by John Newton
Eating in Sydney has come full circle. Let me explain. The first verifiable - even identifiable - waterside picnics enjoyed here, long before the land surrounding the magnificent harbour was named by Phillip after his boss Lord Sydney, were of oysters.
Take a leisurely cruise up the Lane Cove river and there, along its banks, you can see their remains in middens. You’ll also find them near the harbour mouth. But what exactly were these original gastronomes eating, sitting by the harbour’s edge?
It depends where you find the middens. In those mid-estuarine waters, upstream of the Spit Bridge and Fig Tree Bridge, the Sydney cockle (Anadara trapezia) and Ostrea angasi, a wonderful meaty mud oyster, once prevalent in the upper reaches of the harbour, but killed off by the rising sediment levels in the harbour due to dredging, named after George French Angas (1822-1886), artist/explorer/writer and one time secretary at the Sydney Museum. Nearer the harbour mouth, in addition to quantities of the hairy mussel (Trichomya hirsuta) the dominant member of the midden is that magnificent mollusc which carries the name of our city, the Sydney rock oyster (Saccostrea commercialis).
Oysters, of course, were popular from the very early days of Sydney town, as they had been in the old country, so prolific and cheap as to have formed a staple for the poor. The oyster bars of old Sydney may well have been one of the few refuges from the monotonous diet of mutton and damper -a s they were until relatively recently. Who remembers the great oyster bar at Angel Place, the shucker a local character?
We must never forget - its inhabitants certainly didn’t - that Sydney was originally a large prison and the earliest food was prison rations. Even when wealthy land holders (grabbers?) began to ‘graze’ the land (an industrial farming style imported like most of the food we ate, from industrially revolutionary England), the relentless monotonous diet for most was ‘a damper, a fry of meat; pots of tea.’
Some, of course, ate better than others. Back then was set the class divide in eating that persists right up to the present day. On a visit to Sydney in 1810 - not quite 20 years from the founding of the colony, a Dr Joseph Arnold (definitely from the right stratum) was moved to write “a person coming into Sydney Cove would think himself in the midst of a large city; if he dines on shore, he finds all the luxury and elegance of the finest English tables.”
As a boy I remember my father telling me as we walked home down Elizabeth Bay Road past an imposing Victorian mansion set amidst tall firs (where the Kings Cross police station now lurks) “that was a restaurant for officers during the war.” It was called Kenneil.
But this piece is far too short to dwell on the middle, dismal period of eating in this heart break old town, when the maxim was ‘you can’t get a decent meal in a restaurant with a water view’ was true. Let’s sprint into the present day where with a little help from later arrivals (refugees, not convicts) we have learnt how to eat more than mutton and damper; have learnt the difference between ‘a good feed’ (measured in quantity) and good food; have learnt that not all fungi apart from Agaricus campestris - the field mushroom - are toadstools. Indeed in our better providores we find, after favourable weather, supplies of wild saffron milk caps (lactarious deliciosus) and slipper jacks (suillus luteus) and cultivated shiitakes (Lentinula edodes) and even, if you can afford them - imported truffles (Tuber melanosporum).
But most importantly, once again, clumps of locals sit around the foreshores slurping down Sydney rock oysters and - here’s the rub - Ostrea angasi, that mud oyster from up the harbour, now imported from Tasmania. Shall we wander down to the sea, you and me, and eat an oyster or three? This must be Sydney.
