I’ve been a journalist with Melbourne’s daily newspapers – The Sun, The Age – and I’ve written columns for The Age and The Australian. I’ve been food and wine editor for magazines, a columnist, contributor to magazines, journals and radio programs. I’ve judged restaurants, books, and produce. I was co-editor with Claude Forell of The Age Good Food Guide through the 1980s and 1990s.
There have been lots of books. The latest was The Makers: A Story of Food, Family and Foreigners, published by Hardie Grant, and available at Home Make It www.homemakeit.com.au/collections/books
I’ve worked with chefs to tell their stories, and I loved the experiences. There was the brilliant Scott Pickett (of Estelle, Matilda, Longrain, Chancery Lane) and his book SP: A Cook’s Story. That’s still available through Estelle (try Providoor, or contact me). I learnt about the extraordinary talent and commitment of being a great chef, and the skills required to make the transition to restaurateur.
Working with Philippe Mouchel was a different experience. More than French: recipes and stories meant I cooked all the recipes in the book. Mouchel, as a French-trained chef, has many notebooks, and lots of recipes in his memory. But those recipes are not in a format that serves four or six. He would write out the recipes, I would trial them, we would discuss them, I would make them again. Because I knew Philippe’s cooking so well, I knew what they were meant to taste like.
Melbourne by Menu (published by Slattery Media) is an irregular history of Melbourne restaurants, people and dining from the 1980s onwards.
Other books include 50 Fabulous Chocolate Cakes (published by Penguin, and sadly out-of-print); Around Melbourne (published by R. Ian Lloyd), a wonderfully photographed book that was part of a series on Australia’s wine regions. Color me Healthy (why you should eat almost everything) was published by Hybrid, and my co-author was Dr Alice Murkies; it was one of the earliest books to look at nutrition in terms of colour. The phytochemicals (naturally occurring plant chemicals) in food are responsible for pigment, and those pigments relate to nutrition.
I do – or did, until Covid restrictions – a lot of occasional lecturing and public speaking, hosting discussions. I broadcast regularly on Travel Writers Radio, which can still be heard on SoundCloud and other platforms.
