A uniquely Australian food culture. An inventory with notes of Australian bushfood cookery books 1989 – 2025

18 January 2026

I’ve been dipping into my collection of native food/ bush food cookery books of late from Vic Cherikoff’s 1989 The Bushfood Handbook to Sharon Winsor’s 2024 Bush Foods & Botanicals. It was revelatory how much of it has been offered to the multiculinary Australian table, the range of foods that have been used, and the variety of dishes on that table in which they have been the main ingredient.

This article gives a taste of this. I review 20 cookery books. I don’t evaluate the books; I simply describe their content as succinctly as I can.

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Small 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.