On February 14, 1845, on the bank of a dry river bed in South Australia, Ludwig Leichardt, a German naturalist, encountered three Aboriginal women. Two dug for roots with their digging sticks, a third, high in a gum tree, hacked away at a bees’ nest with her stone hatchet. Along with his two Aboriginal guides, Charley and Brown, Leichardt “made every possible sign of peace, but in vain: the two root-diggers immediately ran off, and the lady in the tree refused to descend.... Upon reaching the tree, we found an infant swaddled in layers of tea-tree bark, lying on the ground; and three or four large yams.” (Journal of an Overland Expedition in Australia, from Moreton Bay to Port Essington, a Distance of Upwards of 3000 Miles, during the Years 1844-1845 [London, 1847], p. 150] And so went this extraordinary journey through the outback--seventeen head of livestock, six bullocks, twelve horses, ten men, among them Caleb, an African-American who had escaped a Louisiana plantation for a life in Australia, and Charley and Brown, two Aboriginal men from near Brisbane who had travelled most of Australia, and, of course, Ludwig Leichardt, an accomplished botanist whose name attaches to a distinctive rainforest tree that produces a powerful anti-headache potion.

Not trees but yams interest me here.  In characteristic academic fashion, I prepared for Barbara’s and my three-week trip in Australia--Sydney, Cairns, Adelaide, Darwin, and Brisbane--by reading the literature on Australian food.  At first, I was put off by the silence of English and French travellers on the subject.  Nothing but a few lines on the poverty of hotel meals, like a visiting English woman’s account of her meal in Melbourne in 1853: “The same dirty cloths and dirty everything appeared at dinner this day; the same cleaning and clatter, and slowly-arriving single dishes, beginning with weak, greasy broth, with slices of bread floating in it.... There was also a most univiting-looking leg of mutton, from which people had to help themselves with their own knives and forks.... There was no pastry and no vegetables, save some half-fried chopped-up potatoes....” (Mrs. Charles Thomson, Twelve Years in Canterbury, New Zealand: with Visits to the Other Provinces, and Reminiscences of the Route Home through Australia... [London, 1857], pp. 204-205). And I found that, when Anglo-Australians finally turned their attention to their cuisine in the early twentieth century, they were likely to follow the lead of the Potato Marketing Board of Tasmania, which produced a handsome pamphlet in 1930 entitled 50 New Ways to Cook Potatoes.  Among the Board’s revelations was a dish called Autumn Leaves, an afternoon tea special that required the cook to slowly brown thinly sliced potatoes in an oven, then “brown off quickly,” lightly dress with butter and salt, and immediately serve on a platter strewn with autumn leaves.

After a week of such fare, I turned with great eagerness to a waiting stack of nineteenth-century German naturalists’ accounts of the outback. They fastened their attention on Aboriginal diets, tubers especially.  Leichardt was the first of them to cross the continent, south to north, in a journey that his English informants assured him would last seven months, but that his Aboriginal guides knew would take two years.  Among his instruments of research, he carried a silver tasting spoon suspended around his neck by a leather strip.  As the party made their way from one to another water hole, guided by Charley’s and Brown’s remarkable capacities to recognize places that they had seen on earlier journeys--Leichard noticed that “trees peculiarly formed or grouped, broken branches, slight elevations of the ground, seem to form a kind of Daguerreotype impression on their minds, every part of which is readily recollected” (Journal of an Overland Expedition, p. 118)--the botanist tasted Aboriginal foods, sometimes at a camp’s invitation, often after the great-horned bullocks had frightened the people into hiding.  In such fashion, he identified sixty tubers, all unknown to European and American botanists, all of which formed a vital part of Aboriginal diets.

Here, then, was a distinctive Australian food. Might not two visiting Americans similarly discover yams? Not with tasting spoons, but by stumbling upon Australian camps? On our first day in Sydney, after an early-morning arrival from Dallas, we purchased a week’s pass on the city’s impressive railways, then boarded a train for the further suburbs.  Through neighborhoods like Redfern, an old industrial area now transformed into an Aboriginal neighborhood, we travelled toward Hornsby, for no other reason than it promised food.  After fourteen hours of Qantas meals, we were eager for something else.  At Hornsby, we stumbled into a rainy noon, walked a few steps to a block of restaurants, and circled in search of an interesting menu.  At the very last place, a hole in the wall, we discovered rosemary chicken and roasted vegetables.  We ordered, sat at one of the three tables, and waited for our food.  Fabulous chicken!  Wonderful roasted vegetables in which yams were dominant! Leichardt’s strategy still works.

Afterwards, I spoke with the owner.  An Ethiopian refugee who had fled the violence in Eritrea in 1983, he had cooked in a Sydney hospital for fifteen years, where he perfected his recipe for rosemary chicken and learned about Australian yams. Five years ago, he opened his own place in Sydney, where the competition is fierce, then discovered that Hornsby had no roasted chicken.  To much acclaim from the local press, he opened his new shop a few months ago.  And now he had introduced two wandering Americans to the pleasures of Australian yams, not to mention the flavors of Ethiopian-spices-inflected rosemary chicken.