Bush Cooking - notes on rough husbandry in the field

Essentials for old-school bush cooking: the shovel, wire grill, a couple of rocks, twigs of mulgawood … and six sausages

I was listening to one of my favourite old Hank Williams songs the other day …

Hey! Good lookin’,

Whaaa tcha got cookin’?

How’s about cookin’ somthin’ up with me …

… and it reminded me that I wanted to write about bush cooking. Like many people of my age, I worked and lived in the bush as a young man and experienced many a fine example of that specialist culinary enterprise.

I need to pause here and point out that there is ‘bush cooking’ and then there is ‘cooking in the bush’. They are not necessarily the same thing, although a line can be drawn that links the parts to the whole.

‘Cooking in the bush’ is at the sophisticated end of the spectrum. A good example is my friend Frank’s famous jaffle made from brioche bread, camembert cheese and liver pâté. Yes, it was cooked in a battered old jaffle iron over a campfire somewhere deep in the Western Australian outback, but the flavour was more Left Bank Paris than Right Bank Plumridge Lakes.

For an example of genuine ‘bush cooking’ on the other hand, I turn to one-time forestry mechanic Frank Caddy. Recounting his experiences at the 1961 Dwellingup Fire, Frank told me:

… at Harvey I was immediately sent out to the field with a mobile works van and told to set up a maintenance and repair depot just behind the fire front between Harvey and Nanga Brook. I had a constant stream of vehicles to repair.

Up until that point I had had no sleep for 30 hours, and the job on the mobile workshop lasted another 12. After a while, things settled down a bit and I grabbed some sleep in the cab of the vehicle. Later I enjoyed the best meal of my life. The local butcher from Harvey somehow found our control point and delivered a great pack of steaks. These were cooked over an open fire on a shovel, and the taste was superb! Never again have I tasted such a steak – much to the disgust of many a proud chef.

Like the toasting fork made from 8-gauge fencing wife, the shovel has long been part of the standard toolkit of every bush cook. Back in the days when I worked in a fire crew I “enjoyed” many meals of iron rations while working long shifts at bushfires. These comprised the contents of a tin of greasy spam or bully beef (known to us all as “tinned dog”) heated up on a shovel held over a simmering log on the bushfire’s edge.  Unlike Frank Caddy’s prime steak, the dog tasted revolting, but you could gag it down more easily when it was warm.

Forester Peter Hewett once told me about a variation on the theme of unconventional cooking implements:

I was out in the bush one day and visited the camp of an old timber cutter. He had shot and butchered a kangaroo, and when I arrived, he was frying a roo steak over his campfire. His old frying pan had long ago rusted out, so he had removed a hubcap from his ute, and was using this as a makeshift, but effective cooking utensil.

I have also heard about hubcap cooking from outback Queensland. A mate who had once been a District Forester in the wilds of western Qld told me that, in extremis, he had often cooked using one of his hubcaps. After it had cooled, he would replace it on the wheel of his vehicle.  He also gave me some good advice:

“If you ever need a hubcap for a frying pan, and are driving a car without hubcaps, look for the nearest cattle grid. A few minutes fossicking will nearly always turn one up”.

I confess to never using a hubcap for cooking and probably now never will – modern aluminium hubcaps can only be used as hubcaps, more is the pity, and now days most bush vehicles have no hubcaps at all.

I am reminded that the same mate from Queensland also told me about an unusual recipe for rissoles that he had invented when working out of bush camps:

The rissole mixture is made in the usual way with mince, chopped onions and carrots, crumbled bread crusts and an egg … but instead of the usual Worcester Sauce, at this point I would chuck in a cup of Golden Syrup. If the mixture was too runny, I would add rolled oats to thicken her up.

He didn’t mention that Golden Syrup rissoles were best cooked in a hubcap over an open fire, but I imagine this would be the case. In any case, they definitely qualify as bush cooking.

The ‘Seven Days Stew’ is harder to classify. It was a staple in the bush camps of forestry assessment and survey teams in the years around World War II. That wonderful yarn-spinner Lenny Talbot once described the Seven Day Stews cooked by his boss Barney White when they were working on timber assessment down in the southern forests many years ago. I asked Lenny whether he knew about the origins of the brew, as he had eaten it in a number of camps over the years, but he didn’t know. However, he said, “if Barney didn’t invent it, he certainly perfected it”. (Barney was widely recognised as a trencherman par excellence).

