Before we eat
Before we eat:
A delicious slice of Tasmania’s culinary life
By Paul County and Bernard Lloyd
Published by The Culinary Historians of Tasmania
ISBN 0-646-42903-5
This is not a cookbook. Not a recipe in sight. Instead a glorious potage of what makes Tassie cuisine, the people who make it, and in slices of history, the people who helped make it — from the Aboriginal earliest inhabitants to the early settlers, determined to create an Antipodean England, to today when immigrants from all around the globe have put down roots here and added their touch of individuality.
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Soft Edges Unsafe Margins
Soft Edges Usafe Margins
Stories by Avril Caney
Published by Ginninderra Press
ISBN 1 74027 227 7
An impressive collection of finely crafted short stories by a Hobart-based writer, nearly every one winner or runner-up in short story competitions, and describing feelings, experiences and memories we can all relate to.
The cast of main characters is varied, as are the situations, but with telling brushstrokes of words Avril Caney evokes immediately recognisable portraits of people presented with those moments of life that take us like “a long, moving pedestrian ramp … from which, once committed to, there seems no escape”.
Their efforts to make an escape, to change the seeming inevitability of their lives, underscore these stories. The twist comes, as it does in all good short stories, at the very end, the words of “continued next week, next day, next moment …” unwritten, but vividly tangible. Most enjoyable. PH
Shack Life
Shack Life
By Matthew Newton
Published by Matthew Newton
ISBN 0 646 42878 0
Photographs are the key to this book, photographs almost unaccompanied by words because each one is the key to a thousand memories.
Shack life, unfettered and uncontrived, has been a part of the Tasmanian scene for many generations — but is now under threat, as Richard Flanagan poignantly says in his introduction.
Shacks are not, never were, edifices of grandeur, and usually not of much beauty either. Almost organically they took root and grew on rocky foreshores and lakesides simply as shelters for weekends and holidays.
Some remain so in remote places on the island. But where, not that long ago, they could still be found not far from the big smokes of Hobart and Launceston, today these are being gentrified at the rate of knots.
Once bartered for a comparative handful of dollars — “and we’ll leave the furniture” (such as it was, consisting of hand-me-downs from goodness knows where) — today these places nearer to big towns are changing hands for hundreds of thousands.
So Matt’s book is already an historical memento, as well as a book of beautifully composed, evocative photographs. See his portfolio here. PH
Shooting the Franklin
Shooting the Franklin
Early canoeing on Tasmania’s wild rivers
By Johnson Dean
ISBN 0-9581744-0-7
If there is an impression that extreme sports are the product of today, this book alone will change that perception.
Just to read of the adventures (there’s no other word) of the young Tasmanian Johnson Dean and his various intrepid companions as they battled against the wild rivers of the island’s Southwest will have you debating whether they were lunatics or brave. Or both.
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