Australia the Cookbook. A review

15 May 2026

Ross Dobson’s 2021 Australia the Cookbook is a welcome addition to Australian cookbooks. At 429 pages – 350 plus recipes including recipes from guest chefs Mark Olive and O Tama Carey – it is a successful mammoth enterprise.

The book is divided into three main sections:

  • A brief introduction to Australian cuisine
  • Aboriginal Australian Bushfood
  • Recipes

I am a food writer/historian and in this article I review critically the food history in Dobson’s Brief Introduction.

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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.