Lenny went on:

Barney, Jimmy Raper and I were running assessment lines in the then-wilderness area north of Walpole and east of the Northumberland Road. We only got to town once a month and lived under canvas in a rough camp. On Sunday afternoons, Barney would make up and cook about two gallons of stew in a large iron dixie. It contained a hunk of diced kangaroo, and handfuls of onions, carrots and potatoes, liberally seasoned with salt, pepper and tomato sauce. Barney had marked off the sides of the dixie for the days of the week with Monday being the top layer. Every night we would heat it up and eat down to the next mark. Eating directly out of the iron pot saved washing up.

Another story told to me by Peter Hewett illustrates the important point that ‘innovation’ is an essential element of some of the most basic bush cooking:

During the 1960s my boss for a while was Superintendent George Nunn. He was a big man, standing over 6’2” and weighing in about 120 kg. He was a hard and unpleasant fellow, possibly the most feared and unpopular man in the department. He was also a heavy smoker, always Benson and Hedges cigarettes that came in a small flat red tin.

George had a passion for mushrooms. One autumn day out in the wandoo country we came across a small farm paddock and spotted a magnificent crop of large, fresh mushrooms. There was no debate. George wanted them cooked and eaten on the spot.

Needless to say, I was not carrying a frying pan, billy or butter. But George was not to be denied his delicacy. Emptying the cigarettes from a Benson’s tin, and using butter from the sandwiches in my crib, he cooked about a dozen mushrooms, and ate them, one at a time, crouched over a tiny fire. I remember it always as one of the truly extraordinary sights in my life.

Speaking of innovation, in 1963 I lived for a while in the single officer’s camp in amongst the jarrah trees at the back of the old Harvey district HQ.  There were about ten of us in the camp, and we each lived in small wooden hut, in which we cooked, ate and slept. Each hut had a Metters Number 1 wood stove, but at the time I was there it was winter, the wood was wet and green, and none of us were skilful cooks. A good feature of the huts at Harvey, however, was that they had electric light and power. In this respect they were far more sophisticated that the hut I had batched in at Gleneagle in my student days.

My forestry hut, deep in the bush at Gleneagle, and without mod cons, including electricity.

It was while I was at living in the up-market huts at Harvey that I witnessed one of the most innovative bits of cooking I have ever seen. One evening I popped around to my mate Frank’s hut to see him about something and found him preparing his dinner. (This is the same Frank, by the way, who later in life won trophies for his Parisian jaffles).

Entering the open door of his hut that evening I found Frank cooking lamb chops for his dinner. He was using his electric toaster. It was one of those old side-delivery toasters with the doors that open out, and when I arrived Frank had just turned the chops. They were cooking noisily. Hot fat sparked into the red-hot element and dripped from the bottom of the toaster. A column of oily smoke curled up to the hut ceiling.

I always thought of this as the epitome of rough husbandry, combining as it did innovation and improvisation, making efficient use of whatever equipment was to hand at the moment.

There is a similar story about Jim Power, a portly old timber cutter who rose to the rank of Bush Boss at Pemberton for a while in the early 1970s. He lived in one of the mill houses down at the misty end of town. One miserable winter’s day when his wife was away, Jim came home from the bush wet and cold. The kitchen stove was out, there was no dry wood and Jim was hungry. So he went to the cupboard, took out his wife’s electric steam iron (almost new, her pride and joy). He plugged it in and propped it up and dabbed on some butter. He then proceeded to fry a chop, a couple of eggs and a rasher of bacon on the iron. The next morning, he used the iron again to make fried eggs and toast for breakfast. Jim’s rueful account of his wife’s reaction when she returned from the city and discovered the condition of her iron, gave us all some amusement.

Bulldozer cookery

Bob Shelley was another innovative bush cook. Bob was a bulldozer driver, and like most of this species was a tremendous eater and drinker. We spent some time together when he and I were building new roads in the coastal country south of Northcliffe. At lunchtime during the summer Bob would open his enormous crib box to display a feast of doorstop sandwiches, whole cooked chooks and slabs of fruit cake, but in the autumn when the days became chilly, he would take out an enormous tin of meat (usually corn beef). He opened the tin and then placed it on the manifold of the bulldozer in which he had been working all morning. This was a perfect bush stove. As it heated, Bob would stir the contents with a twig, tasting it occasionally and smacking his lips. When judged to be the perfect temperature he would then then eat it straight out of the tin with an old fork, which he kept in the glovebox of his tender vehicle.   He offered me a forkful one day, to put on my bread and butter, but memories of tinned dog surfaced, and I could not come at it.

