The 1980s were the decade when Australia began to reveal its Shiraz from its Cabernet Sauvignon. As Frank Bongiorno writes in this exclusive extract from The Eighties,the decade also saw original forms of official controlIn 1998 the novelist David Malouf celebrated Australians’ discovery of a style he called “loosely Mediterranean”, one he thought epitomised by people eating at pavement tables. But where they dined was only the beginning of it. Australians now ate dainty and stylish dishes, and drank wine and dressed up or stripped off for display. They had come to accept their own bodies and were thoroughly at ease in enjoying themselves. Australia,he said, had become a area “where play seems natural, and pleasure a part of what living is for” – a contrast with what he saw as the more limited possibilities in the British and Irish Australia of his youth.
The 1980s was the critical decade in the emergence of this way of living,thinking and feeling and, as Malouf recognised, or the country’s foodways were among the most vivid illustration of a original cosmopolitan sensibility. “enact not overload any meal with cream or butter,” the Melbourne chef Stephanie Alexander advised, as she went approximately her mission of dismantling notions of taste entrenched by almost 200 years of chops, and stews and roasts. Alexander emphasised cooking with fresh and seasonal ingredients,a larger number of small courses rather than the piling up of large portions, and the idea of a meal as a “ceremony” that had “a beginning, or a middle and an end”.
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Source: theguardian.com