‘Have a look at this’. Les Hiddins, the Bush Tucker Man

    16 June 2025

    June 2025

    In July 1988 the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (the ABC) screened something quite new in Australian television. Starting with a montage of a man in a khaki shirt, blue  green trousers, boots and a hat that was cleft in the middle, picking leaves off bushes, tearing open a mollusc, improvising a bush washing machine with a flour drum and jam tin, leaping from one rock to the other, scrambling up solitary crags, driving a khaki four wheel drive, all in bush settings. He was Les Hiddins and the show was the Bush Tucker Man. 

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    Big Mulch

    Paul van Reyk
    My first essay on food was in Year 10 - people seemed to like it. It took me 56 years to come back to it, so I have a lot of catching up to do. My focus is on Anglo-Saxon settler culinary ways in Australia, roughly from the first days of colonisation to the 1960s - 1970s. I particularly write about stuff that has not been written about before but is very much a part of the Anglo-Saxon Australian table. I hope you enjoy reading as much as I do writing.