From the Principal

Australian explorers

There’s something really significant about this year’s Spring Dinner; The Great Australian Bite, to be held in the Blackhall Kalimna Library on Thursday 12 September.

Back in the days of my own childhood, when Burke and Wills were celebrated as brave, tragic explorers, starving within sight of an aboriginal community, I recall feeling bewildered, that I must have been missing something and feared that to ask the question would reveal my childish ignorance, but why didn’t they eat what their indigenous neighbours were eating?

Now, on reflection, I have to own the ghosts of Burke and Wills in my own culinary choices and habits… that I too have spent most of my life ignorant of the extraordinary bounty of Australian food, long understood and enjoyed by our first nations people.

Bruce Pascoe, author of Dark Emu, writes:

Australian Aboriginal people domesticated, cooked and cared for foods which are adapted to our country’s climate and fertility. Most of those foods are perennial and sequester carbon; handy attributes in a drying climate. And we did it for around 100,000 years. In the process we invented bread 65,000 years ago. A difficult piece of news to deliver to the French!

Thankfully, there has been increasing interest in appreciating and incorporating ‘bush tucker’ into our eclectic food culture and this year our Spring Dinner will set out to showcase some of these sensational ingredients.

The dinner is an annual event and Preshil’s main fundraiser. There is a large group of enthusiastic diners who have attended every dinner and return knowing they are in for a delightful and delicious evening. We are blessed to have John Collins, who is an outstanding teacher, a brilliant cook and a man of such patience and passion that he is able to build a volunteer group of secondary students into a high-performing team of young chefs.

Our dinner, like Preshil itself, seeks to be inclusive, to be creative, to be playful and courageous. John has explored and foraged, experimented and tested; he has beaten a path for his young team of adventurous cooks to taste and to appreciate what is, after all, the heritage which defines us as Australian.

The Great Australian Bite  will take us all on a journey in our own land to acquaint us with the overlooked and the underrated in a menu of spectacular and delectable dishes. I invite everyone in the Preshil community to come and celebrate this event together, with a special invitation to those new to the School or wanting to renew their connection.

Marilyn Smith

Principal

marilyn.smith@preshil.vic.edu.au