In winter my mind turns to food, but since I'm interested in art, cooking and looking manage to fill in the cooler months – or maybe that’s all months. I haven’t made hand-made pasta for a while, but I have made sushi and sashimi – though only once in recent memory – as I resurrect all the food traditions I used to observe when I lived in Sydney 25 years ago. Cooking, eating and cruising around art exhibitions – that’s a big part of winter for me.
Cooking minestroneIn the course of my life I have cooked many hundreds of pineapple fruitcakes. It’s a long story. Years ago, after finishing my Master of Arts degree, I found myself working as a wrapping machinist at Arnotts biscuit factory in the heart of the Western suburbs of Adelaide. One of the women I worked with came from country South Australia.
She gave me a recipe for the pineapple fruitcake, which I of course assumed was a traditional recipe from the country – like the South Australian classic, chicken cooked in Coca Cola. The other recipe I was given was for Italian bean soup, but I didn’t make the mistake of assuming that was from country SA.
‘That’s when I discovered that my traditional recipe had been created in the Golden Circle test kitchens, as a way of selling more pineapples.’
Many years – and many fruitcakes later – I was working for small Victorian publisher, McCulloch Publishing, which amongst its stable of books produced a cookbook of cakes made using fresh and dried fruit. Amongst the recipes was the exact same recipe for pineapple fruitcake. That’s when I discovered that my traditional recipe had been created in the Golden Circle test kitchens, as a way of selling more pineapples.
Along with the fruitcake, one of my other most favourite dishes is minestrone. Endlessly adaptable, endlessly pleasurable, cooking minestrone always makes me happy – or as my former mother-in-law would have said, ‘very happy’. It tells me winter has come and the time for hot soup is here.
Life in an art galleryOne of the advantages of life in Canberra is that you live in a medium-sized city, not much bigger than a large country town, yet at the same time it just happens to be the national capital. That means there are lots of national cultural institutions, and where I live, they are moments away.
Living in apartments is like living in a large public institution, so to live in one, next to many real public institutions suits me fine. Once on the television series Grand Designs, someone complained that life in one of the houses featured would be like living in an art gallery – and I thought ‘I’d like to live in an art gallery’.
A friend of mine who lived in Canberra for a while said it was the city that most reminded her of Adelaide, so maybe that’s one reason I feel so at home here. It’s a human-sized city and apart from its fly in, fly out workforce, it’s a great location for a life.
‘It’s a human-sized city and apart from its fly in, fly out workforce, it’s a great location for a life.’
The other reason of course is that it reminds me of growing up in the centre of Tasmania, next to Lake St Clair, where the climate and geography and history is so similar to Canberra, like the centre of Tasmania, home to the great nation-building impulse after World War 2. I only have to walk into Old Parliament House and the smell of the wood panelling reminds me of growing up in Tasmania.
Cezanne to…Archie MooreLast week, showing some friends from Brisbane round, I went to the National Gallery of Australia to see the Cezanne to Giacometti exhibition – they had braved the cold just to see this exhibition. Cezanne is possibly my favourite artist and Cubism my favourite art movement, so I jumped at the chance to go.
While I was there I popped my head into the relocated Aboriginal Memorial, surely the greatest and mightiest work of art in the whole building, and saw a surprise I didn’t expect.
Several years ago I saw a photograph of Australia’s work in the 2024 Venice Biennale, kith and kin. It was a stunning piece, based on the design of a family tree, by Brisbane artist Archie Moore, referencing 2,500 generations across 65,000 years. It was drawn in situ throughout the interior of the Australian Pavilion in Venice and won the prestigious Golden Lion Award for Best National Participation at La Biennale de Venezia, the first time for Australia.
‘At the time I thought how much I would have liked to have seen such an astounding and inspired work, that took a central and everyday popular culture icon of family history and made it something much, much greater.’
At the time I thought how much I would have liked to have seen such an astounding and inspired work, that took a central and everyday popular culture icon of family history and made it something much, much greater, but feared that moment had passed. Imagine the pure pleasure to discover on this visit that the artist had installed a similar work across a whole wall in the same gallery where the Aboriginal Memorial now resides.
In the work, dark, clear patches indicate the loss of people through massacres, disease or missing archival information. This struck me strongly because the Australian Government cultural program I managed for five years, now called the Indigenous Languages Support program, used to be called the Maintenance of Indigenous Languages and Records program. Part of its focus was lost archival information important to the Bringing Them Home initiative related to the Stolen Generations.
© Stephen Cassidy 2025
See also
Walking with ghosts
‘Increasingly people I have known for a long time seem to be dying. In fact my generation is steadily starting to disappear. Who is replacing them? We shuffle along in a world that is unravelling, a world – that for both good and bad – our generation gave birth to. We are teetering in a strange balance between building on the achievements of the past and desperately trying to dismantle them. In many countries, the current generation is poorer than the previous one, upending generations of dreams by working class parents and migrants for a better life for their children. In this time of upheaval – both welcome and unwelcome – creativity is needed like never before’, Walking with ghosts.
I'm on the road again – well, on the rails again. On Monday I caught the slow train from Canberra to Sydney, and today I’ve woken up to a third morning in Surry Hills. I’m enjoying the days in Sydney – after all, I did live here for twelve and a half years. I’m mainly here to see the Yolngu Power exhibition at the Art Gallery of NSW, which finishes next week, but I’m also using the trip to see to other business’, On the rails again – a trip about the past and the future.
‘I see the latest report on looming climate change has some pretty dire predictions – like a future of four times the length of heatwaves, up to five times as many deaths due to extreme heat, a massive drag on productivity, 1.5 million Australians at risk of coastal flooding and a potential half trillion dollar hit to property values by 20250 – and that’s just the good news’, Looking down on dire predictions.
‘From time to time my posts on ‘travelling light’ include references to restaurants we have eaten at or enjoyable places we have stayed. However, most of my regular writing about food, produce, restaurants and places we have stayed is on one of my blogs, tableland, which I describe as: ‘Food and cooking land to table – the daily routine of living in the high country, on the edge of the vast Pacific, just up from Sydney, just down from Mount Kosciuszko’, Essen, trinken, tanzen – aber nicht rauchen.
‘Where I live a statue of French maritime hero, La Pérouse, looks out over the suburb as though to say: this, too, could have been France. For a period it seemed everyone who went to school in Australia studied French. Perhaps it was a belated attempt to acknowledge how much better everything would have been if the French had got here first. As I like to say whenever I’m in France, ‘j’ai étudié le Français pendant six ans à l’école’ and I would like to have had more opportunity to use that knowledge', Speaking in tongues.