Bob always carried a rifle in his ute and would shoot a kangaroo every few days. They abounded in those coastal areas at the time, where the cattlemen used to burn the bush regularly, and both roos and cattle relished the green pick that came away after a fire. However, unexpectedly fastidious, Bob told me that he did not eat kangaroo, and that the roo meat was for his dogs at home.  Actually, I suspected that his teeth were not up to the job, a problem for many bushmen back before good dentistry reached the bush. I heard about one old cattleman who spent months down on the coast every summer, living on kangaroo. He mentioned one day that the most indispensable item of his camp outfit was his mincer.

Lamb in a hollow log

I confess I have not tried this but I read about it in an old book dealing with bush cooking by pioneer settlers. The recipe was accompanied by a lovely photograph of a cocky and his kelpie enjoying the finished result.

In case you would like to try it, the procedure is as follows: select a good dry log with a hollow running through it, and a prime Poll Dorset lamb. This must be hung for a week and then seasoned with mint leaves. Light the inside of the log and let it burn for half an hour or so, feeding in some dry sticks to make hot coals. Run a crowbar through the lamb, place it in the log and seal the ends with wet bags, leaving a small gap for the air to circulate and keep the coals hot. Roll the lamb a quarter-turn every 20 minutes and cook for 3 hours. (Serves 30 … or 10 people and 20 kelpies).

It sounds pretty good to me, but the process is tedious and requires tending. My preference for cooking lamb in the bush is to use the camp oven, sitting it on a good bed of glowing coals in a hole in the ground, and piling hot coals on the lid. You can include the spuds, onions, pumpkin and parsnip in with the joint, put it all on the go, and not come back for three hours or so, no tending required.

Cooking on the spot

The finest impromptu bush cooking I ever witnessed was in an African mahogany plantation in the Douglas-Daly region of the Northern Territory. I arrived at the site that day to find the planting gang sitting in a circle eating their lunch, a wisp of smoke rising from the midst of the huddle. I should mention that the crew were mostly Kiwis – the best forest workmen I ever came across, but also possessing some other useful skills, as I soon discovered.

The lunch they were enjoying was Bush Turkey – that great bird also called the Australian Bustard. It is well-known to all bushmen as a great delicacy, said to be the finest flavour of any species of feathered bird, fowl or chook.

A Bush Turkey, about the size of a large domestic goose. They can fly but spend most of the time prowling around on the ground pecking up insects

Bush turkeys were very common in the Northern Territory back then. We would see them stalking around the farm paddocks and in the newly established mahogany plantations. However, despite the fact that they were everywhere, we knew they were on some important Federal Government Endangered Species list and therefore untouchable. The punishment for “taking” a Bush Turkey, if you were caught, was serious enough to ensure they remained untouched … at least by the more law-abiding members of the community.

Joining the crew over lunch that day, I was offered a juicy slice of their Bush Turkey.  It was cooked to perfection. Curious, I asked how they had caught and cooked it. There was some embarrassment about the capture, with mumbling about how the bird had suicidally flung itself under the wheels of the Toyota as the gang was coming to work that morning, and how the driver had swerved dangerously in a desperate attempt to avoid knocking it down.

On the other hand, the story of the cooking was credible. One of the Kiwis was a Māori and knew how to construct those below-ground ovens lined with hot stones, known as a Hanji - the original “slow cookers” – which the Māori had perfected.  He had made a Hanji on the spot and cooked the bird, timing the process so that it would be ready to eat at lunch time. The result was meat that was part-poached, part-roasted and part-stewed, and was about the finest and most tender bush food I have ever tasted.

At the other culinary extreme was the time I arrived, also at lunchtime, to visit the forestry gang working in the Beraking pine plantation, at the back end of the Mundaring Weir reservoir. This gang, I knew, always carried a .303 rifle in the truck cab, and that very morning it had been put to use. A large roo had been shot, skinned, and butchered on a stump with a pruning axe. When lunchtime came around, an enormous BBQ ensued, almost the entire roo being consumed. I admit I had a steak, cooked on a shovel, and enjoyed it. My apprehension about shooting, butchering and eating a protected species in a water catchment area was assuaged by the knowledge that there were thousands of kangaroos in the Mundaring forests at that time, including the pine plantations where they liked to sleep during hot days.

