These days Aussies eat mountains of rice, and grow plenty of it, too. So for a little background to this post, I went to the Ricegrowers Association of Australia’s website which confirmed what I knew, that rice is grown in large parts of New South Wales and northern Queensland, and the different climates of those regions favour production of different varieties. My personal favourite rices are bismati and jasmin … different rices are best for different things. I don’t make it, but I do enjoy sushi, for which sticky roundish grain rice is required – it probably has a name, but I digress. I read one company, SunRice, has been supplying rice to the Australian market for over 50 years, and that gels with the memories I’m sharing here today.
Today’s Aussie kids grow up eating a much larger variety of foods than we did. In the decades since the Vietnam War, especially, many of us have travelled in nearby Asian countries ranging from The Middle East right across to Japan. As a nation we love Asian food, and various Asian national dishes including the ubiquitous staple, rice, are on the menu in most Aussie homes and many restaurants around the nation. People from African and South American countries also eat a lot of rice in their cuisines. All that cultural diversity we’ve embraced in the waves of immigration in my lifetime since WWII has introduced us to many other foodstuffs like quinoa, tabouli and hummus, now so everyday common, but we’d never heard of them 50 years ago.
Tasmania produces mountains of potatoes, and like most people then, we ate potatoes every main meal and often two meals per day. Some time in the 1950s, for several winters in a row, there was serious outbreak of blight in much of Tasmania’s potato crop, making them scarce and very expensive. When this shortage hit, Mum substituted noodles and rice for potatoes, serving them only when we had visitors; and we understood this was to be strictly without any comments from the peanut gallery.
It probably wasn’t only Mum’s basic social insecurity, as a lot of the British stiff upper lip and sturdy Scots endurance ran in our blood, too. There was always an underlying concern that people outside the family shouldn’t know when things were financially tough, as they really were from time to time. One contributing reason for that was that Dad may have over-reached a bit to buy the Bifrons Court house in 1954 while at the same time starting to build up his optometric practice with extra staff and plant. There was tension whenever shoes needed mending or replacing. We each had a pair of sturdy lace-up leather school shoes and a ‘best’ patent leather pair for sunday school and parties. Shoes were only passed down in the family and usually worn out completely. As we girls grew out of them, clothes were handed down first within the family and then around Mum’s friends with daughters. I’ve always wondered where the beautiful Viyella dresses Mum smocked for us each year ended up… God forbid that people might hear that the Padmans of Bifrons Court were being forced to economise, and were actually eating far more rice and noodles than potatoes – but really, who could give a fig?
However, probably because everyone else had also switched to rice on account of those severe shortages, within a few years it became socially acceptable, indeed fashionable, to serve rice at even the swishest events 😉