building contractor. His much younger mother ran the post office and tried to manage the selection while her husband was away.1

  There wasn’t much to manage. Dust. Sheep. Stale muddy water carried in buckets. Meals where the maggots had to be scraped off the cold mutton and the only vegetable was pumpkin, and when there was no pumpkin, ‘bear’ – koala, probably caught by the young boy.

  When he was eight years old a school finally opened nearby, due to the determined campaigning of his mother. A slab hut with a bark roof and dirt floor – the Eurunderee Public School. He was nine before he actually went to school, and increasing hearing loss made him even more isolated, a boy thrust into the responsibilities of ‘the man of the house’, watching, always watching, the people and the land around him.

  Years later, when the boy had become one of Australia’s best-known bush poets, Henry Lawson never wrote much about his early life2, but the images of his childhood on a dry selection are found throughout his work, in poems like ‘Past Carin’ ’ or short stories like ‘Water Them Geraniums’.

  In September 1892, with five pounds and a train ticket to Bourke, 25-year-old Lawson set out to tour the inland for The Bulletin, urged by its editor, J.F. Archibald, who saw that the young writer might be able to capture the growing desperation of rural people in what was now the second decade of extraordinary drought. (He also possibly wanted to get his protégé out of the pubs where he was steadily becoming an alcoholic.)

  Lawson carried his swag and sat in bush shanties, drinking and yarning. But most of all he saw and wrote of the horror of drought and the desperate isolation of bush families, in stories like ‘The Drover’s Wife’ (published in The Bulletin in 1892), and poems like ‘Past Carin’ ’.

  ‘Past Carin’ ’ is the whisper of a woman pushed beyond emotion. She has borne the grief of the death of children and the burden of isolation and poverty, all from the curse of drought, for years or even decades.

  The crops have withered from the ground,

  The tank’s clay bed is glarin’,

  But from my heart no tear nor sound,

  For I have gone past carin’ –

  Past worryin’ or carin’,

  Past feelin’ aught or carin’;

  But from my heart no tear nor sound,

  For I have gone past carin’.3

  Lawson stayed in the outback for less than a year, carrying his swag from Hungerford to Bourke. He brought back stories that remain classics, published in The Bulletin and in a small collection funded by his mother, and then in While the Billy Boils (1896).

  Was the drought as bad as Lawson described?

  It was worse.

  How do you measure a drought, especially in a land where postcolonial settlement records are sketchy? In our district, for example, written rainfall records only go back to the 1870s, and all except the last twenty or so years are unreliable. (Even those often can’t reliably measure extreme rainfalls when the rain gauges fill with hail and overflow.)

  These days the severity of a drought is measured by the soil dryness index, a modern concept not available in the late 1880s. The soil dryness index is more accurate than rainfall measurements as a district can have two hundred millimetres of rain in a year, but if it all falls as one heavy storm most will rush away. The hard-baked soil won’t allow moisture to penetrate, tanks and dams will overflow, and topsoil will wash away, even taking manure, sparse grass and bushes with it.

  The same rainfall, if it comes as gentle eight-millimetre falls after a four-millimetre fall to soften the soil, may mean green grass, fat cattle and water in the dams and creeks, even if it’s not enough to replenish the watertable.

  1 January 1983

  I had been warned.

  ‘Araluen can get dry,’ said Clyde Mundy, as we sat eating our morning tea biscuits in the Bureau of Mineral Resources. ‘My word that valley can get dry. Back in the 1890s it never rained at all, not for over ten years. The cattle died, the sheep – even horses were all starving. Then it rained in Araluen – just one thunderstorm, but it was enough to get in a crop of maize. It got the horses through for another three years.’

  When I first saw the valley in 1973 the grass was lush, with mist that turned to rain almost every second night. Droplets shone on carpets of maidenhair fern. It stayed that way till June 1978.

  Then the rain stopped.

  ‘It did rain sometimes in the 1960s drought, didn’t it?’ I asked Helen Harrison as we served tea to the parties of fossickers our neighbour Keith hosted (he carefully salted the creek so there’d be a showing of gold to demonstrate gold-panning techniques).

  She smiled and shook her head. ‘Not much,’ she said.

  No one can understand a drought who hasn’t lived through one, uninsulated by running water from a dam somewhere else, with money to buy food that has been grown elsewhere, too, even air-conditioning so you can forget, for a while, the rage of heat outside.

  I was broke, living in a shed. When it was hot – abo
ve forty degrees, sometimes reaching up to fifty-six degrees – I was hot too. I worked at dawn and dusk, dozing down at midday by the deep pools that were all that was left of the creek. The vegetable garden died, except for parsley; the kiwifruit died; the orange trees turned yellow, then brown. (They’d come back when it rained. They’re tough, those orange trees.)

  The worst was 1980. The pools in the creek were almost solid with wild duck droppings, fed by tiny seeps deep in the rock. But they were the only open water for more than twenty kilometres. Animals came, night after night, emaciated, desperate with thirst and hunger.

  Every morning my first job was to gather up the bodies of the wombats, wallabies and kangaroos that had died in the night. I couldn’t bury them – the ground was baked hard – but I could drag them away. The valley smelled of death.

  From 1980 onwards the fences on the way to town were piled almost a metre high with topsoil that had eroded from the paddock uphill or upwind of them (it later washed away in the January 1983 rain). The drought was so widespread that there were few places to agist stock; at market it cost more to sell them than they’d fetch.

  By 1981 it was easier. Hotter and drier, but easier. The most susceptible wildlife had died. The animals that were left were the tough ones, wombats that gnawed tree bark, wallabies that tugged at the wire netting around our trees until their paws bled and they finally got inside to have a go at something (almost) green to eat. Most of us had worked out ways to cope by then, too.

  In a Canberra café for a brief, luxurious cup of tea, a cloud passed over us with perhaps twenty-four seconds of rain.

  ‘Thank goodness it’s rained,’ said the well-dressed woman at the table next to me. ‘Perhaps the farmers will stop moaning.’ Her companion nodded her agreement.

  I didn’t pour my pot of tea over them. I stood up, left, drove through the Canberra landscape still lush with watered lawns (unlike the Canberra after the 2003 bushfires, when watering was rationed) back through the brown hills, round as skulls and just as dry.