Shearer’s cooks

The Shearer’s Cook – a 19th century illustration - with his freshly baked bread and the iron dixie over the open fire

I did a bit of time in shearing sheds when I was young. Being either a schoolboy or a part-time volunteer, I always got the most menial tasks like picking up the fleeces, sweeping the boards, or penning the sheep for the shearers. Nevertheless, I loved it. I still relish the memory of the bustle and the smell of the shed at work, the rattle of the engine, bleating of the sheep and barking of dogs, and the yarning at smoko, or over beers after the long day’s work. I always ate well. The morning and afternoon smokos at a good shed were outstanding: the wife of the farmer or station-owner would appear with billies of tea and trays covered in tea-towels, which, when removed would reveal plates of hot scones, pikelets and freshly baked fruit cake. I was never subjected to a bad cook, but I used to hear stories about them.  I recall our meals were unadorned, but substantial (like a roast, followed by jam roly-poly with custard), and there was freshly baked bread daily and a bottle of tomato or Worcester sauce always to hand.

Shearer’s cook stories have been around for years. They are part of the Australian folklore. One of my favourites is ‘The Shearing of the Cook’s Dog” by Henry Lawson.

The dog was a little conservative mongrel poodle, with long dirty white hair all over him – longest and most over his eyes, which glistened through it like black beads. Also he seemed to have a bad liver. He always looked as if he was suffering from a sense of injury, past or to come. It did come ...

One day in the shed, during Smoke-ho, the devil whispered to a shearer named Geordie that it would be a lark to shear the cook’s dog ...

The result was a clean-shaven poodle, except for “a ferocious moustache and a tuft at the end of his tail”. The cook (“Old Curry and Rice”) was greatly mortified; in fact he was “narked for three days”. The enjoyment of the prank wore off quickly - the men were sorry for the cook and treated him with respect and consideration, never expecting that he would take it so hard. But there was a twist in the tail; Old Curry and Rice eventually admitted:

“I wouldn’t ‘a’ minded so much, only they’ll think me a flash man in Bourke with that theer darg trimmed up like that!”

Alan Marshall also told a lovely story about a shearer’s cook known as “The Blue Stew Cook”:

He had a large three-legged pot into which mutton and vegetables were thrown each day. The regular addition to the stew meant that the pot always remained full. It simmered away above the fire from week to week, always retaining its volume, though a score of men were patiently eating it.

It was only natural that they began, finally, to look at the three-legged pot with some distaste. It was said that pieces of meat and vegetable lying round the bottom of the pot had been resting there for a month or more despite the frequent stirrings to which the cook subjected the stew.

Finally, a dyspeptic shearer, determined to have the pot completely emptied for once, tossed a couple of knobs of Reckitts Blue into it as he passed. Just before the next meal, the cook gave the stew its customary stir, started visibly then recovered and yelled to the men as he ladled out the stew on to the waiting plates: ‘Blue stew today, boys!'

I once heard a shearer’s cook story myself, told to me by that doyen of the rangelands Don Burnside. It was so memorable I later wrote it down.

It was on Dalgoo Station, somewhere north-east of Payne’s Find, deep in the mulga, sandplain and breakaway country, where they shear in the middle of summer. It was 48 in the shade, and shearing had just started. There were eight shearers on the boards, and they had 30,000 sheep and a couple of weeks of long hot days under an iron roof in front of them.

Things hadn’t got off to a good start. There had been a thunderstorm, and the sheep had moved out from the wells, so couldn’t be mustered for two days, and the boys had become impatient and started to grumble. Then the cook had up and left. Some family crisis down in the smoke.

The Boss had put the word out for a new cook, and let it be known that it was an emergency. The next morning a dusty Holden ute pulled up at the homestead. There was a whining, brindle cattle dog and a wooden crate of cooking gear tied down on the tray, and behind the wheel sat Black Wally Redmond. A groan went around the shearing shed when the boys spotted Black Wally. His work as a shearer’s cook was held in low regard from one end of the pastoral country to the other.

But it was a buyer’s market and Black Wally got the job. He drove straight down to the cookhouse at the shearer’s camp and started right in preparing the evening meal.

At afternoon smoko the shearers and shedhands held a union meeting. The woolclasser had worked in a shed where Black Wally had been the cook a few months previous and he had some advice. “One of us needs to be down there regular-like, keeping a good eye on what the old bastard puts into the stew, and how he mucks with the food. First sign of the rough stuff and we’ll have the drop on ‘im, get word to the Boss and get him sacked.”

One of the rousies, “Dunga” Rees, was nominated to the job, and elected unopposed.

Midway through the last shift, Dunga stowed his broom and sloped off down to the cookhouse. He found Black Wally just putting the finishing touches to a large steak and kidney pie. He was using his false teeth to crimp around the edges of the pastry.

“Oi!” cried Dunga, “You can’t do that! Don’t you know there’s a tool that can do that job?”

Black Wally re-inserted his teeth. “I used that for putting the holes in the doughnuts,” he said.

I later checked this story with my mate Bill Fitzgerald, one-time owner and manager of Murrum Station out near Mt Magnet. Bill knows every sheep station and every shearers’ cook this side of the Number One Fence. “No such place as Dalgoo” he said, “and Black Wally is a figment of someone’s imagination.” I was neither surprised nor disappointed. A good yarn, after all, is more about the telling and the punch line than about the facts …  even a yarn about shearer’s cooks.

 The ultimate bush cooking

I have eaten damper freshly baked on mulgawood coals and dripping with Golden Syrup. I have enjoyed a rabbit casserole slow-cooked in a camp oven by the Everloving in our camp under the gimlets at Mt Gibson; and I have salivated over spit-roasted kid goat. I have eaten crocodile, possum, bungarra and mutton-bird (none with relish, especially the mutton-bird). But two bacon-and-egg jaffles cooked amidst the aroma of a cypress pine campfire and eaten in the lee of a great granite boulder one frosty morning in the bush, far from anywhere, are up there in the canon of memorable bush meals.

However, I have one special memory of bush cooking and its delectable outcome that surpasses all others. This was the first time I ate freshly caught marron, broiled in river water in a 4-gallon kerosine tin over a campfire on the banks of the Warren River. We ate it still warm, garnished with salt and vinegar and accompanied by a slab of bread and several large brown bottles of Swan Lager.

Later I ate many marron on many marron fishing expeditions. I was lucky to have lived in the karri country back when marron (Western Australia’s giant freshwater lobster) were abundant and the capacity of the Fisheries Department to enforce the catch regulations was negligible. Marroning was always done after sunset, and I especially enjoyed it when the river was floodlit by a full moon coming up over the karri forest on the eastern ridge. You would not describe these meals as a bacchanalian feast, because the whole affair was quite business-like; my colleagues took marron fishing seriously. But we were mates in the bush, hunting and gathering, and the food was exquisite.

A nice-sized marron, probably 25 cms in length, complete with powerful claws and meaty body. They came out of the river black, and out of the kerosine tin, bright red, but with white, slightly pink flesh.

The usual marron party of the day comprised friends from work and the football club, but there was one occasion in the early 1960s when different arrangements were made. The local Girl Guides Leader was Evelyn Clifton, wife of our fellow-forester Andy Clifton. Evelyn was a lovely but in some ways a rather naïve woman. In a moment of supreme misjudgement, she asked my mate Jack and me to take a group of six Girl Guides on a marroning excursion in the Warren National Park, and she put us solely in charge. The “girls” turned out to be Senior Guides, aged about 18. They were visiting from Victoria, and were nubile, frisky and very thrilled to be in the bush, in the dark, with two young batchelor forestry officers. Very few marron were caught that night, and afterwards Jack and I agreed we had been lucky to have escaped in one piece.  It was a rare occasion when bush cooking did not take its usual spot at the top of the agenda.

Passing the test

There are many legends about bush cooking and bush cooks. One I enjoy comes from a colleague in America who had been researching the history of the United States Forest Service before WW1. As was the case in the early days in Australia, the first American Forest Rangers were men without academic training, but were required to be good practical woodsmen who could live for weeks in the forest and deal with loggers, miners, cattlemen, sheepherders, Indians, bushfires, railroaders, grizzly bears and snowstorms. To get a job as a Ranger with the USFS in those days, you first had to pass an examination. This included various bush skills, like how to pack a mule for a 20-day trip into the backwoods. The part of the examination I liked had two tests: the first was: cook a meal. The second was: eat it. 

I knew a couple of young foresters who would have had trouble passing the crucial second part of this test in the days when we worked in forestry gangs and batched in single-men’s camps. Somehow, most of them survived. There was, of course, a secret to achieving a good, well-nourished and long life. This secret was (in this, as in so many other ways) the acquisition of a good woman. At least, that’s how I did it ….